Take On Life

Hi everyone,

Drew Aquilina earns a living — and a pretty good one, at that — making beautiful parks and gardens come to life with his drawings.

But the landscape architect doesn’t stop there with his inspired pencil.

Aquilina, a 1985 New Milford High graduate, also uses his drawing talent to make “Iggy” the turtle and other pond creatures come to life in “Green pieces,” his award-winning cartoon strip headed to a bookstore near you.

With a launch date set for January 2011, Aquilina is back home this week visiting friends and family, and promoting his book, “Green Pieces: Green From the Pond Up.”

The animated volume boasts more than 350 of Aquilina’s cartoons, many of which date back to the early 1990s, when “Green pieces” was a regular feature in The News-Times.

“I love nature and I love to draw and I love to make people laugh,” Aquilina said Thursday from his hotel room in Farmington. “These were cartoons I wrote back in 1992, 1993, 1994, so it amazes me they’re still kind of relevant and people are enjoying them.”

But for a long time — a very long time — Aquilina’s drawings might as well have been cave drawings.

The original artwork hibernated underneath his bed in Arizona, where Aquilina lives with his wife, Lisa.

“I hadn’t forgotten about them, but in a way I had,” said Aquilina, 43. “Lisa was looking for something under the bed about a couple of years ago and she just pulled them out. She didn’t know what they were at first.

“I had shown her the cartoons when we first met, but these were the original (storyboards). She started looking through them and she told me, ‘You have to make a book out of these.’ So that’s where we are today.”

To read more about Drew Aquilina and his debut book, check out my “Take on Life” column Friday.

Only in the print edition of The News-Times.