Stinker

Some time ago, I got a fabulous manuscript to work on: Stinker and the Onion Princess.  Set in Texas, is was a retelling of the Grimm tale King Thrushbeard, but this time the proud and beautiful princess was replaced with a proud and handsome heir to an oil fortune.  The hapless king-suitor became a hapless daughter of an onion magnate.

This was to be the third in a trilogy of Texas stories by Kitty Griffin and Kathy Combs.  Alas, after the sketches were done the publisher deemed the project unmarketable and called a halt to production.

Here is my character design for Stinker.

This project was a blast to design.  Since every character is a Texan, they all wear cowboy boots, no matter what.  We decided to make the book really wide, and I filled the image areas with Western vistas and Spanish-Moroccan architecture.  I will try to scan some of the sketches for future posts.  I only have an 8.5 x 11″ Playskool scanner, so I’ll need to figure out how to piece them together.