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Many Cape Cod artists draw inspiration from their surroundings, but Doug Rugh’s latest endeavor came from a story he told his daughter. The oil painter illustrated and wrote Eddie in My Pocket, a children’s book available in digital form (Safiya Press, 2010). The idea for the book came from a trick he used to get his young daughter to go to sleep. He told her that if she lay down and closed her eyes that there was a tiny shy boy hiding in her room who would climb up to her bed, give her a kiss on the cheek and snuggle in behind her ear to sleep. It wasn’t long after that she was in dream land. Eventually, she wanted to know more about the little boy and the character evolved from there.
“When we came home from somewhere I would say, ‘Did you see Eddie?’ and make up a story about him watching something that had happened, say at the playground,” says Rugh. “It was a way of getting her to notice what was going on around her and rehashing life-lessons of the day in story form.”
Rugh found that he was reworking the text in his childrens’ stories when he read to them every night and wanted to make a book that was actually for them, and not the adult reading it. He made sure that every illustration in Eddie in My Pocket is an action.
Rugh, who owns Osborn and Rugh Gallery in Falmouth with his wife, Hillary, trained at Rhode Island School of Design and worked as a freelance illustrator for clients such as Newsweek, The New York Times, and Microsoft. For the last eleven years, he has been a full-time oil painter. Eddie in My Pocket is available in eBook format from Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Safiya Press. For more information, call Rugh at 508.548.2100.
