SCBWI Book Launch Party for Elephitten

Today, The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators launched a new section of their website highlighting books that have been published in 2015.

My most recent book, Elephitten, is one of the launched books! It's a story of a boy trying to find the perfect pet so he creates interesting amalgamations and this third book in the Petimals series takes an interesting turn.

Click the images below to go to the launch page (and click the like button!). To see all 450 of the books in the launch, just click the "Return" button at the top of the Elephitten page.

New Chapter Book: Elephitten

My newest chapter book has been published: Elephitten.

The book is written by Michael Andrew Fox and is the third in a series of books from Petimals Books. The first two books are Dogopotamus and Hamstigator.

The series revolves around a young boy, Coby, who really wants his parents to get him a pet. But he doesn't want anything to do with 'normal' pets, so he goes about inventing his own.

This book was a huge challenge considering the main character is meant to be a cute kitten with the features of an elephant. No cute little kitty nose- instead an elephant's trunk. No adorable paws- instead elephant feet. I went through so many iterations of this character before finally feeling like I got him right.

My daughter seems to think I got it right:

For fun I created an animated GIF of Elephitten:

And here are some additional illustrations from inside the book:

 You can pick up Elephitten HERE.

ELEPHITTEN animated GIF

I'm working on a new chapter book for Petimals Books called Elephitten (combo of an elephant and a kitten) and I decided to try something new. I created this animated GIF of the title character after reading a tutorial on digitaltrends.com (scroll 1/2 way down) and taking apart someone else's GIF to see how it all works.

How's this for my first try?

By the way, this is also the first look at Elephitten (only the author and my kids have seen him/her). Cute, right? The chapter book will be coming out sometime in May or June. 

Pandarantula

The author of Dogopotamus and Hamstigator wrote a new Halloween short story about the main character of his book series and asked me to create an illustration for it. I'm in the middle of illustrating his next book, Elephitten but when I heard the title of the story I couldn't say no.

So here's Pandarantula.
(And check out the story HERE on the Petimals website.)

You can pick up Dogopotamus and Hamstigator on Amazon.

Below is my original sketch. While I was doing it, my 9 year old drew his own version of Pandarantula (with a sword) and it came out great! I'm going to have some competition soon!