When our son, Bruce, was very young, the best part of the day for my wife, Audrey, and me was reading him his bedtime picture books. I remember I began to look forward to that interlude every afternoon when I noticed the sun was low.

That's when I fell in love with children's literature and decided to illustrate, and occasionally write, children's books. My son profoundly changed my life. (If you are curious to know how he looked at that time, he posed for the character of the Page in King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, a book Audrey wrote and I illustrated.

Now that my son has grown up, he has changed my life again. Since Bruce was a child, he has been interested in computers, but for years he couldn't get me near one.

Finally, in 1991, he literally forced me to sit down in front of his computer, insisting that an artist could find magic there. He was right.

I experimented and researched computer art for two years, and then, in 1993, I began to illustrate my first book using a computer.

That book, Bright and Early Thursday Evening: A Tangled Tale, also written by Audrey, is now complete. It took two and a half years to finish the book, and those two and a half years were the most exciting of my career. Every day I learned so many new techniques that the only way I can describe how I felt is to draw it.

I was certain that the computer would be cold and mechanical, but it wasn't. Many brilliant artists, inventors, and computer scientists worked for years to make the computer friendly to artists. In fact, Audrey and I are so grateful to those visionaries that we dedicated Bright and Early Thursday Evening to them, and to Bruce, who insisted we test their inventions.

After a few months the computer felt so natural to me that it was just like another brush, or a different kind of paint. Many people think that all you do is push a button and the computer makes the art. You can make images on the computer like that, but my illustrations are very "handmade." It took as long to paint the digital illustrations for Bright and Early Thursday Evening as it did to make the oil paintings with fifteen layers of glaze for Heckedy Peg.

I hope Bright and Early Thursday Evening is as exciting for you to read as it was for me to paint.

Don and Audrey Wood have combined their talents as illustrator and author on many books for Harcourt, Brace, including King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, a 1986 Caldecott Honor Book; The Napping House, an ALA Notable Book; Heckedy Peg, winner of the Irma Simonton Black Award and the Christopher Award; and Elbert's Bad Word, an IRA-CBC Children's Choice.

Don Wood received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He has been a logger and sailmaker as well as illustrator. After his son taught him how to use the computer, Bruce also taught him how surf.

By Don and Audrey Wood:

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