We finished writing our fourth kids’ dog book, and our illustrator, Heather Nichols, just sent us the first illustration (above).

It’s so exciting when Heather starts sending us illustrations.  They make our stories come  alive.

This is the fourth time the talented Heather has illustrated our dog books. We met her at the Portland Saturday Market, where she was doing caricatures. We love the way she captures the essence of our characters in such a playful manner.

In this illustration, Heather depicts sensitive Bash and his strong connection to his dog, Lucy. In our fourth book, Bash’s sensitivities give him special strengths, which is why Heather titled this illustration “Sensitive Strength.” When Lucy is by Bash’s side, he feels safe enough to make the most of his strengths–his super-tuned ears and nose, his ability to read people’s feelings and his smarts. But sometimes those sensitivities wreak havoc for Bash. You’ll learn more about that in our book!

Heather has a knack for illustrating Bash’s feelings. Maybe that’s because she has been an illustrator most of her life. She discovered her love for drawing at age 7 in Mrs. Otterholt’s class. She drew Joshua Giraffe, a character from her favorite Raffi song and felt a joy she hadn’t known before. By the time she was 10 she knew that she would be drawing cartoons for a living when she grew up.

Heather took every art class possible from elementary through high school and also took some community college courses. She learned most of what she knows from copying her favorite Warner Brother cartoons, watching Commander Mark and the Secret City (an amazing cartoon instruction series, she says) and observing the local graffiti artists in her neighborhood.

In March of 2000 she landed a job drawing caricatures for Kaman’s Art Shoppes at Sea World in San Diego. Drawing caricatures was an aspect of cartooning she had not explored very much and it was love at first sketch. She was very fortunate to be surrounded by phenomenal artists who helped guide her along, she told us. Before she knew it she was drawing at parties and huge corporate events.

Heather helped launch our first books by doing caricatures of the guests at our book release parties and asking them for a donation, She gave the donations to the Oregon Humane Society, a much-loved shelter in Portland that takes pets from all over the U.S. and finds homes for them.

Speaking of animal shelters, here’s an illustration from our last book. In this chapter, the local animal shelter is having a pet fair on the waterfront, and one of the characters in our book, Coach Danny, falls in love with golden retriever Hudson and adopts him.

Stay tuned for more illustrations and information about our fourth  kids’ dog book. And be sure to watch the real Hudson, as a puppy, romping with 5-year-old Michael in our book trailer: