Brown Sugar Babies

Right after Rimshots came out I had the pleasure of being a new father to a bouncing baby girl. With this new little person in my life I had something else to draw inspiration from. Being a new father also motivated me to create something for my new baby that she could also be in. So once I was done doing basketball books, I switched gears and did Brown Sugar Babies. The idea actually came from my editor Andrea Davis Pinkney who simply had the title in her head. She loved the title but didn’t know what the book would actually be. As soon as she mentioned it, I thought about the rainbow of colors of black skin and how that could be translated into sweet treats. Things like chocolate, honey, and caramel were just a few of the treats I decided to use. Once I had the concept in mind, I then had to figure out how to photograph the babies. Since the book was about the rainbow of black skin, I photographed each baby with a unique color on a black background. Watching my daughter grow gave me an idea of what age child I would need to photograph and allowed me to put her in the book. Here we are together in the book.

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Baby Love board book series

Once Brown Sugar Babies was done, my editor loved it so much that she wanted to do it again in a little bit of a different way. She wanted to use Motown songs as the words for the book and have me photograph the babies in a similar way to Brown Sugar Babies. To make it a little different for me, I photographed the babies on one solid color instead of one color and black. By this time my second child, a boy, was born. Since his sister was in a book, he just HAD to be in this one. He loves music, so I made a point of giving him a toy instrument to play with. I gave each of the babies a toy to play with to make it a little different than Brown Sugar Babies.

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