The Santa Shield

Project Overview

The Santa Shield tackles one of the season’s most asked questions with imagination and warmth: if Santa is everywhere, which one is real? When siblings Hayes and Elyse start spotting Santas in increasingly unlikely places, their curiosity leads them on a festive investigation — and eventually to the discovery of the Santa Shield, a secret organization dedicated to protecting the magic of Christmas and keeping Santa’s identity safe. Eric Bruton’s story is playful and funny without sacrificing the sense of genuine wonder that makes holiday books resonate year after year.

The illustration challenge was making the concept of “many Santas” visually delightful rather than confusing — each Santa appearance needed its own personality and setting, and the reveal of the Santa Shield needed to feel both surprising and completely satisfying.

Role

Eric came with a concept that’s deceptively tricky to illustrate: multiple versions of the same character appearing across wildly different settings. Each Santa needed to feel distinct and believable in his own environment — the mall, the beach, a birthday party — while still reading as part of the same larger mystery. The comedy had to land visually, not just through the text.

The other challenge was the reveal. The Santa Shield needed a spread that felt both surprising and inevitable — the kind of page that makes a child gasp and then immediately want to flip back to the beginning. That kind of payoff takes as much planning as any of the individual scenes that build toward it.

Character Design

Before a single page is illustrated, I develop the main characters in full — defining their proportions, expressions, and personality. This is the foundation that keeps your characters recognizable and consistent across every scene, every lighting condition, and every emotional moment in the project.

Process

Every project follows this same structured path, so you always know where we are and what comes next. You review and approve at the sketch stage and the line art stage — nothing moves to color until you’re happy. By the time the final spread is rendered, there are no surprises.