Drawn

When I was a kid, one of my favourite books was Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — page after page of every imaginable cartoon automobile.

Today, one of my favourite children’s illustrators is Brian Biggs, and his new book Everything Goes On Land is a spiritual successor to Scarry’s book.

Mr. Biggs is so deft at drawing cars — each one with its own personality — that it’s his work I visit when I have trouble drawing cars myself. Modern cars are particularly tricky to get just right, with their weird, slick shapes. In Everything Goes, Biggs’s chunky colourful cars and trucks have a distinct old-fashionedness to them, which only adds to the charm.

And just like Richard Scarry’s book had the fun game of trying to find the hidden Goldbug on each page, so too does this book — on each page there’s a bird wearing a hat, and throughout the book the numbers 1 to 100 are hidden somewhere in the illustrations, adding a Where’s Waldo element.

So great! And there’s an Everything Goes in the Air, and an Everything Goes By Sea in the works.

Be sure, too, to visit Brian’s blog — especially under the Everything Goes category, for all sorts of process stuff and preliminary sketches. It’s where I found this trailer, too: