Final touch

This is a finished book!

“My First Book of Animals” has more than fifty double spread pictures. I’ve been working on it a whole year. Last week I finished the last illustration from the book and felt a kind of relief. I always fall for this. I think the book is finished as soon as I finish the last illustration, but it’s never like this. There are always little changes and adjustments and there are endpapers to be painted and a contents page and end of chapters…, so in the end it’s been a couple of busy weeks for me.

Here is the mentioned contents pageand some of the illustrations from the book.

“My First Book of Animals” is divided into five sections and each of the sections finishes with information about certain animals. I wanted these end chapters to be different. I wanted the drawings to look as if they had been taken out of somebody’s sketchbook.Some of the drawings were quite challenging.The book will have a sleeve cover.Sleeve covers are nice, but then you have to do one more cover for the actual book. Here is one of themand here are details of some other options.One of the butterflies?Or perhaps another beetle?Or an egg?

What about a hummingbird? I like the hummingbird.I got myself carried away. The truth is that I enjoyed painting these small images.

Tomorrow I will tidy up my studio. I do that every time I finish a book. If you imagine, that this book took me a year to work on you can imagine what my studio looks like.

I’ve already started throwing away some paper and cutouts. I found this drawing, which I quite like. It’s a sketch for a giraffe.

Here is one more drawing from my little sketchbook I wanted to show you.It’s a drawing I did this week when I heard on the radio that one of the last four white rhinos has died.  It’s sad, sad news.