Christmas Card 2009.

I am submitting this for Illustration Friday: Trail. Forgive me if I have submitted this for another theme, I honestly can't remember if I did or not.

For the past few years I have incorporated Ranger Kent and Cowgirl Pearl (two characters my wife and I portrayed for our church's annual Vacation Bible School) into our Christmas card. This year, with the birth of our daughter Virginia, I wanted to put her in as well our dog, Charlotte. The problem I ran into was that Kent and Pearl were never married so I would have a lot of explaining to do if they showed up on the card with a baby, right? I decided to go with it anyway and added this little note on the back of the card:

Last year sometime Ranger Kent and Cowgirl Pearl got hitched and had a baby some 10 months later. Oh, and they also adopted a dog, apparently.

________

I hope that straightens things out kids!

As a little side note, if you go back and look at some of the illustrations I have done for Highlights this year, you can see Kent or some kind of cowboy in the illustration.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. God Bless you and your family and best wishes for a successful and healthy new year.

- Chuck, Daisy, and Virginia.

O Bethlehem.

In April of 2001 I had the wonderful privilege of visiting Israel, a trip which changed my life and forever altered my appreciation of God's word for the better. This is a small excerpt from my Israel trip sketchbook, as well as my Christmas card for 2001. I hope to have my Christmas cards delivered to me by Tuesday which means I should be posting the illustration on Christmas Day at the latest. Meanwhile, enjoy and have a Merry Christmas.

Forgive the quality...

Miniature Golf - January Highlights Magazine

This one took me a while. The fun part of a "What's Wrong" illustration is that you can add some pretty off the wall things but they must be obvious for the kids to get. The problem with this one (as instructed by the art director) was that miniature golf courses already have unusual things on them (windmills, etc.) so I needed to make this work in a way that still looked "wrong." I decided making a generic miniature golf course and focusing on the people and their accessories worked best, but this was after a few trial and errors.

This illustration will appear in the January issue of Highlights for Children which should be in stores now.