Monsters
Beasty Bath, you know, it’s full of monsters. Monsters are fun. I just did a little board book with little Simon called Too Many Monsters. And it’s a takeoff on the “I Love Lucy” thing where she’s in the chocolate factory and she gets behind and its
Anyway, it’s a counting book and this poor kid
Originally the dad was gonna be involved. “What’s going on in there?” But there’s this kid and these monsters keep cropping up in his room. He’s pushing em under the bed and he’s stuffing em back in the lamp shade and like it’s an everyday occurrence for monsters to be popping out in the room and he’s just gotta push em away.
Monsters on Machines is one of my favorite books. It was the first one I did with Andrea Welch who is Beach Lane Books. And it’s written by Deb Lund who’s a lovely author. And what I love about this is, first of all, there’s monsters involved, okay, and also there’s bulldozers. There’s lots of bulldozers.
And bulldozers are really fun to draw. You know
I mean, here’s a bunch of them, okay. And the nice thing about this was Andrea had seen Wow! City! and she wanted that kind of kinetic energy. I’m trying to find my favorite
Oh, here. I have a photograph of my children that looks exactly like this, two of my kids and a couple of the neighbor kids eating.
So I don’t know. I mean, there is something lovely about monsters. You don’t have to be realistic, you don’t have to draw the figure and you can just draw whatever you want to. And I can make them up; they’re fun to make up. Anyway, you know, there’s another big bulldozer.
There was a cover we didn’t use that was only a big bulldozer. What else can I show you on this? Well, okay, here’s, you know
This
I love big heads. When I was studying with Milton Glaser, I don’t know if he ever actually said this, but I look at his body of work and I see he does a lot of posters with the big head, like Duke Ellington, things like that.
And I tell when I teach — I teach art on the college level from time to time — and I tell the kids, “When in doubt, draw a big head.” Okay? It’s always effective. It’s wonderful.
