Family Road Trip Survival Guide

With the holidays just around the corner, lots of families will be loading into vans for loooooong rides to Grandma's house filled with I Spy, missed turn, fast food and the buildup of silent rage. Great Lakes Life Magazine ran a survival guide to help make the venture a little more...jolly. The first image (above) was the main image for the guide, the others are just sidebar illustrations.

Fun fact: the car they're driving is some strange mixture of a Honda Element, a VW Beetle and a PT Cruiser. It seems like the perfect combination of ugly cars.

The next image is a family who isn't having such a good time. I wanted to go very simple with the coloring of the sidebar illustrations. I find with very small illustrations, simple looks better (I also realize this isn't really ground-breaking information).
Another one of the sidebars talked about the greatest family road trip movies. Number one was obviously National Lampoon's Vacation so I did a lil drawing of Chevy Chase. I'm amazed how much more difficult it is to pull off a good likeness of someone when he have pants on his head. For some reason facial features take a backseat to the fact that there are pants up there.

One of the other movies mentioned was The Muppet Movie (yes we know the Muppets aren't technically a family) so I was originally going to have Kermit in the back seat of the car, but thanks to Conan O'Brien, I can no longer draw him without adding vomit. That sort of thing doesn't tend to fly.

The final sidebar deals with taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese's (kids need to eat on the road, right?). I'm amazed how ridiculous I was allowed to go with this one. The only major change was the removal of three hanging children. The image got a little hard to read with so many little fellas coating the mouse.