Hopefully, SleepyTown will be out soon. It is a great little book for children. It is true that every night, Zander says, "I'm going to beat you to SleepyTown, Gomey." (Gomey sounds like Domey...He can not say his "Gs" yet.) I do not care. It can sound like "dummy" and I will smile. How could I not smile, when the "perfect" child says something to me?

Last night, Zander was lying next to me in bed. He was holding a book and pretending to read. The funny thing, children copy what they see us do. We make reading important to us. He sees us read. He is also excited about SleepyTown. I asked him to read to me. He opened the book and said. "I love you, Domey. I love Domey."

I said, "I love you, baby." He looked at me over the corner of his book and replied, "I'm reading to you." I smiled.

Actually, I surprised myself, when I did the illustrations for the book. Yes, I have painted Acrylic on canvas for years. I have also drawn animals with pencil, but this was something new. I did not know if I could do it. To be honest, I was scared.

I did the design work on tracing paper. Why tracing paper? I took the advice of a guy that I had emailed, after seeing his work online. He told me that he did all of his pre-drawing stuff on tracing paper. That made it easy to change as well as trace, if needed. Then, I transfered it to drawing paper, via carbon.

I used a perminent marker to fine-tune the designs and then I colored them with colored pencils. I tried an illustration with Acrylic paint on canvas pad. I even tried one with watercolor pencil on watercolor pad. After trying all three, I stuck with colored pencils. They were easy to use and gave me the look that I was looking for in the work. (Drop me a message, if you would like to know what brand of colored pencils were used. They were not the cheap-o kind.)

After finishing the illustrations, I took them to Office Max and had them scanned at 600dpi. This gave me great detail in the scans. The scans looked as good as the originals.

So, here I sit...waiting for the book. Check back and I will give you another look at the creation of SleepyTown.