I've drawn for as long as I can remember. And having grown up with my nose buried in comic books and the Sunday funnies, I've leaned primarily towards pen & ink. These days I switch between a more cartoonish style and a style more influenced in the tradition of the illustrators from "the Golden Age of Illustration," such as Franklin Booth and John R Neill. Bernie Wrightson's beautiful illustrations from "Frankenstein" were also a major influence and continue to leave me in awe.
Anyway, I made this odd little alphabet book titled "The Alphabetical Chefs' Fateful Expedition" and printed it up as a self-promotional to mail out to publishers to drum up some work. Amongst the negative feedback I got, the general gist was that "we're not looking for new submissions."
Obviously they missed the sentence in the cover letter stating that the book was a sample of what I could do and not a proposed submission. Amongst the positive feedback were some offers to do work, and amid those was an e-mail from Beth Farrell from Sea Script Company asking me if I'd be interested in collaborating with an Alaskan-based writer named Mic Lowther concerning this merry band of animals who go off on adventures together.
I talked about it with my wife and said "why not?" Up to this point, I have to mention, I had done mostly either horror or cartoons that could be put under the file "general weirdness." So to do two covers and 38 interiors of creatures of the wild would be a stretch to say the least. It would definitely be different.
It was a lot of fun, although while doing the research I learned more about moose than most people need to know. Mic's a good writer. Both entertaining and informative at the same time. He passes along a lot of his knowledge of the woods in the books. I'm looking forward to working with him on the second part of the series when it's time.