Following up on my blog post of a few months ago, here are more examples of illustrations in which I used my wife Eve, son Benjamin and daughter Rebecca as models, (not always with their consent).
The earliest is a Portland Tribune piece from 2001 when Rebecca was still a babe in arms. To make single mom Eve seem even more burdened, I augmented the family with a couple of extras- a middle daughter and one on the way.
I made frequent use of the family as models for the Modern Love columns I illustrated in the New York Times. The piece with the jilted suitor is a true family production; those are my fingers being slammed in the door, the hands slamming it belong to Eve and Rebecca, and it can only have been Ben snapping the reference photo.
In another Modern Love piece Rebecca switches sexes to portray a boy obsessed with penguins.
For the last piece, done in 2007, Ben and Rebecca were too old to model for the toddlers in the story about a military wife who tries to make do with “Flat Daddy”, a cardboard cutout of her absent husband; but photographs pulled from a family album enabled them to appear anyway.
All four of us appear in this storyboard for a car ad. You can tell it’s a few years old; Ben is now taller than me.
Ben and Rebecca make occasional appearances in my comics as well. In the 24 hour comic we are playing a family game where one member thinks of a name and the others have to guess it; “before” and “after” refers to where the guess falls alphabetically.
“Snow Angel” is a story I first drew as a 24 hour comic in 2007 and since reworked in color for the anthology Dark Horse Presents. The heroine is not named, but she is pretty clearly based on Rebecca, so much so that when I drew the character again in a 24 hour comic last year, I found that she had grown taller along with Rebecca. Her annoying older brother is pretty clearly Ben as well, but for some reason I did give them a different set of parents.