Kombucha!

At long last I have finished my latest book project.  "Kombucha!" is to be published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin sometime around September 2013.  I've been working hard on the illustrations since December and have had a good time getting out the old ink and brush.  As it is a two-colour book, all the colour work was done in Phototshop to keep everything separated for pre-press by Avery's designers.

For those of you who don't know, kombucha is a pro-biotic, fermented tea brewed with sugar, yeast and healthy bacteria and is celebrated for its many beneficial properties.  Thats the yeast and bacteria gettin' down in the first image by the way.

I was approached by the owners of Kombucha Brooklyn to illustrate the book and thankfully the editor at Avery agreed that I'd make a good match.  The book covers everything from brewing how-to to recipes and chemistry, to the drink's history and origins and contains about 60 illustrations.  It made for a lot of diverse subject matter which is always nice in a project and I had loads of research to do.  I also liked the challenge of making a how-to sequence look interesting and less clinical.  So here is a small sample of the images... I'll post some more up after the book has been published.

Brush Cleaning Scraps

My latest Illustration project (more on that later) involves A LOT of ink brush and ink drawings and thus, lots of brush cleaning.  These two scraps are my favs so far.  Makes me want to get a little looser in my actual work...

1 little bookie AH AH AH!

Another project that happened during the new baby era... I'm still catching up on posts. There are a few more on my main site but these two were my favorites. Drawings for a cheeky version of Dracula's diary "A Vampire's Diary" from Ivy Press in the UK. Fun project, it was nice to do some straight black and white line work.

This Green House

This is older news by now, seeing as the book came out in Sept 09' but I dont care... I'm still riding high off of this project

"This Green House" published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang, AD'd by the very nice Ann Stratton and designed by super talented Alissa Faden. Over 120 individual illustrations!! I had a lot of fun working on it and the finished book really came out nice. See a few more spreads on my site.