Sugar here again. I can’t get this illustration right, so instead of sending our hero into his adventure, I’m ruminating on what to do with page two.

I tried to finish page two, and I got this, which I really don’t like:

At the very least, the car in the foreground needs to go, but so much is not right here that I’m going to do it over.

I went back to my quick story board for the book. Here’s the original ten second sketch:

For some reason, giraffe looks like a hippopotamus here, could be the bowler.

Next I tried to make a sketch that showed buildings, trees, and cars as three dimensional shapes, rather than the flat approach in the first painting:

And then I tried again:

But I was worried that the road was not a good place to run the text, particularly because the greys and blacks I seem to be mixing are UGLY. So, I moved the horizon line down:

This is better! I was going to try to do this in paint last night. Unfortunately we then had Toddergate Part One, in which the Bean did not eat dinner, punched Bionic in the eye with the corner of a book (she’s ok) and then took two and a half hours to fall asleep, effectively killing the evening. Toddergate Part Two was this morning, just as much fun, but with persistent attempts to yank me out of the shower and lots of wailing when I was anywhere except within six inches of the Thomas the Train set up. Good times. The poor guy has cold sores and a bad diaper rash right now, but he’s on the mend, so maybe this weekend will be better.