For Akiak I travelled to many places in Alaska and made friends with many dog mushers. I also saw a lot of moose.

       I drew constantly while in Alaska. The mushers, the dogs, the landscape, and I also tried to imagine how it all would look as a page in a book. Here's an example of a typical working sketchbook page

       Most of all, AKIAK is a book about never giving up. I needed to find just the right dog to create that feeling. I also needed a dog that looked slightly different than the rest of the team, so that you could always spot the main character on the page. I interviewed many dogs until I found just the right one. Then I did a lot of drawings of her to get my character just right.

       I needed the right people to play the characters in the story, too. The people that you see in the book are all my friends. They usually like to be in my books. Usually. When I am working on a page for my book I do hundreds of little drawings that artists call thumbnail sketches. When I find one that looks like it will work I draw it larger and paste it into a prototype book, called a dummy. Then I ask friends if they want to pose and be in my book. They are happy to do it ( I think that's because we usually have a big posing party) until the book comes out and someone sees that THEY are the one drawn with a face full of snow. Then I have some explaining to do.

       The mushers I met were all very helpful and friendly. I visited some at their homes and they showed me their kennels. Others took the time to tell me what it was like to run the Iditarod. And some even took me for rides on their sleds. So when it came time to create the human characters for the book, I tried to make up people that were like the mushers I met. Here are some sketches of different characters I thought I might use. On the page where Akiak is chased into the musher's cabin, the man that lets Akiak out is actually a friend of mine who has been a homesteader in Alaska for almost twenty years.

       A cool guy with an AKIAK t-shirt!