When I began work on the Halloween book Night of the Candy Creepers, one of the first things I did was draw a bunch of costumes for the main character to wear as he went trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. I showed my best ideas to the author, Donna Davies, and she chose the vampire costume for the book. Which was the right idea for a spooky book, but I would have love to draw the cowboy or pirate costume for a story. Maybe someday…

 I wrote about my 3rd book with Donna Davies the other day, and I can’t let October passat least mentioning my 4th book written by her: Bye, Bye Boogeyman

For this book, I needed a Boogeyman who could be both scary and fearfull. I read through the story a few times and paid careful attention to the physical descriptions of the Boogeyman. Then I drew up these possible scary monsters (Click on the images to enlarge them)

And then did these scared variations

I showed the monsters to Donna, who picked Boogeyman #2 to star in the new book. I really like #2 (especially after drawing him through the entire book) but part of me wonders what the book would have been like with #3.

I’ll post more about the creation process of this book later this week. But until then, if you want to see more of the Boogeyman, check out the book on Amazon.

Night of the Candy Creepers is the 3rd book I’ve had the pleasure of illustrating for author Donna Davies. I’ve been wanting to write about this book for months (I began work on it last January) but I’ve been waiting for Halloween to come around. For the first half of the story, a kid walks through his neighborhood trick-or-treating while being followed by the mysterious “Candy Creepers.”

I decided that to make the monsters seem even more out of place and spooky, I would have to make the neighborhood as realistic as possible. Thankfully, I just happened to live in a realistic neighborhood.  So I grabbed by camera and went for a walk. I took a bunch of great photos and used them as inspiration and references throughout the book.

Here are a couple of photos I took of the neighborhood and the illustrations that I used pieces of those photos in.

If you would like to see more of the finished illustrations, check out the book on Amazon:

Or get the super-cool animated version for iBooks: click here! And it’s currently on sale!