Illustration > Safe Baby Handling Tips

Fun fact about my book, Safe Baby Handling Tips: That’s me and Kelly in all those drawings! We were living in SF and I was doing a rockabilly thing with vintage red tab Levis and no handlebar mustache. You can see Kelly go through a couple of hair styles between Safe Baby Handling Tips and its prequel follow-up, Safe Pregnancy Handling Tips. I’ve written about how we came up with the idea, but the intention of the drawings was to mimic instructions for power tools. Not airline emergency instructions. Not IKEA assembly instructions. There’s actually an important distinction here.

FINAL: The first edition of the book in question – Safe Baby Handling Tips circa 2005. Look at that handsome rockabilly devil, will ya? — **FINAL:** The first edition of the book in question – *Safe Baby Handling Tips* circa 2005. Look at that handsome rockabilly devil, will ya?

FINAL: Like painters in all the cartoons who paint live models, illustrators use photos for reference.. We call it “scrap”. Before computers, I knew illustrators who had rooms full of file cabinets packed with torn out magazine pages, photos, all ki… — **FINAL:** Like painters in all the cartoons who paint live models, illustrators use photos for reference.. We call it “scrap”. Before computers, I knew illustrators who had rooms full of file cabinets packed with torn out magazine pages, photos, all kinds of scrap (see!?) paper with stuff they could reference in their work. I like this photo because of the baby laying on the ground behind me. Looks like I totally missed!

FINAL: A couple of my favorite panels. It takes people a while to see what’s so wrong about Shopping with Baby, which is fun to watch. Drying Baby is so moronic and mean it never fails to crack me up. Same with the Lifting Baby detail (what a grip!)… — **FINAL:** A couple of my favorite panels. It takes people a while to see what’s so wrong about Shopping with Baby, which is fun to watch. Drying Baby is so moronic and mean it never fails to crack me up. Same with the Lifting Baby detail (what a grip!). Oh, and a little something from Nursing Baby to keep you up at night. Yep, that’s me. I’ll spare you the scrap I shot for it.

FINAL: Another true life adventure in scrap shooting (courtesy of Bonding with Baby). And two of my favorite Kelly panels. She cut her hair short in the middle of the project and I kept it accurate. So when you read through the book you can tell wha… — **FINAL:** Another true life adventure in scrap shooting (courtesy of Bonding with Baby). And two of my favorite Kelly panels. She cut her hair short in the middle of the project and I kept it accurate. So when you read through the book you can tell what was done first and what was done later. Don’t ask me why all our furniture was labeled.

My dad and my granddad always taught me that you have to respect your tools. You understand their power and never forget that you need to be mindful when using them. Let your mind wander, and bad things can happen. That’s what I thought about when we had our baby. As long as you stay mindful and not be a moron, no one will get hurt. It’s a weird twist, but you follow me, right?

If you read about the strategy behind Safe Baby Handling Tips, you know I didn’t have a lot of time to mess around drawing these. They’re simple, but they had to be realistic enough to need scrap for me to work from. Because what I’d do if I had time is take photos of people recreating the actions and then draw from that. I did that, but then traced the images in a stylistic way so I could scan them, clean them up in Photoshop, turn into vectors in Illustrator, and then pop them into frames fast. The stuff I couldn’t shoot, I just drew freehand which turned out to be pretty efficient.

COMPS: of course there were a lot of ideas that didn’t make the book for one reason of another. When we did the 10th Anniversary update/expansion we had to nix some panels because technology made them obsolete. They just don’t make TVs like that any… — **COMPS:** of course there were a lot of ideas that didn’t make the book for one reason of another. When we did the 10th Anniversary update/expansion we had to nix some panels because technology made them obsolete. They just don’t make TVs like that anymore and we didn’t feel like a flat panel would be as funny. And somethings our editor at Running Press nixed to save us from ourselves. Co-Sleeping is too scary and real a problem, for example. And even though we have a booze related panel (Calming Baby) it was not recommended where this one we flipped it to be the YES. Bad. And I added some that were just shitty for fun. That’s a string of firecrackers I’m lighting over there for the unpublished, Teaching Baby to Crawl.

FINAL: New directions for Safe Baby Handling Tips. Clockwise from top left: 1. If dogs are the new children, a Safe Dog Handling Tip series seemed appropriate. 2. We played with the idea of offering our Handling Tips on adult apparel, canvas totes, … — **FINAL:** New directions for Safe Baby Handling Tips. **Clockwise from top left: 1.** If dogs are the new children, a Safe Dog Handling Tip series seemed appropriate. 2. We played with the idea of offering our Handling Tips on adult apparel, canvas totes, and even pillowcases, so we made some useful usage tips for those fine products. 3. I picked something at random to see if the formula would hold up. HI-YA! It did. 4. This was the big NO on how to use a SBHT coffee mug.

I later tried my hand at expanding the Handling Tips concept to other things to see if the idea had legs. Karate, Dog Ownership, that kind of stuff. I think the baby is the best foil just because of the original power tool reference. For some gross reason it’s funniest when the person who could get so seriously hurt is the small helpless person who least deserves it.