Dog Training For Kids Book!

Hello, sadly neglected blog. I've got some exciting news! The middle grade book I illustrated in roughly a month and a half is available starting Tuesday November 26th! The author Vanessa Estrada Marin is also from Queens and worked with the North Shore Animal League and my good friend L. Ryan Storms wrote an additional portion of the book.

Here's a direct link to the book at Penguin Random House's site, but it's available for pre-order on Amazon. It will also be at Barnes & Noble, Powell's, Hudson Booksellers, Target, Walmart and as an ebook. If you like it, positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are always helpful for authors!

I was obsessed with horses as a kid and spent an inordinate amount of time poring over the delightful drawings in "Happy Horsemanship" by Dorothy Henderson Pinch to convince my mom to let me take horseback riding lessons. I can only hope this book does for children who love dogs what that book did for me as a young reader. While working on this book, I also reminisced about my sister Kelly and her friend Devon taking dog training classes at the local kennel with their pups. I'm a proud aunt to three dogs: Luna, Aria and Auger. Though it's been a long time since I've had a dog of my own, according to my mom my first "words" were panting like our giant black dog Aspen. Drawing this book definitely scratched my dog itch, although I'm now following a problematic number of rescue sites on Instagram in the name of research.

Here's a look at one of my drawings from the initial rough sketch to final art. This was the first time I was using Procreate to draw on an iPad and I ended up doing most of the art in that program, only switching to Photoshop to compile everything and save the files as CMYK for final delivery. Thank you to Aimee Fleck at Penguin Random for the opportunity and her design input on this project!