Hello again everyone, merry Christmas to you all. Today I finished the last complete illustration for a book I have written. The Egg Beaters is a heavily illustrated chapter book about some chickens playing baseball. I got the original idea about 10 years ago when I was hired to create a poster for a friend. The poster was a birthday present for her cousin who loved baseball and chickens. As I drew, and then painted the poster I contemplated the characters, and dreamed up a story for them. That story was the nucleus for The Egg Beaters.
I was very busy at that time as a new dad, and transitioning into a stay at home parent, so I did not sit down and start writing until a year or so later. I did some character drawings to cement the concept in my brain, then set the project aside so I could complete a picture book project The Daydreamer. From time to time I would come back to The Egg Beaters, write another piece of the story, or do some character/location sketches.
With much help from the ladies in my writers group, and much grace from my wife I completed the story and all of the rough drawings two years ago. Then I began the final drawings. Having those drawings to work on over the 2020 summer was truly a blessing. The kids played in the sprinkler and I sat in a lawn chair in the shade and escaped the pandemic one drawing at a time. At over 120 pages and almost 200 illustrations it is easy to see why it took me 2 years to do the final drawings, working in my spare time. Today I finished the last final drawing. I will need to do some fixes, mostly computer work, or adding a character to an existing drawing, but it is pretty much done now. The next step is to combine the word docs into one giant pdf and get it printed, then send those to agents.
This pencil sketch was done with a Pentel .7mm P207 mechanical pencil in a Pentalic Sketchbook on 70lb paper. I hope you enjoyed this post, and that it encouraged you, made you think, or challenged you. God bless, merry Christmas, and have a great day! --Ryan
