Wild Thing – Part 1

Once in awhile, the opportunity to do a really fun, and completely unexpected, project comes along that I just have to be a part of.

Sometime later this year, Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic Caldecott winning children’s book Where the Wild Things Are will be making a splash on the big screen in a live-action movie. Because of this, the original book has really been drawing a lot of attention again – not that it ever fell out of fashion, mind you. In over 40 years it has never been out of print.

My friend (and terrific artist) Cory Godbey has a website called TerribleYellowEyes.com that is in tribute to this great work by Mr. Sendak. He has invited some artist friends of his to contribute tribute pieces for the website, and I am very happy to be doing so! So, for the next week, I’ll be posting progress reports here on my work all leading up to the reveal of the final piece on Cory’s site next Friday, May 22!

In my quest to figure out what exactly to draw, I needed to look at the original book. I turned to my personal library only to discover I only had The Art of Maurice Sendak and not the full original story! My local library is just around the corner, so I utilized its resources and started sketching ideas in my sketchbook.

Here for your perusal are some preliminary thumbnail sketches and some quick character sketches of how I might want to interpret the Sendak characters. Just this short jaunt into the project so far has been a blast!

Come back for my next post to check out Wild Thing Part 2 to see the preliminary drawing! It’ll all work its way into a watercolor painting by next Friday.