remember the Morse Code?

The third book I illustrated for CUP's Rainbow Reading series was about Samuel Morse and his invention, the Telegraph Machine.

This one was a particular challenge for me, they wanted a comic-book format (which I was only too happy to do) that in itself was great but researching everything proved tricky as it juuust pre-dates the first Daguerrotypes (photos), in fact it turns out that old man Morse was the first one to also obtain the licence to produce daguerrotypes in America! He was also an accomplished artist, busy fellow, AND led troupes in the Civil War...

Anyway, I digress, I used every trick in my book on this story, rendering inkwash bacdrops and adding cartoony characters which I thought 'popped out' very nicely. In comp, I treated the illustrations to give them a Victorian feel and added what photographic textures I could.

If anything, I got to draw many ships... as you can see :)