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VIDEO: North Delta artist’s new project one part picture book, one part play mat

Come Drive With Me is Heidi Boomer’s first book, and a sequel is already in the works

A young mother and art enthusiast is one of North Delta newest authors.

In early January, 31-year-old Heidi Boomer self-published her first book Come Drive With Me. A blend between a picture book and a play mat, the book features drawings of roads that toddlers can drive toys cars and trains along.

Boomer was inspired by watching her three-year-old son Darius play.

“He just drives on everything. He’ll drive on body parts, he’ll drive on walls, on a wrinkle in the carpet, for hours. For ever,” she said, laughing. “But he’s really rough too. He’ll get hyper — like a lot of kids — so I didn’t want [what he drives on] to just be a drawing on paper and have him wreck it right away.”

Looking online for activity books and car mats didn’t yield anything Boomer wanted for her car-crazy toddler: the ones she could find were boring, she said. “It’s like the computer clip art, so it’s just straight lines.”

So she started making her own designs for Darius, and when people who visited her home started taking notice, she decided to create her own book.

“I actually did the whole thing in one week,” she said, then laughed. “I got really inspired.”

Unlike the clip art books she found before, Come Drive With Me is “all crazy,” she said, with winding roads and “stuff that’s not perfect. It’s more kid-looking.”

On each page, kids can drive their toy cars along different scenes: in candy lands and ocean venues, beside monsters and up tree houses. A yellow school bus makes an appearance — an homage to Darius’ love of the Magic School Bus series, as do tunnels, bridges and train tracks.

The book, printed in December, comes on flexible plastic paper that doesn’t tear — an important detail, as when the North Delta Reporter visited Boomer’s home, Darius was kneeling and crawling all over the pages. At the time, there were three copies of Come Drive With Me on the floor, as well as pages from Boomer’s next two books on the table.

Since the book was printed, Boomer has sold about 50 copies at $40 apiece. She mostly sells them through word of mouth, but also has copies in Spektra Reflections of Home, a gift shop by the Delta Lion Pub, and on eBay.

The response has been so great that Boomer is working on a second volume, also named Come Drive With Me, that will match up with her original book. (She’s also working on a mermaid picture book, separate from the driving books.)

“The roads will all interconnect,” she explained, pulling out one of her home copies and setting it beside another Come Drive With Me to demonstrate.

“So if you buy number one, and then you get volume two, everything is meant to be laying beside it so you get a bigger play mat. You can fit the pages and change the landscapes, but all the roads still match up.”

Like the first book, Boomer plans to finish Come Drive With Me, Vol. 2 in a short period of time. But that’s not a problem for Boomer when she gets drawing.

“I’ll get inspired and I’ll do it,” she said.

“I just want to keep making cities,” she continued. “If this was all my house, then I would be covering the walls and the carpets, drawing giant cities that connect. I like designing stuff like that.”



grace.kennedy@northdeltareporter.com

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Heidi Boomer and her son Darius (3) play with multiple copies of Boomer’s book Come Drive With Me . (Grace Kennedy photo)