I dedicate this page to Alex, one of my adorable sons.
Today is his 30th Birthday, and when he was just a little guy he used his bowl of spaghetti as a pillow!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX!!!


 

Here's the first two pages from Aurora Borealice, book 2 - I'll be posting something every Friday till the book is done! Please feel free to ask any questions regarding artwork or content. I'm going to show the artwork in progress, and not necessarily in any order. The dialogue (word balloons) still needs some work, so they'll be added when I finish all the images. So for now, I'm going to add captions like I did for my first book.  

This book starts off where the first one ended, new year's day 1981. Ken and I were both 26, living in the Beaches area in Toronto. Art school was now behind us, but the rest of my education was still ahead of me...

Aurora Borealice is a series of four autobiographic novels that span 40 years of my life, and I've been working away on Book 2. For those of you who have read the first book and are wondering what happened next - well, here I go... These books are about my ongoing struggle with literacy while  juggling kids, Ken, career, and getting an education, all the while finding out that life itself is the real education. I hope my story resonates with anyone who takes the time to have a look. 
I'm hoping to be finished in the spring 2012, and I'll be posting both finished and unfinished pages over the course of the next few months so you can see the work in progress. The page above is the  first pencil drawing, soon to be  finished with pen and tonal washes.  The word balloons won't be added for a while. I've written the first draft of the whole book and layed out the pages in thumbnail sketches, now I'm in the long process of copying them onto lined off 11x17 comic pages for all to see - gulp!