Atheneum Books

This is a book about trucks and the heavy loads they carry like chocolate chip cookies and puppies. George Ellen Lyon wrote it and I illustrated and designed it. It took about a year to produce, during which I photographed a lot of trucks and freeway overpasses with my cell phone out the windshield of my car! I wanted to capture that scale and massiveness that the trucks, their 18 wheels and their cargo occupy on the freeway. I designed it in a square format so that when open you would get a super-wide landscape.

The trucks are pretty accurate in terms of scale and design, however their cargo is always a bit odd and out of scale. The fact that most everything we consume except loans or other services is shipped in a truck, but always concealed. I had the idea to reveal everything like dolls, spaceships and toy trains either on a flat bead or poking out in a peculiar way. Still, there was nothing more fun than drawing those big grills, horns, exhaust pipes and wheels in dramatic perspective! You could almost hear them!