Take a Look Inside the Book (and a Giveaway)

Now that the veil has been lifted, allow me to show off what I've been keeping under wraps since January. Yes, a bit of self-indulgence, but this is my very first children's book and I CAN'T HELP MYSELF! I'm extremely excited to share with you all some spreads of How To Train With a T.Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals. If you like what you see, why not click on the book title and order it? It'll make me happy. And my family. We're counting on you. No pressure.

(However, if you want a freebie, I'm offering a BOOK GIVEAWAY further down in this post!)

Allow me to take you on a visual tour of the book:


Holding up the cover, you can see the gold foil lettering and gold medals. Looks pretty cool, I think. Hard to photograph, though.


I like what my art director did with the back cover here. Lucy took what I had drawn for page 5 and put it on the back. Nice.




I like how this spread looked. Simple and basic.


The dog is Herman, Michael's very own pet bulldog. I looked at pictures and video that was available of Herman (not much actually) and tried to match the color patterns found on his coat.

The audience on the right was a pain. I didn't want it to look like I just drew 10 shapes of people and copy pasted the heck out of it. I really went in and drew and touched up almost every single "person".


This was a fun spread, showing the relative time it took for Michael to train leading up to the Olympics (it goes to 2003, but who's counting). We decided to go with a boy growing up, alongside his pet bulldog, from birth to six years old. Even though it's not really Michael here, I made it look like the kid's really into swimming (he reads a book called "How to Swim Like a Dolphin", for instance).


The whole eating up to 10,000 calories thing is fascinating to kids, so it was fun to visualize the fact that it would be like eating tons of pizza. Of course, eating just pizza would be sorta not healthy, so that's why you see a "I could never eat that much pizza!" line.

Easter Egg alert: the name of the pizza delivery service is "Ava's Pizza".


When in doubt, DINOSAURS! I had a blast drawing this spread—I mean, who doesn't love T. Rex's and Velociraptors?

I was *this* close to putting my graffiti tag on that subway car.


Wrapping it up. Getting near the end of our journey, as we recap all the things that Michael had to endure to reach his goal at Beijing.


Okay, one more shot.

------------ BOOK GIVEAWAY!!! ------------

Now that the book is officially released, I'm going to celebrate by offering a signed copy of the book! (Sorry, not signed by Michael, just me.) I'll make it even MORE worth your while by throwing a 5x7 print from my Etsy shop into the mix. How's that? Yeah? Yeah!

Okay, what you need to do is leave a comment on this blog post by midnight (PST) Wednesday, June 17 and I'll have one of my kids pick a number out of a hat. The winner will be announced this Friday, the 19th.

GOOD LUCK!

UPDATE: Comments are now closed. Thanks for participating, guys!