more sugar plums

So I thought I'd have my own little media blitz here at the ol' blog, and post some more about the Sugar Plum books.

I'm often asked how I got hooked up with these books, and how Whoopi Goldberg became my BFF. First of all, I'm sure she's a lovely woman, but alas, as we have never met, no friendship bracelets have been exchanged. All of my interaction is with the fine folks at Jump at the Sun Publishing, an imprint of Hyperion Books, owned by Disney, who also owns ABC, on which airs Ms. Goldberg's show The View. Not sure any of that was important, but it's interesting, isn't it?

Over the years, I've done a lot of work for Jump at the Sun. One of my bigger projects with them has been a middle reader series called Willimena Rules! by Valerie Wilson Wesley. When the Sugar Plum books came along, the Jump at the Sun folks liked what I had done on the Willimena books and asked me to do some sample sketches of the main character Alexandrea (see above). Everyone approved the sketches (including Ms. Goldberg), and thus I was on the project. Pretty straightforward.

A little about the cover. The final cover, which can be seen in the previous post, started out a bit different. This sketch above was actually to be the spot on the back cover. It got moved to the front and the center girl (old version of the character Brenda) was replaced with Al.

From there is was just a matter of doing the final illustration in Photoshop using all my standard brushes, textures, etc.