Word: DREAM

One thing that makes this job so much fun, is that I can do ANYTHING I want for each image.  For dream, my dog Cobber was the inspiration.  When he is sleeping his paws twitch and he makes little woofing sounds.  I just imagined that he's dreaming, super dog to the rescue! 

Word: FAT

With a word like fat, it's always wise to go with an animal.  I use animals a lot when the subject matter could hurt someone's feelings.  It's kind of hard to offend a cat.

My Annual Lunch With Joy

It just so happens Joy lives on the coast, about 20 miles from my house in Escondido. We decided to meet for lunch in December

We had a picnic at the Nikki St. Phalle sculpture garden at Kit Carson Park, in Escondido. My daughter, now 10, on Christmas break joined us!

Joy Chu to the Rescue

 The decision was made to hire the super talented designer, Joy Chu. That's when things really started to happen. So now there was a team in place. a designer, a person to illustrate the signing motions, and the illustrator (me) to make this a fun dictionary to look at.

Joy has a major job here. She has to keep track of everything. She has set up a system of keeping track of 1,000 words using log sheets. They have notations as to sketches,revises, and finals. The same goes for the signing diagrams and text for each definition. Yeah, we definitely needed Joy!

They're great! We'll get back to you.

I sent off the samples and everything was fine. They said they'd get back to me soon. In the mean time they sent me this cool little tape measure, which I have now been using for 15 years!

First Three Samples