How to use this Page

I wanted to share this user review from Amazon. Thank you JP! I really like the little boy's reaction...

This book is a great read aloud. The text gives you the opportunity to build suspense and finishes off with a perfect feel good ending for every preschooler. It's great when a picture book comes along that allows even the youngest to feel a little scary thrill and then find out it's all ok. It's not too long and is sure to hold the attention of every wandering 3 year old. I used this in story time and when I closed the book I had every eye in the room and all you could hear was one little guy saying "boy that was a good one". The art really adds to the story - I think every preschooler can identify with the wide eyed boy in the book. The picture of him peeking out from under the covers is just perfect. If you are looking for a good preschool story time book - this is a great one and is certainly going into my permanent collection.

A nice review by Ruby Winkle of On a Dark, Dark Night. Thank you! You should also check out the rest of the Ruby Winkle Review: Children's Book Illustration and More, there's lots of good stuff in there. I especially enjoy the illustrator interviews.

I'll be at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord, NH this weekend. And now that I see all the great stuff they've got going on there, I'm completely bummed that it isn't closer to my house. Check out all the happenings this month at Gibson's

I'll be there this Saturday at 10:00 am along with children's book author Marty Kelley, the author and illustrator of "The Messiest Desk" and Jean Cochran the author of the book I illustrated, "On a Dark, Dark Night." Marty and Jean will be reading their books and I will be doing a drawing demo and a craft project. So if you are in the area, please stop by with the kids.

I got my copies of "On a Dark Dark Night" this past weekend. It's always a treat to see the finished books. There are a lot of steps to the publishing process so sometimes the book actually arrives months or even years after the authors and illustrators have done their part. As you can see, Eddie helped me unpack.

If you live in the Concord, NH area please join us on October 10th at Gibson's Bookstore. Jean Cochran and I will be appearing there to promote our new book, On a Dark, Dark Night. We will be joined by the talented author and illustrator Marty Kelley. Marty's books are filled with the funny, slightly yucky type of humor that little kids (and myself) love. In fact, Marty's new book may have been written about me. It's called, "The Messiest Desk." Okay, it's probably not about my desk, but from what I've seen of it, it looks like a really cute book. I can't wait to get a copy!

In anticipation of the release of my new picture book I have added yet another new coloring page to my website. (It's up to you to give the witch a face.) Here's a link to the downloadable PDF. To see all the "On a Dark, Dark Night" coloring pages and activities visit my website.

I've added a new activity to my website. This is a super simple paper folding project. All you need a sheet of paper and some crayons and you can have your very own pet monster. Click here to download puppets and folding instructions. When you print your monster turn off the "scale to page" option or the face might not line up with the folds properly.

Also visit the kid's section of my website to check out more activities and coloring pages.

I found out today that the distributor has selected "On a Dark, Dark Night" to be a full page feature in their fall catalog. Yay!

Even though I've known for ages the book is coming out this fall. I still got excited today when I saw it was listed on Amazon and available for pre-order. Some how it seems more official now. More info about the book is available on my website.

Over the next few weeks I hope to reorganize the kids section of my website and I will be adding some new activity and coloring pages. Here's the first, on this one you have to finish the picture by drawing something scary. It's based on the characters from "On a Dark, Dark Night" written by Jean Cochran. The book is scheduled for release later this year. For more color pages visit the kids section of my website.

Does anyone have any ideas of what types of pages I should add? I would love to hear your ideas. My son loves mazes so expect a few of those.

Okay I've seen all these great book trailers out there and my kids spend hours looking at silly videos on YouTube. So I figured it's about time I get with the program. I'm going to try and build a 30 second book trailer for my upcoming book On a Dark, Dark Night. On a Dark, Dark Night was written by Jean Cochran and illustrated by yours truly and will be released this fall.

I decided to use Windows Movie Maker for this experiment because it's already on my computer. First I created 4.jpg images to use in my movie (I used Photoshop for this because that's what I'm most familiar with). Three of the files are simply type on a blue background. The fourth is even simpler, just a light blue background - for a lightening effect.



I also downloaded a couple of sound effects from free sound effects websites and I found some music in the "samples" folder of my PC that I thought worked nicely. It took while playing around with the sound and the timing, and reading the Movie Maker help files. But I'm pretty happy with my first try. This is actually kind of fun. Steven Spielberg watch out!

The next step was to publish my masterpiece on the internet. When I was happy with the way it looked, I created a .wmv file by clicking "File->Publish Movie...". I compressed it to 1MB to save space an upload times, especially since this is only a test. Then I signed up for a YouTube account. Once my account was set up I uploaded my video to YouTube.

And then so I could show you my creation here on my blog, I embedded the video into my post. In case you're wondering here are the directions for how to do that.

TaDa!!!

This is an illo from a picture book that I recently illustrated entitled "On a Dark, Dark Night" by Jean Marie Cochran. I thought it was appropriate for this week's topic although the pooch is a little too chubby to leap. The book won't be available until later this year but I think I can give just this little peek.