Farm Stories. Bike Ride.

Over the past few years, I have illustrated about 30 stories written by a professor from one of the universities here in Colorado. I am completing one last cover page illustration for him. He is in the process of working with a publisher to get his book of stories published. He writes about growing up on the farm and the stories are very down-to-earth, simple, humorous and sometimes quite touching. Each story has an average of 4-5 small black pen illustrations interspersed in the text. The first drawings, completed probably 10 years ago are slightly different in style than the ones I've most recently completed. We had a break of about 5 years when I moved from one area to the another and he continued to write but I was not illustrating anything for him at that time. He contacted me about 2 years ago and we finished our collaboration. Here are a couple of the illustrations.
It was lots of fun to read the stories and to come up with the ideas for illustrating them. I would run my ideas by him, he would maybe come up with suggestions of his own and then I would get started. It became a part of my life for quite awhile and I confess that I will sort of miss it.

BIKE RIDE

It's 8:10a and I just got back from a lovely, invigorating bike ride. The camera is sitting on a rail post for this shot. I'm in the shadow of a big redstone topped hill. This area is very beautiful and a popular spot for bike riding. My particular route takes about 45 minutes and I get plenty of exercise. Merle and I rode here on Sunday. We are planning to use both cars for our next ride, parking one at each end of a longer route we are planning. Any exercise has to be done in the early morning or evening around 7 p.m. to avoid the very hot temperatures we have been enduring in this part of Colorado. We have mountain bikes and from what we see around us, this type of bike riding should probably be done on road bicycles. They have thinner and bigger around tires making it easier pedal plus, I guess you go faster. However, I think we will stick with our mountain bikes for now since we do not go real long distances.