The Wishing Lantern vignettes (1999)
From my first children’s project
I have on occasion taken on work with independent publishers, though I don’t really do so anymore for a variety of reasons. Generally, these projects afforded a lot of freedom and the folks involved were usually wonderful to work with. The downside and why I eventually moved away from working on these kinds of projects is that they rarely get good distribution, and so the work goes largely unknown. The author of The Wishing Lantern reached out to me through my brother, with whom he worked.
Author Jeff Wheeler has continued on producing independently published works, but we’ve not been in touch much since working on this book together in 1999. I think there was some talk of a sequel shortly after, I think I read a draft of the manuscript even, but for whatever reason it didn’t materialize.
In any case, the book featured mostly vignette or partial page illustrations, and the cover which was also used as a full-page illustration within. We balanced out budget and complexity and I worked smaller than usual, many of the illustrations then being enlarged for print.
