Princesses wear neck braces too

Sometimes an odd request comes in that you feel you just must make happen.

A friend contacted a small group of illustrators, including me, about his friend who has a granddaughter, age 4, who just had surgery and needs to wear a neck brace.
The problem: This little girl loves princesses, wants to be a princess, and believes princesses don't wear neck braces. Especially ugly neck braces.
So the little girl refused to wear the one thing which would insure that she would heal quickly and properly.

Enter the request.

The grandmother wanted art of princesses which either the artist or the grandmother could Photoshop a neck brace into, to collect into a book of images for the little girl, in hopes it would inspire her to see that princesses do indeed wear neck braces when it's important.

I loved the challenge.

I didn't have any images of princesses that would work, though. Either a neck brace wouldn't fit into the picture legibly, or the image was too small or old. 

But I did have a drawing I did a short time ago of my youngest daughter with a cat.

Add a few princess accessories and -- voila! 

A princess.

The grandmother will add the neck brace.

Let's hope it works for the little girl. I love happy endings.

(And I think my daughter will be charmed by seeing herself as a princess.)

-- Ruth McNally Barshaw

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