Snowmen

So anyway, a friend of mine wrote a children's story and asked me to have a go at illustrating it. It was called A Snowman is Not Just For Christmas. I took it as an opportunity to develop my style a bit, and come up with a series of illustations that looked like this:

But the one I thought was most successful out of all of them was this one:

I published this one on my old blog just before Christmas that year, and before long I was getting a lot of hits. A quick image search seemed to show that it was one of the most popular snowman images on the internet. I mean, people were checking this out a lot. And, I suspect, using it for commercial gain as well. Strangely, despite its near-global popularity, only one person ever asked me for permission to use it, a really nice librarian from Michigan who wanted to put it on her library's calendar. So I said yes. She got it for free. The rest of you buggers can pay up.

So anyway, I did another last December for our Christmas card that we send to all our friends. Here it is:

Help yourself, everybody...