Colby Sharp, Judy Blume and Green Kangaroos

Above: I love teacher Colby Sharp‘s enthusiasm for reading and how he shares it with his students. “READING IS AWESOME!”

Thanks to Colby for letting me use his classroom as photo reference for some of the illustrations I did for the Judy Blume chapter books. He and my teacher friend Allison Durno were kind enough to share reference photos with me during the process.

Here’s how my illustration for pg 7 of THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE IS THE GREEN KANGAROO (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 2014) began:

Then it became this:

Then I referred to a couple of stills from a short video that Colby sent me:

Video still courtesy Colby Sharp, reposted with permission

Video still courtesy Colby Sharp, reposted with permission.

and the illustration became this:

Then Simon & Schuster art director Lauren Rille worked her magic and here’s the final page layout:

In thanks for the photo ref, I put Colby in the auditorium crowd near the end of the book:

So fun!

Anyway, do check out Colby’s SharpRead blog and the Nerdy Book Club, which he co-founded.

Read more about how Simon & Schuster’s Lauren Rille and I created a new look for Judy Blume classics at the Nerdy Book Club.

To find out more about the Judy Blume books I illustrated, see my Illustrating Judy Blume page. I’ll also be talking about the process during a panel discussion at the INSPIRE! Toronto Book Fair on Sunday, November 16th on the Spark Stage at 1 pm.