This is actually the 13th and 14th children's books I have illustrated since 2016. Author Jeff Jones found me through Thumbtack.com. He had three stories he wanted to tell, and was looking for me to illustrate and format them, but each story was only about 12 pages. Jeff wanted to self-publish the book(s) through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), but they have a 24 page minimum for children's books. So I suggested to Jeff that we combine his first two stories, which are cautionary tales for young readers, regarding the oceans and the environment respectively, and Jeff decided to save his third book for another time. This gave us a 24-page interior and allowed us to publish under the KDP guidelines. Thus the "2 Books In 1" blurb, and the diagonally split images and title logos on the front cover. Jeff's stories revolved around situations and not specific characters, so it was my idea to include the two horse fishes as 'guides' in "Saving The Blue", and the two little blue birds serve the same purpose in "Some Colors For You". I extremely enjoyed the challenges and the fun of depicting underwater scenes, coral reefs and wildlife in the first story, as well as the multiple animals and scenes of parks, streams and oceans, clean and polluted, in the second story, and the educational values addressed in both books. As with all the books I illustrate, these images were penciled and inked by hand, scanned and colored in layers in PhotoShop, then imported into an Adobe Illustrator file to format and construct the PDFs that were uploaded to KDP for publucation. If you'd like to hire me to illustrate and/or format your children's book, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

Here's several more images from "Some Blue For You" by Jeff Jones and illustrated by Tom Arvis.