Monday, October 18, 2010

Little Golden Book Monday #129

Today's Little Golden Book is a second printing of the officially licensed Woodsy Owl and the Trail Bikers from 1976 (first printing 1974). As soon as I saw this book, I started thinking about a favorite childhood mall hang out, called Willie Woozle. There was one of these hot dog and malt shops at both of my local malls; Surrey Place Mall and Guildford Town Centre. I went looking on the net for some photos of Willie Woozle, but sadly, I could not find even one photo of the place, just some people reminiscing about how much they liked going there when they were kids. I can't be sure since I could not find a photo, but I seem to remember that the Willie Woozle logo featured an owl very similar to Woodsy and I used to think the malt shop was somehow related to Woodsy, which I'm sure is what they were going for.
I assume every one knows what a malt is, but just in case you've never had one, the term malt comes from the malted milk that made the shops famous. The concoction is a mixture of malted barley, wheat flour, and whole milk that is dried to a powder form. The taste found popularity in soda shops, and even greater popularity when mixed with ice cream. If you remember back, Scooby-Doo and the gang were always hanging out at the malt shop. Wendy's burger restaurants still serves malts which they call Frosty's.
Since I could not find a photo of the Willie Woozle malt shop, I decided I would get creative with one of the interior pages from the Woodsy Owl and the Trail Bikers book to at least include my childhood vice!

Monday, October 11, 2010

Little Golden Book Monday #128

Today's Little Golden Book is another faux Golden Book. This one comes from Bob Canada's Blogworld! blog. Here is what Bob had to say on his blog about this great faux Little Golden Book: For this year's custom-made Christmas card I had a novel idea: instead of waiting until the very last minute to begin working on it like I always do, I would actually get a head start on it! No more racing against the clock and mailing it out a day or two before Christmas. What an unorthodox concept.
My original intention was to make a simple card that looked like the cover of a Little Golden Book. But as I was sketching out ideas I started thinking of an actual story for the inside. Before I knew it my little card had evolved into a full blown eight page book.
I had a week long vacation at the beginning of November. I couldn't afford to go anywhere, so I spent almost the entire week in front of my computer working on this card/book. It turned out pretty much the way I pictured it in my mind. It was nice to have it done ahead of time for once.
Here are all the pages in order along with a few of the sketches he did for the project.