Thursday, July 24, 2014

Today is National Cousins Day!

I have cousins!
Dozens of cousins!
(Wish I'd thought of that title and book idea before the awesome Shutta Crum did, but she did such a fantastic job with it that I can't really complain.)

I have lots of cousins partly because of these two people:


That's my grandma and grandpa. I will probably write books about them eventually. For now, this is what they looked like in their early marriage, and re-figured as paper dolls. This is an early pencil sketch. Lots of things got smoothed out before the art was shared last December.

Below is something I worked on last week -- again, this is a rough pencil sketch that subsequently got cleaned up a lot and re-inked. This is a concept for my family reunion t-shirt. When I was a kid we formed a cousins band, and that's what this shirt art represents. We'll see how well it goes over at the reunion next month (where many of us will have musical instruments with us).


I love my cousins because my grandparents brought us together so often for family parties that we became more like siblings. Dozens and dozens of siblings.
Many of them and their kids have become characters in my Ellie McDoodle books.
Go draw a cousin -- real or imaginary -- today!

-- Ruth McNally Barshaw

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