Meet Rosie. She’s a bit shy, and might need a little encouragement to come closer.  A few treats should do the trick.  Before you know it she’ll be perfectly content to snuggle close and put her head on your lap. 🙂

Rosie is smaller than your average dinosaur, about the size of a deer.  Like a deer, she can be a bit jumpy, and she feels much better if she has friends to keep her company and watch out for troublesome, over-exuberant types like Opie.  He’s far too excitable, and that makes her nervous.  She’d much rather curl up under the shade of spiky cycad fronds for a little siesta.

Much safer there.  And Rosie always wins at hide-and-seek. 😉

If you take the time to give her treats and coax her out of the thicket, then she’ll get to know you rather quickly.  Then she’ll be your friend forever, and come running when you call. 🙂  I hope you don’t mind having a second shadow…

Making progress…

Trying out a little something new here.  A number of times the precise text formatting, headlines and such, hasn’t always looked right to me.  At least as far as dividing the two segments between Critter of the Week and Making Progress.

I’ve also included the picture above, and plan to do that for every COTW from now on. A big reason for this is the advice I keep reading on how necessary it is to have an email list.  Why?

• If you as a reader really like what I have here, then many people like to receive things through email.
• It gives me a way to give you stuff, like the character critter cards.
• As a creator, I want to be able to make things that my readers want.  The best way to do that is by having direct contact with you through email.

Basically, it’s all about communication, and the best and easiest way to communicate with my readers is through email.  Obviously, this is only for those who actually want to hear from me.  I hate spam as much as anyone else, and if someone doesn’t like dinosaurs or picture books, then they’d best go somewhere else instead of wasting time here.

In other progress…I’d like to introduce our featured family.

They don’t have names, so I’ve just been calling them Daddy, Mommy, Sister, Brother, and Baby.  They are modeled after my own family of course, since I see my kids and husband all the time (and myself if you count the mirror 😛 ).  It would be a bit harder to ask another family to model for me.

At least not until I get famous. 😀

So here is my little family.  Not really any reference here aside from memory and general knowledge of what my children look and act like, so please excuse the sloppy mess.  You’ll notice that the kids’ precise ages and height go all over the place…

That’s because I don’t draw humans nearly as often as I do dinosaurs.  But I’m always drawing different species of dinos and their prehistoric neighbors, so how hard can a few new shapes be?

I’ll definitely be referencing the photos I take pretty closely, as well as little “stick figure” clay models…depending on the scene. I’ll show you how I do it once I get to that point.  I’ve never done it before, so I’ll get to show you if it works or not. 😀

Coming Next Week…

This little guy loves to curl up in his bed with his favorite teddy. 🙂

Share your guess in the comments! He’s one of the critters over on the critter page. 🙂