Jed Alexander

Does the Convention of the "Elevator Pitch" Truly Serve the Book Industry?

2012-01-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

In the publishing industry there's something called "the elevator pitch." The idea is that you can sell your story in a few compelling sentences, no more than it would take you to recite on an elevator ride. But aren't their books that defy description, that you can't truly do justice to in a pitch, or one page query? Is a book truly unsalable if you can't sum it up in a sentence?

What would be the elevator pitch for a book like the Catcher in the Rye?

This is from the Cliff's Notes summary:

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caufield recounts the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. After a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, Holden leaves school two days early to explore New York before returning home, interacting with teachers, prostitutes, nuns, an old girlfriend, and his sister along the way. J.D. Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye illustrates a teenager's dramatic struggle against death and growing up.

Here's the Amazon description:

"Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger's New Yorker stories - particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme - With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep."

I'm sure someone else more skilled could do a better summary of the book, but these are pretty useless. Aside from the author's reputation, neither make the book sound particularly appealing. I doubt either description would sell the book to a publisher or agent as a young adult novel today.

Where Did Elevator Pitches Come From?

My own theory, is that elevator pitches are a relatively new convention borrowed from the film industry. After films like The Exorcist and Jaws, the blockbuster was born, and films that would have otherwise been allowed months to find an audience, were judged on the basis of ticket sales in the first week. High concept movies that could be easily described in a sentence became the focus. This practice continues to this day. At some point the publishing industry picked up on this practice, and incorporated it into their own marketing practices.

It might be surprising to most people who know that the incredibly popular picture book, Where The Wild Things Are to learn that it wasn't an instant success. Not until it was discovered by kids in libraries did it become popular. I doubt a book like Where The Wild Things Are by an unknown author today would fair well with publishers. To be fair, even then, Sendak had established quite a reputation. The difficulty of selling a a book not easily summed up or categorized is nothing new--the number of rejections that now hugely successful books have gotten is something often touted.

Book publishers have to sell books. There's no getting around it--a high concept book, or a book that features a popular subject has a better shot of making immediate sales. This is what keeps publishers in business. I realize there are passionate editors who work hard to get good books in print, and that sometimes this is an uphill battle. But books do get discovered by readers. Libraries are still an excellent tool for books that didn't immediately find an audience, and those books will eventually sell. Since the book publishing industry has been struggling for many years, fewer editors are responsible for more books, and are unable to do the same job they used to. So editors have increasingly relied on high concepts and stories that can be quickly and compellingly summarized. But are we missing out on these truly great books?

The Role of Publishers In The World of E-Books and Print-On-Demand

Is print-on-demand and e-book self publishing going to be the new way that these kinds of books find an audience? The only problem is, when everyone can publish a book, it becomes even more difficult to find those great books. Publishers do act as a kind of jury process, weeding out amateurish and just plain awful writing to find the good stuff. The role of editor is also still an important one. Many great books are collaborations with insightful and knowledgable editors. Self-publishing cuts out that often very important editorial process. There is a movement of online publishers out there run by editors with experience in the conventional publishing world, but it's still easier for a conventionally published book to get seen than a book by an online publisher. There are a few success stories that involve self-publishing or online publishing, but they're the exception, not the rule.

I do think there's a role for publishers to play in the digital publishing world. It's going to be interesting to see how the role of publishers evolves. The one thing that digital publishing and print-on-demand publishing offers is low risk. When you can publish a book virtually, or print them individually, there's little initial investment. The main cost becomes promotion. Lately promotion has fallen more upon authors, who are often asked to produce their own video trailers and book their own signings, and are no longer supported by publishers in the sameway that they used to be. In a new digital publishing world, promotion may be, once again, the responsibility of publishers, and authors will have more time to do what they do best, write. So with lower initial cost, maybe editors won't have the burden of so many titles, so they can do what they do best: edit. And maybe, just maybe, the importance of the elevator pitch won't be so dominant.

A Wrinkle in Time Revisited

2012-01-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

I posted the original version of this mock cover for an imagined reissue of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, but here's the revised version with suggestions from my agent, Abigail Samoun.

Here's the original version,

An excellent artist in his own right, Monico Chavez, commented on the original post that the wings were a little distracting against the otherwise dull blue background. Abigail also suggested I add a little more light into the background, and add a little more consistent light on the figures. Here's the second version,

I gave the buildings more realistic shadows, and brought more yellow into the background, added some light on the centaur/pegasus, but it still wasn't quite there. Abigail commented that the figures didn't seem substantially rendered, and reminded her of the way a hand colored photograph looks, all in different shades of one color. They weren't quite painted.

OK, this one is finally it! I punched up the saturation, rendered up the kids more, made the planet darker so the kid's faces would pop, added highlights around the wings of the centaur and to around his head, to separate his head from the wings, put some analogous (green) shadows in the centaur, and generally rendered the bejeezus out of it. Abigail was pleased. MUCH MUCH better, she said. She suggested I add type, or hand lettering, to make it look like a book cover. I discovered that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the book, so I decided to pop that on there too. I went for hand lettering, inspired by the lettering on Polish posters.

Abigail felt the hand lettering on the author's name and on the "fiftieth anniversary" were too ornamental. Maybe for a poster, but maybe not so much for a book cover. Also she felt the title should be in the lighter color and the author's name in the darker one. She thought that "50th Anniversary Edition" would make more sense for a book cover. She sent me a number of typefaces, and I decided on this one:

So after another few nips and tucks, this is what I ended up with! So here's my book cover! I hope Ms. L'Engle doesn't think it presumptuous of me if she ever sees this, but if I were to do the cover to a fiftieth anniversary edition of the book, it would probably look something like this. Thanks again to Abigail for pushing me to be a better illustrator!

Yet Another Random Pirate

2012-01-19T11:55:00.001-08:00

Yet Another Pirate

2012-01-17T11:21:00.001-08:00

Another Pirate

2012-01-16T14:25:00.001-08:00

Pirate Drawing

2012-01-15T10:57:00.000-08:00

A pirate I won't end up using for my pirate series.

My Favorite Model

2012-01-14T05:16:00.000-08:00

Usually when I draw figures I draw on a number of sources. I never find exactly the pose I need, but use a number of photos to get what I'm after. But every once in a while, I'll need an adult male, and so I prop up my camera, set the timer and pose. These are for a pirate piece I'm working on.

This first guy has some unpirate-like slacks, but his legs will mostly be cropped out. Those are Maori tattoos on his face, since I was thinking Queequeg from Moby Dick. I like the idea of pirates that pick up crew from allover the world with different ethnicities, but I have no idea what real pirates from this era--I guess the 18th and early 19th century?--were like, outside of Treasure Island, which is what I listened to on audio while I drew these.

What I love about the timer on my camera is that I can pose as unselfconsciously as possible, and be as hammy an actor as I need to be. Of course these photos are pretty awful, and the lighting is pretty bad. Sometimes I spend a little more time working to get better shadows, but all I really needed for these background figures were the poses. I've got plenty of time to take as many photos as I need until I can get just the pose I want. When I translate these poses into pirates, I feel like I lose a little, and gain a little--sometimes I don't quite capture a tilt of the head or a shrug of the shoulders, but in reinterpreting my poses as the characters, I want to change their builds and features and generally make them pirates and not a bunch of people that look like me. It's easy to get into the trap of relying on the photos so much that you're simply trying emulate the photo, and that's when things start to look stiff and inanimate. Well, for me anyway.

A Great Book Will Always Remain a Great Book: Why Your Kid Will Never Outgrow Picture Books

2012-01-09T09:04:00.000-08:00

Your Early Reader Needs Picture Books, Even if You Think They've Outgrown Them

There is an increasing trend to get kids into reading chapter books as early as possible. The publishing industry has responded to this trend by making picture books less sophisticated and with fewer words than they had in the past. I think this is a mistake. Picture books are a pivotal and significant part of a kid's growth and development as a reader. Kids need to be able to read picture books as long as they have a desire to.

I recently came across a post on a blog called the "Homeschool Classroom" that discussed this issue, expressing that their child, at four, had reached a "reading wall." Here's the original post.

And here's a slightly edited version of my response:

Your boy is four years old. Picture books are OK. I repeat: picture books are OK. There are plenty of challenging picture books for even the most advanced reader. Try William Steig. Try William Joyce. Or Chris Van Allsberg. Yes, there are less words per page. But you'd be surprised--the vocabulary is not necessarily less sophisticated. The stories are often challenging and engaging. Compelling an early reader to read books he's not that interested in is not going to make them a better reader in the future. Let him choose his own books, even if they are what you consider to be below his reading level. Picture books are a very important and critical part of a kids early development as a reader. At four he needs picture books.

There are also some very excellent lavishly illustrated storybooks in the slimmer, picture book format. And no matter what the age level, I don't think it helps to make reading a compulsory act. Give him books that he likes and he will seek them out. Read him books that are maybe a little more sophisticated but that engage him--books that he may not be able to read on his own but that he can enjoy, like Doctor Dolittle or Peter Pan. These are nighttime reading. Bedtime stories. And read him his favorites--even if they're below his reading level--over and over again if that's what he wants. That's how you change a reluctant reader into an enthusiastic one!

I Missed My Picture Books

When I was eight years old, I moved from my home in Pennsylvania to California with my mother and brother. And I left behind my picture books. I had a wonderful collection of some of fantastic picture books, Babar, Maurice Sendak, Steig, classic fairytales illustrated by Dulac and some of the great illustrators of the past. At eight, I saw these as "baby books" and my mother asked if it was OK for my grandmother to sell them. I would get to keep the money. She sold the lot for $50, and my mother started a bank account for me. At the time, I thought this was a great idea. It wasn't long before I figured out what I'd done.

We no longer had any books in my house that I wanted to read. We had my older brother's Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom books. I tried to read Ramona the Great which was supposed to be written for my age group, but I found it totally unsatisfying. I had always considered myself an enthusiastic reader, prided myself on my interest in reading, but there was nothing I wanted to read. Then I discovered comic books.

Comic books were picture books that I could buy myself. I could seek them out on my own, and buy them with my own money. At the time, the only thing I checked out from the library were hardbound collections of comics, like The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics and Origins of Marvel Comics and Flash Gordon. My parents thought: at least I was reading, but I think these comics were as sophisticated as any chapter book or young adult book. You see: when I was a kid, I liked fantasy, but there wasn't a Harry Potter. We had Roald Dahl, and later I'd discover Daniel Pinkwater, and John Dennis Fitzgerald's The Great Brain (not fantasy, but no less a great series). I loved a Wrinkle in Time, but didn't read it till much later. But we simply didn't have the wealth of young adult books, of truly engaging young adult books that we have now. Yes, there are too many vampire books, and the fantasy genre dominates, but they are books that kids want to read. And there are so many that are well written, and that have compelling characters, and that go so far beyond the The Hardy Boys and The Babysitter's Club in the sophistication of their content. But there has to be a transition point. Even when a kid's reading level is high enough for them to read a chapter book, or even a young adult book, picture books can still be important.

A Great Book Will Always Remain a Great Book

Maybe I was supposed to be too old for picture books, but I never stopped loving them. And I'm positive that even at eight, or nine, or even older, I would have still read them over and over, even if they were "baby books." These were, and remain important books for me. A great book is a great book, and if it's a truly great book, no matter how few words it has, no matter what age it was intended for, it should continue to be a great book, and kids shouldn't be compelled to abandon them.

A Wrinkle in Time Illustration

2012-01-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

My Wrinkle in Time illustration:

A detail:

One of my favorite books from childhood was Madeleine L'engle's a Wrinkle In Time. There simply weren't any books like it at the time. Since the big fantasy boom in YA fiction, there have been a number of really excellent books in the genre that are as well written as any book for adults, but back then, our choices were limited. If you wanted to read fantasy or science fiction with a reasonable amount of sophistication, you had to read science fiction for adults. Otherwise, all there were were what they used to call "juveniles" written at the middle grade level, like The Wonderful Flight of the Mushroom planet by Eleanor Cameron, a great book, but the kind of book I'd outgrown. In fact, I tried to read A Wrinkle in Time when I was about nine, but it was too sophisticated for me, and didn't rediscover it till later. It quickly my favorite book. I've wondered to do some Wrinkle in Time art for a while now, and as I'm building up my portfolio with more YA pieces, I decided to take on the challenge.

This is Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin riding Mrs. Whatsit, not transformed into a centaur with rainbow-colored wings. They're flying over Camazotz, the city ruled by "It" with small gray identical houses. In the distance I have tall factory-like smokestacks, as Central Central Intelligence lies just across the horizon.

The Centaur image is a common one on many of the covers that have been done for the book, but it's an image that has really stuck in my mind from my first exposure to the book. That cover made a big impression on me, so my image, in a way, is a kind of tribute to that cover.

And here's the version I remember from my childhood, though I'm not sure of the name of the illustrator:

My favorite version of the cover , more recently, was done by Taeeun Yoo:

I struggled a good deal to try to come up with an original take, but I'm afraid I was too attached to that cover from my childhood copy of the book, and was never quite able to move beyond it. Yoo, however approached the material in a very fresh way, and I think, really captured the feel of the book. I'm still happy with my own version, and had a great time doing it, and it's one step further for me in getting a more painterly look in my art.

Curved Landscape

2012-01-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

A curvilinear landscape for a work in progress. This was mostly eyeballed, so it's not 100% accurate, but I'm preferring this more organic approach to perspective.

The Longest Winter For Cricket Magazine!

2011-12-28T15:20:00.000-08:00

This month's Cricket Magazine features a story called "The Longest Winter" by Pamela D. Guaci, with illustrations by me! The story is about two Inuit brothers who go on a seal hunt. In this one the younger brother dreams that he's a seal, struggling to get through to the surface:

This one shows the distance between the two brothers:

They bond through the hunt, imagining their father, who had recently died, smiling over them.

Like the last piece I did for Cricket, these required a lot of reference. The first challenge was to try to draw a harp seal. Unfortunately there weren't many pictures of swimming harp seals on the web. Here was one of the few I was able to find:

But it wasn't quite enough to really get a sense of what they looked like in motion. So I found more reference for a seal that looked similar who lived in a warmer climate, the monk seal.

So I found pictures of monk seals, watched videos on Youtube, added a little blubber, and whoola! I had a harp seal! For my Inuit reference I watched everything from the classic documentary Nanook of the North:

To this pretty horrible Anthony Quinn movie:

But these were Inuits from Greenland, and I was drawing Alaskan Inuits. So I did eventually find more authentic reference for my Inuits, and took a few photos using the timer on my camera for some of the harder poses:

I also had a student of mine do a few poses, but ultimately, I only use photos to get a general sense of the pose. When I draw directly from the photo my drawings tend to look a little stiff, so I try to reinvent the figure in the drawing.

These were the sketches I submitted to Cricket:

The art director, Karen Kahn wanted me to make sure the horizon faded out as it met the sky in the second image, something I could resolve in the color stage, and for the third, she wanted the hole in the ice to be smaller and more of an uneven shape. She also wanted me to show the tool made out of a bone and feather that the boy uses in the story. These changes were easy enough to make, and they were happy with my solutions.

Not long ago, I received an e-mail from the author, curious about how I had handled the story. I sent her the images and was gratified to hear that she was very pleased with them. So hopefully I got most of the details right! And here's the magazine, with a great cover by Heidi Younger:

Centaur Inks

2011-12-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

So here's the centaur I posted earlier, now inked:

The last time I posted it I called it a pegasus, which wasn't entirely a mistake--he's to have wings, so he's sort of a pegasus/centaur. This is for my Wrinkle in Time illustration to beef up my YA portfolio. This particular drawing was inked in 3 parts, and there will be three figures on his back, and wings of course, so the whole drawing is done on a number of different pieces of paper.

Yet More Monsters

2011-12-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

More monsters to give you the creeps...

More Mini Monster Drawings

2011-12-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

More drawings for 50 Monsters to Give you the Creeps. This million-eyed beast has an excruciatingly piercing (and annoying) whistle:

And here's a Flibbertigibbet Flibbertigibbetting:

A 20 Minute Pose

2011-12-15T06:38:00.000-08:00

Here is a 20 minute pose from yesterday's figure session:

Remembering to Draw

Once again, I choked on the long pose, so you won't be seeing that one. Last night, someone looked at the drawing I was doing at the end of the session, and said simply, "It looks like you're trying too hard." I wasn't sure about how I felt about this statement, until he elaborated, "it looks like you're trying to get it too perfect. You just need to not think about it so much, and draw." And he was right. I always get fussy on that long pose. I have more luck with the 20 minute poses, but it's that long pose where I always forget to draw, to turn off that fussy, over analytical part of my brain and to involve myself fully in the act of drawing.

Drawing requires a little bit of both--you still have to pay attention to proportion and measurement, but then there's a part of you that has to fool itself into thinking that what you're drawing isn't a flat image but something three dimensional, and this is not the most logical way to think. You can approach it methodically, but there's a part of your brain, the non-rational part, that has to interpret what you're seeing and translate it into marks on paper, and there are a million ways to do this. You're always interpreting, deciding to emphasize some things and deemphasize others, to exaggerate some things and simplify others. I never stop learning about drawing, but sometimes I forget the most basic aspect of the process--to get out of your own way and to allow it to occur. It's good to have people around you,who, however bluntly, are willing to remind you of this. It's valuable to cultivate your own community of artists, whether in person or online, and to have at least a few people who are willing to tell you what often isn't easy to hear. But then it gets easier and easier to take that feedback as you gain confidence in your ability--knowing you can do something well gives you a foundation to be able to be told that you can also do it better.

More Mini Monster Drawings

2011-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

More from 50 Monsters to Give you The Creeps, the side project I've been doing during breaks while my current fully rendered piece is driving me crazy.

More Monsters...

2011-12-13T05:46:00.000-08:00

More monsters for my monster book.

This would be a Dwarfis Creepus Insomnilopus:

And a Backwards Forwalpus:

50 Monsters in Progress

2011-12-12T05:51:00.000-08:00

Some recent drawings for a picture book dummy about monsters, 50 Monsters to Give you the Creeps. This one has been in progress for a long time, so I'm just chipping away at it while i work on other projects.

This is a comparative anatomy drawing between the common housecat, and Australapithacat.

Some monsters get scared, too...

If you scroll waaay back in the blog you'll find the original drawings for these guys. Each monster will have a profile that will include a description, a full page picture of the monster, and a smaller drawing with the monster in action, or that describes something about the monster.

But anyway, this is what I've been doing in the evenings. During the week I stick to my main priority, this bear of an image for my portfolio based on A Wrinkle in Time that's kicking me in the ass. It's always the figures! I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with my ability to draw people! But I keep working at it. There's another figure drawing session this week...

A Couple of Random Sketches

2011-12-10T12:32:00.001-08:00

These are, as advertised, just a couple of random sketches. They turned up somewhere, in a pile of stuff, and I have no recollection of drawing them. I think I must have drawn the first one while watching Disney's Sleeping Beauty since it has that look.

It's been an exhausting week for a variety of reasons I won't go into. Nothing seemed to work out this week. I've been busy with a relatively complicated piece, which is just starting to come together, so that's something. It's been taking me ages to get this one together, but it should be resolved soon. Otherwise, I got my Christmas cards ready for the printer just in time, though I couldn't afford personal cards this year, unfortunately. These are going to publishers only. Dark blue is one of the most horrible colors to print digitally, so I've had to look at proofs, and adjust, and adjust some more to get the thing to resemble the colors I intended. I think I got them pretty close. We'll see when they come in the mail on the 19th.

50 Monsters

I'm finishing up a dummy that I've been doing on the side, a compendium of silly monsters. You may have seen me post the drawings about a year ago now I think. So I've got 50, with descriptions, but I want individual illustrations for each one to demonstrate what they do. I've got about 20 of those done. I get these incidental drawings done, usually in the evenings, while we're watching TV. Reg and I are currently into The Fringe. It's typical trashy J. J. Abrams with all his usual red Mcguffins and red herrings, but it's still pretty fun.

Books in Progress

After some feedback from first readers, I'm getting ready to do a second draft of my second YA novel for teens. The first is completed and sent to my agent. I've finished the first draft for a chapter book, and I've been writing the first draft for a middle reader book--something to do while I've been sitting on the YA novel until I've had enough distance from it to dive in again. After I've been sitting on it long enough, rewriting seems more like an opportunity than a burden, as I rediscover the book all over again.

Christmas Card: New Version.

2011-12-03T05:35:00.001-08:00

Here's a revised version of my Christmas card. I'm usually afraid to go this dark (especially when I've put in all that detail!) but i think it really adds to the image, and gives it a lot more depth and richness. I'm pretty proud of this one.

Red Fox Racer, Early Memories of Saturday Morning Cartoons

2011-12-02T08:05:00.001-08:00

Abigail Samoun asked all the artists she represents to do a small drawing of a fox for the holiday calendar. I haven't seen any of the other foxes yet, but all the artists at Red Fox are extremely talented, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the calendar turns out. For my own fox, I decided to draw a fox in a foxy race car. The race car looks a little stern, but I'm thinking of it as more determined than angry.

The Laugh Olympics and other Horrible Cartoons

When I drew this, a part of me was thinking about one of my favorite cartoons as a kid, The Laugh Olympics. All of the Hanna Barbera cartoon characters would compete in a variety of olympic competitions, and there was always a race where each character would have some personalized wacky car to drive. I always liked the unlikely combinations of characters, like Snidely Whiplash with Batman, or Grape Ape with Mutley. I think Snaggle Tooth and Sour Puss were the announcers. I can't remember. Anyway, I'm sure the cartoon would be completely unwatchable now.

Most of those late 70s Hanna Barbera cartoons are pretty awful, though I think most adults my age who grew up with them have a lot of nostalgia for them. Hanna Barbera pretty much owned the airwaves back then. That was when Saturday mornings were always a big deal. My brother and I would sometimes get up so early we'd stare at the test pattern, waiting for the cartoons to start. Back then, the network TV stations crapped out sometime in the very early morning, and if you got up early enough there would be a color bar test pattern, followed by the National Anthem with an image of a flag whipping in the wind. That was back when some TV stations would air an image of a burning log in a fireplace on Christmas, or Christmas eve. TV was generally pretty awful and pretty weird back then. But even though the cartoons by and large, were pretty awful (aside from a few rare exceptions, like The Bugs Bunny Road Runner show), Saturday mornings-- before there was a Cartoon Network, when cable offerings were pretty meager--was something to look forward too.

Back then, everyone watched the same TV shows. When you went to school, everybody had seen Scooby Doo that weekend. During the week we'd watch Happy Days or All in the Family. I remember when everyone in my second grade class was talking about the Fonz jumping the shark, back when "jumping the shark" only meant that the Fonz was about to jump over a shark. I always seemed to miss stuff like this. Like when The Six Million Dollar Man fought the Yeti, or when The Battlestar Galactica ship actually made it to earth. TV really sucked unbelievably then. There was no Mad Men or Deadwood. But we all watched the same shows religiously.

I think the quality of TV cartoons is also lot better now, and Nostalgia is pretty much all those old cartoons amount to, for me. I can't bare to watch stuff like Scooby Doo or the Flintstones, though I know they still have their appeal to a lot of people. I still like stuff like Jonny Quest and Bullwinkle, but I don't think I'll ever want to watch Turbo Teen, or Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels ever again for any other reason than childhood nostalgia.

New Christmas Card

2011-12-01T08:32:00.001-08:00

Here's the front and inside, respectively, of my new Christmas card. This one actually came out a lot how I imagined it might. I'm falling more and more in love with drawing architecture--my role models for architecture are Windsor McCay and Nicolas DeCrecy--I love those rich, detailed environments! I also love the way they invent their own architecture, and how it always, no matter how elaborate, seems to flow and make sense. My buildings here aren't quite that inventive, but they do the job.

I've been enjoying doing these night scenes lately, and using super contrasty light sources. Again, I had a great time with the perspective, no CGI primitives, just a ruler and a pencil. I tightened up the background under the light box and scanned it directly from the pencils, no inking, and changed the contrast to make the lines dark. This is the second time I've tried this, and I'm really satisfied with the technique, at least for stuff like architecture where line weight variety isn't as much of an issue. The sled is also done this way. For figures and animals I'm sticking with ink, but for backgrounds, this really saves a lot of time, and I can use that time to put more detail in and simply focus on the drawing.

Now if I can get the thing printed in time, I'm in business!

A Brief Thought About Character and Setting

2011-11-30T10:58:00.001-08:00

We were discussing on Google+ recently about how much setting serves to establish character in a story, or just how important setting is.

Setting in a lot of ways has to do with how your characters react to things, rather than the things themselves, which isn't to say that character alone determines setting, so much as voice determines setting. And voice doesn't have to be the literal voice of the protagonist or omniscient narrator , but an overall feeling of coherency. Character and setting flow naturally together in a consistent way when the voice is consistent.

Sometimes you change narrators in a story to tell the story from a different perspective, but if you also change your underlying voice, you change the readers perception of both setting and character. It's a change in tone. it's Huckleberry Finn vs. Tom Sawyer. You're taking the reader out of one world, and putting them into another. But if there's an underlying voice throughout the narrative, a consistent vocabulary and tone, you can change point of view without breaking the illusion of a consistent environment, an objective world that exists and continues to exist outside of the individual character's perceptions.

Edit: of course both approaches can be equally useful, but the question you want to ask yourself is: is it purposeful? Is changing voice going to add something meaningful to the story?

Kid Drawing for Work in Progress

2011-11-29T15:17:00.001-08:00

THis is a kid drawing for a Christmas card. I'll probably post the full image in the next day or two. I'm pretty happy with it so far.

The Art of Dmitry Sandzhiev

2011-11-26T06:21:00.001-08:00

I know next to nothing about Dmitry Sandzhiev, but someone posted his work on Google+ and I was able to find some excellent examples of it online. This is the image that first caught my eye:

I'll let the rest speak for themselves:

More Wednesday Figure Drawings

2011-11-24T09:37:00.001-08:00

We had a great model last night, a retired physics and music professor who did some really fun short poses. The first two are longer poses, the the last one is one of his dramatic poses.

A 20 minute pose:

A long pose:

A 5 minute pose:

Winter City, Work in Progress

2011-11-21T11:05:00.001-08:00

This is the background for this years Christmas card. I went with a looser approach to the perspective--when the perspective isn't quite so dead on, there's a much more organic feel. This is how I'd like to approach perspective in the future. I think it has a lot more character this way.

Girl and Lantern Finish, Harvest Moon changes

2011-11-18T09:15:00.001-08:00

Here's a new image, another image for the portfolio. I wanted to do another night scene, and I was inspired by an image by George Tooker of people holding lanterns. I'm particularly happy with the texture of satin on the woman's dress.

I still might do more to this one. I used a little more wash and dry brush in the earlier stages of the image as I have with other recent pieces, allowing me to generate an overall more painted look.

Here's a revised version of my "Harvest Moon" image based on suggestions from my new rep, Abigail Samoun of Red Fox Literary (you can see the original version, here).

Abigail suggested that I get rid of the fireflies, since they were a little ambiguous. It wasn't clear exactly what they were, which is something I had already suspected. She also suggested I darken the background and add a glow around the scene, and put a little more color and modeling on the faces. And lastly, she suggested that I add highlights to the fur to make it look softer and more like fur, to contrast with the kids.

Cherry Blossom Silhouettes

2011-11-16T07:54:00.001-08:00

Here are some silhouettes I did for a background for a new image. The trick with silhouettes is to treat them just as you would any other drawing--a generalized or abbreviated silhouette will be noticeably unconvincing. The trick with trees in particular is to avoid repetitive patterns. Even though the bows and limbs of certain varieties of trees have a unique growth pattern, each branch and leaf is unique. The more cookie cutter you draw them, the less real they'll seem, so it's important, even when drawing trees from your imagination, to be conscious of keeping the leaves and limbs diverse.

Girl with Lantern

2011-11-15T15:29:00.001-08:00

Here's an inked image for an illustration in progress. I should have the completed image done by the end of the week!

Cherry Blossoms

2011-11-14T05:56:00.001-08:00

For a current project.

Woman in a Japanese Kimono

2011-11-08T10:08:00.000-08:00

My posts have been a little more infrequent--I've been so busy making pictures I haven't had a chance to post them. Here's part of a work in progress, a woman in a Kimono.

Also I should say that the earlier post, admittedly, isn't really a pegasus, it's a centaur, but eventually it will have wings, so it will be a little bit of both.

Pegasus

2011-10-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is a Pegasus that's meant to eventually have wings, which is why its posture is a little weird. I'm working on a sort of mock cover for A Wrinkle in Time in order to do more young adult material.

Wednesday Figure Drawing

2011-10-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a figure from the figure drawing session last night. This was a twenty minute pose. Once again I choked on the longer pose. I just murdered it, but I'm relatively happy with this one. It was a pretty good night for me.

I'm Now Being Represented by Red Fox Literary!

2011-10-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've been hinting at some good news for a while now, but didn't want to announce it until all the paperwork had been signed, and I just received the signed forms today! So as of now, my writing and illustration will be represented by Abigail Samoun at Red Fox Literary.

I was also honored to discover that Red Fox recently took on one of my favorite all-time illustrators, Henrik Drescher! I've been a fan of Drescher since my teens, with books like Pat the Beasty and The Boy Who Ate Around. I'm looking forward to working with Abigail and Red Fox Literary and making lots and lots of books!

New Picture, "Harvest Moon", What's my daily routine?

2011-10-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Harvest Moon

I did this illustration in order to include more kids in my images, but at the time I made it, it hadn't occurred to me that it was a Halloween image, so it's Halloweenness is a complete accident. In fact it didn't occurred to me until I completed it. My original plan was simply to do a birthday party, but I like to draw animals so I added the animal costumes. ThenI wanted to add some dramatic lighting, so I thought it would be nice to have it at night in the forest. Then, in the end, I decided to add a big bright harvest moon, which also helped to balance the image, bringing the eye around from the focal point.

And here's a detail:

I like the feel of this one, and now the fact that it's an unconventional Halloween image. I like that it has a little element of mystery, why these kids are out alone in the woods with no adults. It reminds me a little of Peter Pan's lost boys, and of Max, from Where the Wild Things Are in his wolf suit.

Where Have I Been?

I haven't posted in quite a while, in part because I didn't want to show this one in progress. The images never quite looked right on their own--it's largely a bunch of drawings of kids sitting in space, since the background was done separately. I was also a little unsure of this one until it started to come together.

The other reason I haven't been around is because I've been putting together some of my writing projects for submission. More on that later. No definitive interest by publishers yet, but there's some other news I'll be sharing soon that's almost just as good.

My Daily Routine: The Long Answer to the Question, "How Long Do you Spend Every Day Working?"

When I've gone to workshops and artist speaking engagements, someone is always bound to ask, "how long do you spend every day working?" When I used to hear their answer, I generally felt woefully inadequate comparing my own productivity to theirs. I think discipline is something you build up over time, and everyone has their own way of doing this. It took me years to develop the discipline I have now. For me, routine is critical, but time spent working and time spent wisely are two different things.

Using the Pomodoro technique I've mentioned in earlier posts, I've gotten a better sense of what a real work day should be, but the Pomodoro technique is new to me, so the work day I describe here is something I've only developed recently. I try to work about 12 to 16 Pomodoros (as described in earlier posts), or 25 minute periods every day, while spending the morning writing. I don't time my writing period since it tends to vary, though I try to write 200 words at the very minimum, though usually I write more On bad days I write less, but these are rare. This takes about two hours. While taking breaks during my art making time maximizes my productivity, taking breaks slows down my momentum when I'm writing, so for me, it's better to spend a shorter but focused and uninterrupted period writing than drawing. During my Pomodoro breaks I like to go on Google+ or Facebook, but these breaks go fast! (But that's kind of the idea) I tend to work on the weekend as well, but less, because of household chores and other responsibilities, though sometimes on weekends I'll have a longer writing session. And working doesn't always involve drawing. Sometimes its about collecting reference and doing research. Sometimes it's inking, or coloring. Sometimes I'll spend the whole day spinning my wheels trying just about everything and failing miserably to get anything to work.

So my day begins at 5:30. I usually screw around for an hour, then walk our dog, Cinder. When I get back from my walk, I eat breakfast. Writing usually follows, unless I'm doing something like a blog post, but that, I guess, also counts as writing. Drawing begins at 9:00 to 9:30, and ends anywhere from 5:00 to 6:00, or 6:30. I usually take an hour lunch around noon, sometimes longer if I have errands.

Wednesdays I teach a student for an hour, and every other wednesday I have a figure drawing session in the evening that I administrate, which is usually a four hour time investment or more. Hiring models and other general upkeep of the group is also time consuming, so I don't tend to draw much on these days, but I do tend to write.

The Virtues of Goofing Off

Of course all of this is subject to having a life. This doesn't always represent a typical day. The math adds up just a little too perfectly, and most days aren't perfect. There are always other responsibilities and distractions that come up, or sometimes I just take the day off. Or I'll take a trip. Or I'll go to the comic book shop. Or I'll decide I just want to watch a movie instead. I like to spend time with my wife. I love having the evenings free. This said, I don't tend to get out much. social networking sites are great, but they're also a great time waster, but the Pomodoro Technique has really helped my limit my internet time.

I think the consequence of being a full-time artist is spending a lot of time alone, and having your world become just a little smaller than it could be. If you want art to be a true discipline, this is the way it has to be. You have to make it an integral part of your life, but it's also important to have a life. My studio is a tiny room in our house with a single window that looks out onto the backyard. I like my work, so its not exactly a hardship, but sometimes you need to get out of your cave and get a little sunshine, or goof off, or otherwise do what you need to do to enjoy the life you have. And exercise! Get some exercise! Many Illustrators tend to get pudgier as they get older, so to avoid falling into this trend, I try to ride my bike whenever I can. For me, this isn't too hard a habit to maintain--it's more of a necessity, since I don't drive. but it's always good to have some kind of outlet for exercise. I intend to to have a long life and career. So eat right, exercise, develop your discipline, and enjoy your life and work! That's the best advice I could give anyone who wants to become an illustrator.

Edit: I originally wrote "6 to 8 Pomodoros" when I meant to say, 12 to 18 Pomodoros. I tend to add each two in my head as an hour, so I was thinking hours instead of 25 minute periods. Oops!

More About Being an Illustrator in an Increasingly Digital World

2011-10-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

This is an elaboration on some comments I made on a discussion started by Leif Peng on Google+.

The most successful illustrators of the turn of the century--and I guess I should specify the 20th century at this point--were magazine illustrators. There was a golden age of print media at the turn of the century with the rise of the automated four-color press. There was a high demand for color pictures, and since there was no color photography, illustration was the only way to go. Periodicals were a cheap, current form of entertainment, and even during the depression, everyone still read newspapers and magazines. This golden age began to decline some time in the fifties, with the rise of TV and color photography, and now, finally, we're seeing the internet overtake most periodical print media, like magazines and newspapers.

So what are illustrators supposed to do now? Now we're told: make digital media. Learn to animate. Learn to storyboard. Learn to provide content for video games and movies. New media will replace old media. But I think this is approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

First, I don't think traditional illustration is going to disappear entirely. Though digital media may largely replace old media, I don't think it's going to entirely replace the inanimate illustrated book or story. You may replace the mode of presentation and distribution--it may be on an Ipad or Kindle, but the form itself will endure. An animated or interactive Cat In the Hat isn't going to be able to replace the simple experience of reading the book. It's still a unique experience that people value. Otherwise it would have happened already--Chuck Jones did a great animated version of The Cat in the Hat in the 70s (available on DVD and Blue Ray!), there's that awful Mike Meyers movie, there are video games, interactive toys, but kids keep wanting to read the dead tree version for some reason.

But still, digital media continues to grow as a popular form. You can't stick your head in the sand. So I do think Illustrators can benefit from being involved in more aspects of media production, but it's not the form of media that you work in that's going to make you a success. Illustrators need to be storytellers first, rather than simply picture makers. That doesn't mean they have to learn to animate, so much as learn to tell stories structurally and visually in a complete way. Rather than ornament someone else's story, they need to learn to tell their own. The more complete their unique vision is, the more invaluable they become. Artists who have spread themselves over the greatest variety of media have done so because their vision and ability to tell stories is what's compelling, not their aptitude for working in different media. Flexibility is important, but have a vision, first.

Illustration by Boris Arzybasheff

Dump Truck End Papers!

2011-09-30T05:28:00.000-07:00

I'm working on what's called a book dummy, a rough mock-up of a book for a book proposal, for a picture book about dump trucks. I've been doing a lot of studies of dump trucks lately to prepare, and decided to take a bunch of those studies and make end papers with them. These are just pencils, and the real end papers would be inked and colored. Originally I thought to use only one of these, but then I thought it would be cool if I used one in the front of the book and the other in the back.

Wednesday Figure Drawing, More about Time Management

2011-09-29T04:47:00.000-07:00

Here's another drawing from a Wednesday session, this time a long pose. I usually choke on the longer poses, but this time spent a little more time on the structure. We had some great artists last night, including the model herself. Brooke is not only a great model but an amazing painter, and I keep trying to get her to draw with us! The quality of the work all around at the figure sessions is really improving, and It's great to be in such good company.

The pose was pretty straight forward, so it was a little easier, but I simplified the tone quite a bit, instead of going for more of of a detailed more line oriented render.

Developing Time Management Skills for a freelancer and Work-at-Home Artist

It was a long working day, having effectively started some time at around 7:00, ending at 9:30 at night (with breaks of course!) There's work time, and then there's work time effectively spent, and with the Pomodoro technique I'm learning the difference. 6 hours of 25 minute sessions with 5 minute breaks in between beats 8 hours of diminishing returns.

Fortunately the figure sessions, with 20 minute sessions and five minute breaks, falls right in line with my everyday working method. It's made me rethink: what is a an 8 hour work day? What's a 10 hour work day? How can it best be spent? As a freelancer and work-at-home artist, when I'm working on self-motivated projects there often aren't set, external deadlines, so I'm forced to structure my day in a meaningful way. It's easy to get distracted. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you've put in more time than you have.

To make the most of your work day, you need to have a way to account for your time, especially when those distractions can be such compelling ones, like the internet. Many of us don't have that incredible focus that allows us to work hours on end--I do for certain tasks, but not for all of them, particularly drawing, since I find it most demanding. I envy people who have that kind of relentless endurance, but I'm not one of them. You don't have to be one of them either. Everyone has their own working method and pace, but it all comes down to how you manage your time. Not having that endurance doesn't make you a lesser artist, but if you don't, you need to discover what will help you to stay on task.

So I need tools to keep me motivated. Audio books are incredibly helpful, especially fun ones. Right now I'm listening to a lot of Sarah Dessen, my current favorite young adult author. If a book requires too much of my attention, it only makes it harder to keep focused, but when it's an enjoyable and easily engaging book, it gives me one more reason to look forward to working. Since I only listen to audio books while working, this can be a big motivator.

The other ritual I have is putting on my shoes. This may seem odd, but putting on my shoes is a cue for me that I'm officially working. Working at home, I don't have to put on my shoes. I could work in my boxer shorts if I wanted to. But maybe it's like the way Mister Rogers takes off his dress shoes and puts on his sneakers at the beginning of every show--the shoes somehow affect my attitude. Don't ask me why. Whatever ritual you have that does this for you--a cup of coffee, a shower, seize on it. Work is ritual, and in working at home, you need to separate what you do with the rest of your time, and work. When work time easily flows into every other task at home, it's easier to be just kind of working sometimes, or preoccupied with the idea that you should be working. I haven't fully masters this skill, but the Pomodoro technique has helped. So what's your cue to start working? Starting can sometimes be the hardest part.

Which brings me back to the Pomodoro technique mentioned earlier. If you need to at first, or if other responsibilities require it, maybe 10 minutes of sustained activity and then a five minute break will work better for you. Not all of us have the luxury of a full, uninterrupted work day. So if your time is divided, how can you maximize the time you do have? How can you make it more focused? How can you give yourself a cue that now is work mode, and that all other distractions have to fall to the wayside? Take your work time seriously.

But even if it's drawing in front of the TV, there's value in having small goals, for example: I'm going to finish this drawing at the end of this TV show. If all you have are small snatches of time, take advantage of them, which again, means, take them seriously. Making small goals and achieving them helps to give you the small satisfactions required to go to the next step.

But I Didn't Have Enough Time!

It's bad enough to give this as an excuse as a student, but never give this as an excuse as a professional, even if it's simply a workshop. If you need a deadline extension, ask for it, but never excuse the quality of your work because you "didn't have enough time." Of course, sometimes you won't have as much time as you would like, in which case, your fundamental craft comes into play, your ability to give something polish, to pay attention to every part of the image. You may not have time to give the piece the level of rigor that you would like, but you do have a fundamental responsibility as a professional to make sure it's polished. The words, "I didn't have enough time" simply indicate to an editor or art director that you aren't ready. Every piece should have this fundamental polish, which is why it's so important to maximize the time you have. So give yourself the tools you need, whatever they might be! Time management is as important a part of your craft as any other skill.

More Dump Trucks

2011-09-28T04:40:00.000-07:00

More truck studies. I used to hate drawing cars. Now I'm kind of digging it.

Overcoming Fear of Perspective

2011-09-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

Since I was in school, I was afraid of perspective. I said it. Perspective freaked me out. I could never seem to get it right.

In more recent years, for more complicated perspective scenes, I've been using 3D models from the program Google Sketchup. I felt a little guilty about this. It seemed like a crutch. A few times I've shared the 3D models I used on my blog, to demonstrate the difference between the models and the final product, as if to say, See? The models are just a tool. And it's true. They were. But it still didn't feel right. This was despite the fact that my knowledge of perspective is pretty solid. But using 3D models was less because of lack of knowledge than fear of getting it wrong. I hated perspective. I couldn't wrap my head around it.

One of my principal problems was that when I did perspective, I got so hung up on grids and vanishing points, I forgot to draw. This used to happen when I used photo reference for figures--I would get so hung up on duplicating the image in the photo, that I wasn't paying attention to what the photo was communicating. I wasn't paying attention to the forms, or using what I knew about the figure to reinvent the figures on the page. Before, when using perspective, I wouldn't spend enough time on the structure. I wouldn't gesture out the structure as I would a figure, but would instead right away get too worried about these technical issues. And this was how I started to use the 3D models--I would come up with my primitives and grids first, then move the 3d camera around until I got the composition I wanted. I was getting the result I wanted, but going about it all backwards.

There are some great books on perspective. One of my favorites is David Chelsea's Perspective for Comic Book Artists. It's one of the best books I know about the subject, and you don't need to be a comic book artist to learn from it. Books like these will teach you the fundamentals about perspective. They'll teach you the rules. Unfortunately they won't teach you how to draw.

Not too long ago I did something that I thought was impossible for me: curvilinear perspective. This is when you have a sort of fish-eye effect. I put together a basic curvilinear grid, which I mostly eyeballed. If you're curious what piece this was, it's the Christmas image in my portfolio. Once again I did a grid first, then started putting in the buildings. Since the whole point was to draw a neighborhood, a grid, it didn't really matter as much. But I was still missing the point.

More recently I started to simply rough in the kind of perspective I want, eyeballing buildings and other structures with what I already essentially know. Then I pop that rough idea, with all my compositional elements, under the lightbox, and then I start worrying about vanishing points and grids. But then sometimes I don't worry about this stuff at all. I just draw. If you draw enough, a lot of this will come intuitively. The illustrator Robert Fawcett claimed to have never learned perspective and that he completely did it by eye, but his perspective looked flawless. I doubt I'll ever abandon my grids and vanishing points completely, but then sometimes, they're not as necessary as I think.

The trucks in the previous post were done freehand, perspective by eye, no vanishing points, no grids. It's something I would have never thought I would be able to do not too long ago. Is the perspective perfect? I highly doubt it. But using CGI as an underpinning for my perspective sometimes has made the perspective just a little too dead-on. It looks too perfect, and not quite organic. So for the foreseeable future, I don't think I'll be using CGI for my perspective solutions. After all these years, I've finally overcome my fear of perspective.

Dump Truck

2011-09-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

Dump Truck "turn" for a project I'm working on. I just got this great dump truck toy from E-bay, but this one was done from regular photo reference since I haven't gotten my toy yet. My favorite trucks are Tibor Gergely's, who did a lot of Little Golden Books. Everybody loves a dump truck.

Le Renard Rouge

2011-09-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

A small original painting ( about 4" x 8") done in ink and watercolor on a postcard sent as a "thank you" to a much admired agent littéraire.

Debonair Fox Drawing.

2011-09-17T01:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an anthropomorphic Fox, a sketch for some original art I did to make a correspondence a little extra fancy. I'll post the finish after they receive it.

Some Sketches, Increasing Productivity with the Pomodoro Technique

2011-09-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here are a few sketches of some very animated furniture for a picture book project I'm working on.

Every two weeks I run a figure drawing session at the Pence Gallery. I was finding that my focus and productivity was really strong during these sessions, andI wondered why I didn't have quite the same focus at home. Then I realized: it was the timer. 20 minute drawing sessions are broken up by 5 minute breaks. This made me recall a similar technique that my wife had told me about called The Pomodoro Technique, a technique that many professionals use to increase their productivity.

The Pomodoro Technique

Illustrator's and freelancers often struggle with time management. It's particularly difficult to manage your time when you have an inconsistent workflow. I recently started using a time management technique called the "Pomodoro Technique." It's very simple:Set a timer for 25 minutes. After the timer goes off, set the time again for a five minute break. Then set the timer again for another 25 minutes, then another five minute break. Each 25 minute interval is one Pomodoro. After four Pomodoros you give yourself a longer break, Maybe fifteen minutes, or break for lunch. Then start again.

I'm finding this helps me in a number of key ways: for one, it cuts back on my internet use significantly. I like to use the internet. In fact I LOVE to use the internet. But I often waste a lot of time just checking in with Facebook, or Google+, or checking my e-mail. Or someone posts something on one of the social networking sites and I spend entirely too long chasing links. Well that's something better left to one of my long breaks. And the checking in stuff I can do during my short breaks. But I'm also finding that I want to do all this obsessive checking-in less when I know I have only a short time to do it. Often I'd rather spend the time eating a snack, or getting my studio for a change of scene.

These 25 minute intervals are deceptively short, but it's a good kind of deceptive. It's the perfect way to fool myself into keeping focused, knowing that there's a break right around the corner. I find this makes me a lot more productive than when I do long marathons of uninterrupted work, at least, as far as drawing is concerned. Drawing is the one activity where I really have to push myself to keep going. Writing, I can do for hours. Inking, coloring, I have no problem sustaining. But keeping up my drawing stamina can often be difficult. This technique has proven to be a great solution.

Wednesday Figures

2011-09-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

Last night's figures. These were both 20 minute poses.

Inuit man, inks

2011-09-13T06:46:00.001-07:00

Here's the inks for the Inuit man I did for the Cricket piece. The hairline looks a little weird--I didn't bother to resolve it since most of it would be cropped out above the eyes.

Cricket Teaser

2011-09-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a small fragment of one of the recent pieces I did for Cricket magazine. I can't show the whole thing, I'm afraid,until it sees print, but I'll post the full version and talk more about it then. They seemed really pleased with the work and I'm anxious to collaborate with them in the future!

"The Gingerbread Boy" for SCBWI's Illustrator's Day, art directed by Joann Hill from Disney/Hyperion

2011-09-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

An optional assignment for The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators fifth annual Illustrator's Day at Fort Mason in San Francisco ( I know that's a mouthful. SCBWI Illustrator's Day for short) was to do two pages and a spread for the book, "The Gingerbread Boy." Joann Hill from Disney/Hyperion would art direct the pieces by e-mail, and we would show the finished pieces at the event. It was a fun project and it was great to work with Joann, who, like any good art director, made some great suggestions to improve my images. I've posted the initial sketches I submitted to Joann, and the finished pieces so that you can see the differences.

Thinking of desserts, I thought of the painter Wayne Thiebaud,

Though Thiebaud was an inspiration. I didn't want to emulate Thiebaud, but used him as more of springboard than anything else. Joann, like me, was a fan of Thiebaud and really liked the idea.

The first piece illustrate's the text,

“I’ve run away from a little old woman and a little old man.
I can run away from you, I Can.”

I decided to make the cow a chef from a roadside diner. The roadside diner comes a little later.

This series of images is designed to be wordless. Here I"m expanding on the idea of "as fast as his legs could carry him", a phrase used earlier in the text. Rather than a strict literal interpretation of the idea, I chose to have the gingerbread boy take one of his legs and turn it into a car so he could get to where he needed to go a lot faster than, strictly speaking, on foot.

This one illustrates the text,

"And the cow ran after the gingerbread boy..."

and on the facing page of the spread:

"...but couldn’t catch him."

So here's the roadside diner on a Thiebaudesque landscape.

Joann gave me some really positive feedback on my sketches, but suggested a few key changes. She thought the cow looked a little bit surly, and that he wasn't quite looking at the Gingerbread Boy. She wanted the cow to have more of an expression of "delight." So I changed the cow's expression, and getting the cows eye line to match up with the Gingerbread Boy was simply a matter of giving him a little tilt.

I used a number of textures here: the hill is a pattern made with a fan brush, oil paint and mineral spirits. Much of the color is pastel, and the cloud and outline for the hill is simply done in pencil on print making paper, which I popped over the textures.All the line is in ink, and the color is placed in later digitally.

For the second illustration, Joann liked the idea of the car, but didn't care for the fact that the gingerbread boy was amputating his own leg, which is easy enough to understand. I suggested that he take the dough from his leg without it diminishing him, similar to something you might see in claymation. She liked this idea, but wanted me to vary the Gingerbread Boy's expression more as he's struggling to make the car. I added eyebrows to give his simple dot eyes a little more range of emotion, and I think the expressions added a great deal to the narrative.

And here's the spread.

Joann also had me change the expression of the gingerbread Boy in the spread, again adding to his character and emotional range. At first she was ambivalent about the diner. Diner's reminded her of hamburgers, and she was questioning the logic of the cow working at a diner. Eventually she decided that she had over thought this, and that she liked the diner as an image. She suggested that the cow carry a rolling pin, which contributed more to the idea that he was a baker, rather than a grill cook. It was great to see that Joann didn't stick with her first impression and was able to change her mind. This emphasizes to me the collaborative nature of illustration, that there's always a little give and take. A good art director can be flexible, and flexibility on both ends is what ultimately makes a better finished piece. It was great to collaborate with Joann, and I hope that I'll be able to someday work with her as a professional!

I'd also like to give a special thanks to Lea Lyon, who organized the event, and is a talented illustrator in her own right. This is the fifth year that Lea has put this together, and there were some excellent guests. Guests included the amazing illustrator Andrew Glass, Literary agent Linda Pratt from Wernick and Pratt Agency, and of course Joann Hill. There were also some other professionals available for critiques, including John Clapp, my former teacher at San Jose State, and Abigail Samoun from Red Fox LIterary. I'm a fan of both Abigail and John, so it was great to see them both at the conference. Please feel free to click on any of the links above to learn more about the guests at the conference.

Curse of the Weregiraffe: The Pitch

2011-09-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

So I'm working on a book called, "Curse of the Weregiraffe." The mock-up cover is on the previous post. Here's the pitch:

Andy Friedman is cursed.
What happened to all the trees in Gracie Park? Who broke into The United Cabbage and Fruit Cannery and emptied every single can of canned cabbage? And how did a giant monster giraffe get into the Forest J. Ackerman Junior High School Multi-Purpose Room during the basketball game between the Forrest J. Ackerman Junior High Junior B Giants, and the Hugo Gurnsback Junior High Junior B Ferrets?

While on African Safari with his family, sixth grader Andy Friedman is bitten by a giraffe. In fact, it wasn’t even a bite, but a nip. A harmless nip.

One month later, on the first night of the gibbous moon (the stage of the lunar cycle just before and just after the full moon) Andy felt the hunger. The hunger that caused every leaf, every lawn, every tree and every plant that Andy laid eyes on (even his mother’s nasturtium!) to be irresistibly delicious! And it was that night, that the hunger turned Andy into the most horrible of all herbivores, the weregiraffe!

But when Andy meets Professor Glen Strange, he finds that his best friend Ogden isn’t the only one who knows his secret. And Andy soon discovers that professor Strange knows more about Andy’s secret than even Andy himself.

Curse of the Weregiraffe

2011-09-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is a spec cover for a YA chapter book I've been writing, so the book doesn't officially exist yet. The book only needs a final polish at this point, but I"m pretty happy with it.

I've been having a great time writing it and this was a fun piece to do. I just finished all my stuff for the SCBWI meeting, including my Cricket pieces, so this was just a little bonus piece. I was working on it before I did the Cricket assignment, so all I needed to do was color it. I'm having fun adding a lot more diverse textures, everything from pastel, to watercolor to graphite. I got the texture on the quilt with graphite on canvas board with a pencil rendering dropped over top of it. The moon is watercolor turned into a transparent clipping path and placed over pastel. The wood textures are a combination of ink dry brush and gaouche dry brush. The only truly digital thing is the highlights. I was also lucky to find that great tree textile online, as well as the typeface which is called "Creepsville". I'm really pleased with it. Hopefully some version of it will end up as the actual cover.

Busy busy busy...

2011-09-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

For every mark I make with a brush, I have to make about 20 on a piece of test paper. When I do dry brush, it's more than that. Here's what my trashcan looks like after a week of inking...

Pay no attention to my dirty floor. Years of built up graphite and other miscellaneous messes have not been kind. Even when I mop this stuff just doesn't come up! The amount of paper I use in general is kind of embarrassing. I go through a ton of bond paper, watercolor paper and bristol board. I'm sure I've murdered a small forest. I have no excuses for this. If I could get a digital tool that could duplicate the look of a thoroughly abused and worn crappy brush, I'd switch to a tablet in a second. I have about a dozen beaten up brushes that do the job. There's nothing like a cheap, ink incrusted craft brush to get great dry brush effects! At least I recycle.

So I'm in the process of coloring three pieces now, and I just finished coloring three others, but I won't be posting any of this stuff for a good while. I've got an SCBWI illustrator's conference on the 10th, and I want to get as much new work as I can done by then.

Sunset

2011-08-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

The background for one my Cricket pieces in progress. Dry Brush.

Inuit Boy Inks

2011-08-30T04:32:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I've approached a close-up portrait using dry brush. At least for an illustration. Using a very line oriented technique, there was always the problem of how to get the subtlety I wanted in a close-up portrait. With straight line art you're limited to contour, and there's only so much you can describe with contour. So dry brush with a few lighter washes really added the nuance I wanted. Portraits tend to be the mainstay of a lot of YA book cover art, so this approach should serve me well in the future. This Inuit story has been a great trial run for YA illustration--I was hoping that Cricket would give me the chance to do some figure work and this is just the opportunity I needed. With a roomy deadline, I'm able to do a little more experimentation than I might otherwise do, and it's really paying off in ways I could have never imagined. Stay tuned for more dry brush inks!

More Dog Inks

2011-08-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

That last dog was drawn pretty sparely because it was a background element, but these are a little more resolved.

One disadvantage of working in pieces is that I tend to ink more of the image than I use. About half of both of these images are going to be cropped. It's a shame because I really like the inks on these. I'm using a lot more dry brush in my illustration work and really liking the results. Having spent the earlier part of the year doing dry brush for my show has really helped me to improve my dry brush skills.

The Unsympathetic, Unredeemable Antagonist: From Fables to Fantasy, The Achilles Heel of Genre Fiction

2011-08-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

I grew up on Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. Loved them. From my childhood to my teenage years I read almost nothing else. From my very first fairy tales, to the books I read as a teen, there were inevitably bad guys. The best were the science fiction stories that were more about ideas than battles between good and evil, books by writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Phillip K. Dick, and these were my favorites, but even Sturgeon and P.K. Dick resorted to bad guys in their weakest moments.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Literature's first Redeemable Villain

Bad Guys have been the anchor of Fables for as long as there have been fables. But not always, and not all of them. The oldest written fable on record, The Epic Gilgamesh, is about a tyrant who redeems himself. So precedent tells us that we've known how to tell a different kind of story for a very long time. But still, we resort to unsympathetic, unredeemable antagonists more often than not. The bad guy continues to appear, particularly in genre fiction, over and over and over again. And it's not only in genre fiction that this occurs, but genre fiction is the most guilty of the trend, since genre fiction most often employs the purest of archetypes, the evil, unredeemable villain, more force of nature than character, the simplest and most basic way to anchor your plot, since there's no easier way to generate instant conflict that has an easy resolution than the unredeemable villain. No matter how many ways you decide to twist the plot, the resolution is always simple: vanquish the villain. If you want to resolve your story irrevocably, killing the villain is the best way. If you want your protagonist to sustain their purity, have them offer the villain redemption before the villain dies of his own folly. There is also no better way not to challenge your reader, to provide them the neatest and easiest form of black and white morality.

The Influence of Harry Potter on Young Adult Fiction

My most frequent form of reading these days is--and sometimes I hate to admit it--but the way I'm able to read as much as I'd like to and still be as productive as I need to be, is to listen to audiobooks. In the last few years, since it's been my goal to write young adult fantasy fiction, I've listened to well over 200 genre young adult novels. I cannot think of one of them, not a single one, that hasn't anchored itself on an unsympathetic, unredeemable antagonist. The most popular and enduringly popular series of book in the Young Adult market, the series that single-handedly revived the young adult market and got millions and millions of kids to read again, is anchored on this very device: the Harry Potter series.

I'll admit that I've yet to read any of the books. In fact, I've avoided them for the most snobbish of reasons: I'm suspicious of anything so popular. I've read, and enjoyed other popular books, so distaste for the Harry Potter series is for entirely personal and less than objective reasons. I did begin one of the books and immediately put it down, not giving it the least of a chance. So any qualitative evaluation of them is more than presumptuous, and I hate to hinge my opinion of the books on the worst excuse imaginable, that I've seen most of the movies, but I've seen most of the movies. Movies have a way or reducing the complexity of books, of distilling hundreds of pages into as few as 90 minutes. And here's another horrible excuse for my assumptions: someone I know has read the books and confirmed my opinion. That someone is my wife, so I consider her a reliable source, but still, it's a lousy excuse.

So I will concede that I could be very wrong about the Harry Potter series. But I'm probably not. My opinion is not a qualitative one, but the simple assumption that the books offers us a bad guy, an unredeemable villain, and the resolution of the books offers us the death of that villain. If I am wrong, please correct me. If I'm wrong, I'm doing an injustice to a book that I admit, I've never read. Unredeemable villains by no means negate the quality of a great work of fiction. There are many great works of fiction that follow this exact same pattern. So I wouldn't presume to judge the quality of the books, or whether or not they represent the best of what young adult fiction has to offer, but from everything I've been able to gather, Harry Potter is a classic tale of good versus evil, and my best guess is that it follows the same essential pattern of the vast majority of stories about good versus evil as earlier described.

I can't blame Harry Potter so much on the trend, since it's a trend that dominates most all of the fictional media we consume. It does, however, account for the dominance of fantasy fiction in books targeted at young adults. Now that teens are reading more than ever, this is the kind of book that they tend to read. Again: no surprise, and nothing new. But now that we've got their attention, now that we've gotten kids to read, why not use it as an opportunity to give them something else?

Why Feeding Children and Teens Nothing but Tales of Good versus Evil Can Contribute to Making Them Less Empathetic Adults

There are often said to be only a few basic plots that most stories follow, of stories of conflict and resolution, and the fact that many of these follow the pattern that I've described would be a facile way to condemn them. I am not condemning every good versus evil parable as a failure. I am condemning, however, the pervasiveness of the trend. So whats wrong with a good old fashioned tale of good versus evil? It's what all of us have grown up on, and most of us consider our sense of morality to be reasonable and just, but I think that these kinds of stories have effected our sense of empathy more than we would care to admit.

We may try to teach children to search for redeemable qualities in people who have done them wrong, to find forgiveness for people who have hurt them, but the stories that have shaped their sense of morality, that have encouraged them to root for all of those good guys so often and so vehemently, has given them the easiest reason to condemn them. Even as our sense of morality evolves, the reflex to demonize is something that so many of us carry from childhood to adulthood. I don't think that stories about good versus evil are the cause. It's a natural enough human tendency. But stories about good versus evil reinforce this distilled sense of black and white morality, and if you don't offer an alternate narrative, it becomes harder for us to learn to truly empathize with those who are responsible for even the most minor injustices in our lives. Our immediate reaction is to condemn. But empathy, and the evolution of our empathy should be a natural part of becoming an adult.

Authors: You, Yes You, Can Provide Children and Young Adults With a Different Narrative

This is why I think that it's the imperative of the people that tell stories to children to offer a alternative narrative. There are many different kinds of conflict. All stories don't have to have antagonists, but antagonists are often a critical part of genre fiction. But all antagonists do not have to be villains. Villains portrayed as evil and unredeemable not only reduce your conflict to a black and white morality tale, but they make your stories less complex, and less interesting. The key to great character development is identification. If your reader can identify with some aspect of the character, if they can have a sense of what it's like to be in that character's shoes, it enriches their understanding of what it's like to be a person. It provides a model for empathizing with real life people whose motives and actions you don't always agree with.

Right now, in young adult fiction in particular, we're failing miserably to do this. Right now, as young adult authors, you have the attention of young adult readers in a way that hasn't had precedent in many many years. So if you've presented the reader with a morally questionable antagonist, how can you make the reader better understand their motivations? How can you allow your readers to empathize with someone with whom it isn't easy to empathize with? Stories with redeemable, but flawed characters are better stories. The more that you allow your reader to identify with your characters, with all of your characters, or at least your principal characters, the richer your story becomes.

Dog drawing

2011-08-26T04:38:00.000-07:00

Another drawing, inked, for my recent Cricket assignment.

This doesn't have a lot of detail, since it's going to be way in the background. Mixed media, ink gouache and dry brush. I usually use white gouache to make corrections, but I've more recently experimented with using it as a drawing tool to work white lines over my dry brush work to get some interesting textures. My recent approach to dry brush is very must inspired by Robert Fawcett, since I just got the new Robert Fawcett book.

Inuit Man, and my Dad: Separated at Birth?

2011-08-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

This sketch was part of my recent Cricket project. It took me about thirty minutes to draw. The rest of the composition took me hours. Which part do you think they liked best? Well, sometimes it just works out that way. One of my favorite dry brush pieces took about twenty minutes. When I featured it in my recent show, it got more attention than others that had taken me days. It's a similar situation to the one I've mentioned before--when it all comes together too easily, it feels like you're getting away with something, that you can't entirely take credit for it, despite all the other pieces that you struggled over which contributed to the skill set that made the one that "came easily" possible.

But then, I'm also just kind of good at drawing old men. I've had plenty of practice drawing my Dad, I guess, who's 86, and about to turn 87. I've drawn more portraits of him from life than anyone else, mostly because I can always count on him to take a nap, which means he stays still for a long time. This image was done from a number of sources, various photos vintage and more recent of Inuit men, most of them head on, so I gave him a bit of a turn. This imaginary Inuit, in part by coincidence, in part by circumstance, has a vague resemblance to my dad. I think this is because my dad's parents came from Eastern Europe, and his mother was largely Uzbek, and Uzbekistan was invade by the Mongols, so there might be some Mongol blood mixed in with the general Ashkenazi mix. Mongols have that dark skinned Asian look that's so similar to the Inuits. Here's a recent portrait I did of my Dad:

What do you think?

Thoughts on Disney's Bambi, or How Cute is Too Cute?

2011-08-22T03:34:00.000-07:00

I Saw Bambi for the first time last night...

Somehow I've gone my whole life without seeing Bambi. I saw it for the first time last night. I've re-watched, or watched for the first time a number of Disney films recently, the most surprising of which was the Sword and the Stone--that movie really captured the style of Bill Peet, who, unusual for Disney, got a big screen credit at the beginning of the film. The best of them was Pinocchio by far. But back to Bambi--

Disney studios pioneered something they called, the multi-plain camera, and I think they made more use of it in Bambi than in the earlier Snow White. The multi-plane is an elegantly simple design--layer after layer of glass panes with painted backgrounds on them are slowly pulled aside during a pan. Sometimes there would be dozens of these glass panes, spaced in front of the animation cells to provide an incredible amount of depth. You can extend the pan even further if you allow it to go into shadow, which is what they did in the opening scene of Bambi, basically starting the whole process from the beginning when the scene emerged from shadow. This sense of depth was attempted before, and successfully by means of an entirely different method previous to Disney by Fleischer studios (best known for Popeye and Betty Boop). Fleischer shot their animation in front of three dimensional models which they slowly turned on a large turn table. It looked surprisingly seamless, but the multi-plane provided an even greater amount of depth and never broke the illusion with live action photography. So Bambi opens with this long multi-plane shot, but it's still a very early use of the technology, so it's not quite as seamless or effective as it is in the long city pan in Pinocchio, which they made right after Bambi. Sometimes the painted edges are a little too obviously flat, or there's scratches or dust on the glass. It's subtle but noticeable. Still, it's a great shot.

Here are some great examples of these kinds of panorama shots. Stills, unfortunately, don't give you the full effect of the multi-plane camera, but they're still pretty cool:

The real star of the show in terms of effects, was the way the water was animated. Later Disney animators would comment about how difficult it was to animate scenes like the one with Pinocchio inside a swinging cage, or that long city pan I mentioned before, while the audience took more notice of the ocean scene later in the film. These water effects were what the audience really marveled at. There is no wonder why, when you see the water effects in Bambi. I'm not even sure how they did many of them. reflections, overlapping foreshortened concentric circles of distortion on the surface made by water drops, various effects of rain, condensation, splashes and undulation, the water in itself is an incredible achievement. More recently, in contemporary 2D animation, as rare as it is these days, computers are used extensively to create the illusion of water, but the water in Bambi is pure handcraft on a level that we may never see again.

The characters, as always, are everything that we associate with Disney. I don't really have to explain this. You know what I'm talking about. Disney. But however you feel about their Disneyness, they're beautifully animated. I once read in an interview with Walt Kelly, who had once worked for Disney, how disappointed he was with the now seldom seen animated special of Kelly's creation, Pogo, made by Chuck Jones. He said that Jones was attempting, and failing, at what he Kelly decided Jones must have thought was a Disney style. He had his characters bat their big lashes so they would seem more endearing. Jones would attempt to do a Disney impersonation more in earnest later when he did his Kipling TV adaptations of Rikki Tikki Tavi and The White Seal. Though there's some great character animation in those films, you can really see what Kelly means when he talks about the batting eyelash thing. Once you notice it, it's such a cheap little trick, it becomes distracting and obvious. But as Kelly says, this wasn't at all what Disney was doing.

Indulgent Cuteness

Yes, the characters in Bambi and other Disney films occasionally bat their enormous eyes,but what really makes them endearing is the way they seem to discover and indulge in the sensuousness of the world around them with every sense. It's a sensuousness that exudes from their whole bodies. While we were watching the film, Reg felt suddenly compelled to lie next to our dog Cinder, who is always up for a cuddle. Disney's characters tend to illicit that cuddle reflex.

My reaction to this is two-fold--I want to give Bambi a hug. But I also feel a little manipulated. A little bit used. This cuddliness becomes aggressive as more and more characters roll and shimmy onto the screen with their cumulative cuteness. So while I appreciate that Disney can elicit this kind of affection for ink on acetate, it's a little too much of a good thing. When everything is turned up to the same volume of cute, there's a monochrome quality to the effect. The whole point of it is simply for you to desire it, and you both expect, and anticipate it. This is when I feel manipulated. I've heard pornography described similarly: the only objective of pornography is for you to desire it. While Disney's objective is more complex than this, this tendency towards indulgent cuteness is pervasive. It's also effective. The audience falls in love with the characters. I think they do for genuine reasons beyond the characters existence as cute porn, but it doesn't hurt.

So how cute is too cute? I don't have a real answer to that. I don't think cuteness, or indulgent cuteness, is a bad thing. Maurice Sendak elicits this kind of sensuous quality in his book, In the Night Kitchen, whose protagonist is by no coincidence named "Mickey". Somehow he manages to elicit these feelings without the same kind of aggressiveness. I can't put my finger on what he's doing that's different, but it seems more sincere to me.

Sometimes I fear that I'm verging on Disney cuteness, rather than Sendak cuteness in my own images. While I appreciate some images whose main purpose is to elicit this kind of emotional response, it's not what I want to do with my own images.

In Progress Figures: Inuits

2011-08-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've been really busy lately on this Cricket assignment, so I haven't been posting. Here are a couple of figures from that assignment.

For some reason animals come easier to me than figures. Every figure seems like a small battle. This is for the third image, which will be a full page. I've already turned in sketches for the first two, and the art director, aside from what was essentially a note about color, requested no changes. This almost never happens. I may not be so lucky with the third one, but it's been great to work with Cricket.

Gingerbread Boy and Car #2

2011-08-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

Here's another inked image of the Gingerbread Boy and his car.

Inuit Boy

2011-08-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Another in progress sketch for my Cricket assignment.

New Husky Drawing

2011-08-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

A New Figure and My Blog Gets a New Look!

2011-08-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

Not a great drawing night, but I was happy with this short gesture. This is a five minute pose.

No Longer "Apologizing in Advance"

So I decided to change the look and title of my blog. I changed the layout a bit: Now I'm featuring in the right hand column a list of the most visited blog posts for the week, and if you scroll down a little, you'll also see my Twitter feed, even though I still have no idea what to do with Twitter. But most importantly, I changed the header and title of my blog. I'm no longer "Apologizing in Advance". I think that title has officially outlived it's usefulness. The title was based, in part, on a certain amount of insecurity, a feeling that maybe I might say the wrong thing. So with the new look and new title comes a new confidence. I feel more confident in general about the quality of my work and the quality of my writing. So I hope you enjoy the new look, and my work as it continues to progress!

Some Husky Drawings, Research and Character: You Don't Always Have to Write What You Know

2011-08-10T02:51:00.000-07:00

Edit: I changed the title of this blog post because it didn't entirely make sense.

When I have multiple animals to draw like this I like to give myself plenty to choose from, and the more I draw them, of course, the better I get at understanding their anatomy. We have a Doberman and Australian Shepard mix named Cinder, a really beautiful animal with a pattern of spots something like you'd find on a hyena. We often get compliments because her coat is so unusual. She's perhaps the sweetest dog we've ever owned, and though she loves affection, fortunately when left to her own devices she's very good at entertaining herself, so she's not overly dependent. She's a little timid around strangers though.

Reg and I were playing with her last night, and Reg thought that there might be something wrong with Cinder because of the way I was looking at her. I kept looking at her legs and haunches, moving her around so I could get a closer look. I couldn't help myself! When drawing a new animal, it doesn't hurt to have one in the house. Though she's not a husky, her basic anatomy is the same. Usually I'm not so lucky. As yet I haven't been able to locate any eagles or elephants that were available to model for me. My usual technique is to use multiple photographs and draw from them until I've figured out the animals anatomy as best I can. I also have a couple of great reference books on animal anatomy that come in handy.

I love drawing animals but they're always a challenge. The recent seal drawing was particularly hard--trying to give it a sense of movement when its essentially a big thick teardrop with a face on the end didn't help. Harp seals have short flippers and don't have as much articulation in their necks as other seals, so most of the movement is in the lower body. I was able to give it a nice S-curve and a dramatic expression, so I think it ended up being pretty effective.

This is my second series of illustrations for Cricket magazine, and I find myself envying my friend Kris Mcleod, another local Davis artist and frequent contributor to Ladybug, Cricket's sister publication. Kris gets to draw kids and snowmen, while I get these assignments that require tons of research! Animals and period costumes and unique habitats all have to be on target. It isn't fair! But I can't complain too much. One thing I like about illustration, and also fiction writing, is that I always end up learning in the process.

You Don't Always Have to Write What You Know

In fiction, they always say, "write what you know", but what you don't have to limit what you know to your personal experience. You always approach your writing with your own unique perspective, but it doesn't hurt to enrich your writing with a little research. I think it's the same with illustration. Working as a professional illustrator or writer, after a while, making pictures and writing stories becomes your main occupation, so if you were to literally "write what you know" you'd end up writing a less than scintillating story about someone who spends most of their time writing and drawing pictures. That's when it's time to step out of yourself and learn something new.

When writing about a teenage girl, I watched hundreds of video blog entries on Youtube made by teenage girls, to get a sense of the phrasing and rhythm of their speech and to understand a little more about how they think. There's always a little bit of your own voice in every character you write, but putting yourself in another persons head, particularly someone of another gender, requires you to inflect that voice in a way that makes sense for the character. Teenage girls not only speak differently than me, but they also see things differently than me. I once heard the actor Ryan Gosling say that when he acted, if he could allow his body to become the character, his head would follow. Getting a sense of the physicality of the character allowed him to become the character. In writing, when I find the voice of the character, their attitude and unique perspective will follow. It's a very intuitive and unscientific process, but somehow it works out.

Getting Out of Your Own Way

The magic of art making is in this process of identifying with people and objects in a unique way. In drawing its the form and contours of an object or person or animal or landscape. You may never touch an elephant, but you can still draw an elephant. You can't hold a landscape in your hand, but you can get a sense of it's character and shape, and do the best you can to translate that to the page. In writing, similarly, you must try to get a sense of the character of your subject, and translate this to the page in the best way you can. Of course, you're never going to do this perfectly, and you'll always be instilling your art with an aspect of yourself. In this way, it becomes a collaboration between you and your subject. Even if that subject is yourself, the process of writing about yourself allows you to discover aspects of yourself that you didn't know before. Similarly, drawing a subject allows you to discover aspects of that subject that you didn't know before.

You have to be able to get out of your own way, to find the subject instead of trying to impose yourself upon it. You're not shaping it. You're not creating it. You become a vehicle for the expression of the thing. You become its instrument. Most of the time our ego gets in the way of doing this effectively, and there are plenty of egotistical artists, but when they're making art, if they're effective, they can only congratulate themselves after the fact. The intuitive and very non-rational process of making the thing is imperfect, is frequently interrupted, but when it's working, it has a life of its own. Your conscious and rational self might convince you that you created it out of whole cloth, but a part of you, no matter how deeply sublimated, will always know better.

When I've made something that really sings, it feels like I had nothing to do with it. Taking credit for it feels like I'm getting away with something. Most often I get this feeling when I've made one of those rare pieces that feels like one big unrepeatable accident. That's when it feels like I'm getting away with something the most, and when people compliment me on it, I often think, "but they don't know what a fraud I am. I practically had nothing to do with it." When this happens, I feel like my work is the most successful. I feel like I've plagiarized nature. Its always an imperfect copy, but it's close enough to resonate with my audience and for them to recognize themselves in it. Then the audience becomes another collaborator, and they add their own unique perspective into the mix. That perspective may be entirely different than yours, but you can't fully own something after you make it. It's hard not to want to lay claim to it, hard not to feel that you've been misunderstood when other people don't see it as you do. Maybe their view of it has such disparity from your intention, that you feel they've missed what's in the work that has value. Maybe they've allowed their own egos to get in the way of fully appreciating and understanding the work. But you can't control that. It's part of the collaborative process. But then, it's always nice to have collaborators that are little more sympathetic to your unique point of view.

Another running Cow, Perseverance

2011-08-09T01:16:00.000-07:00

Here's another running cow for the same project, this time in profile.

The Inuit drawings are giving me a little more trouble than I anticipated, so inking these drawings has given me a nice break. Doing something I"m good at helps me to bolster my confidence when I'm trying to learn something new, and there are a number of things in the new piece that I've never drawn before. The invisible part of the illustration process is all the bad drawings that are required to make the good ones, and I draw quite a few to get to mine, usually on cheap bond paper. I can always print the drawings in blue on nice paper, later. This is the advantage of focusing on each element of the drawing individually and assembling them later: I can spend the time I need on each element to get it right.

The difference between good draftsmanship and passable draftsmanship is persistence of one kind or another. There are artists who can get by with passable draftsmanship because they're good at something else, like color and composition and texture, or a unique point of view. There are artists that have a practiced and natural talent for draftsmanship--but that practice must be constantly maintained and cultivated. I fall somewhere in the middle. Dividing my time between writing and drawing, I've never been the draftsman I've wished I was, but I'm always improving, and what I lack in natural ability I try to make up for in perseverance.

Running Cow Chef Inks

2011-08-08T02:55:00.000-07:00

Here's my running cow Chef from earlier, now inked.

This is a busy week for me, with two half pages and a full page for Cricket magazine (a story about inuits) and two pages and a spread for the upcoming SCBWI Illustrator's Day Conference, on top of my personal projects. I've got a number of writing projects at various stages of completion--A finished YA novel for teens, a finished chapter book for middle readers, and one of each respectively completed first drafts.

Like my last Cricket assignment, this one is requiring a lot of research. There's just so much stuff to get right--period costumes, animals, and habitat, so that's keeping me pretty busy as well. And of course, finishes for everything are all due about the same time. Sigh.

Gingerbread Boy in Gingerbread Car

2011-08-07T06:19:00.000-07:00

For a project I'm working on for the SCBWI Illustrator's Day Conference in September.

Harp Seal

2011-08-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a harp seal for a new illustration. Harp seals are the ones that start out life cute and fuzzy and white, though they get less fuzzy as they mature to adults.

Google "harp seal" and it's hard not to come across harp seals being clubbed to death, so yes, these are THOSE seals. I found very few images of harp seals swimming, since you just don't get too many scuba divers willing to dive in water that cold, but I did find some great youtube footage of Monk Seals, which are the closest warmer climate seals in body shape to Harp Seals. I just had to fatten them up, and show less neck, and they started looking more like harp seals.

Letter from the Afterlife

2011-08-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

Here's the mock-up postage stamp and cancellation stamp I did for the project I mentioned in previous posts.

This is for a Griffin and Sabine-style facsimile piece of mail from "the afterlife" for a proposal that is being sent by an agent to a publisher for a book by another author. I don't want to get too much more specific than that, unless something comes of it.

I just got another job from Cricket magazine with an inuit theme, so I'll be working on that in the weeks to come. I'll try to post sketches as I go.

From idea, to Expression, to Communication: The Fundamental Absurdity of "Intellectual Property"

2011-08-03T02:11:00.000-07:00

DRM, or DIgital Rights Management, is what they call the software that doesn't permit you to use a digital media on anything but a single commercial product. DRM does not allow you to use that media on a competing product. Without the Itunes player I can't watch my Itunes videos.

In the history of commerce, this isn't a new concept. Sharecropping represents a form of oppression and moral bankruptcy that it would be ridiculous to compare morally to DRM, but the basic model is similar. The sharecropper is completely dependent on the farmer for his income and basic needs. Again, I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, since buying MP3s isn't exactly indentured servitude. In fact, the objective is reasonable and easy to sympathize with: the merchant wishes to sell a product that cannot be infinitely duplicated and then redistributed for free. The comparison that is often made is outright theft--you may have seen the ads that they often include in DVDs, comparing copying to theft. But this is not an apt analogy. No physical product is stolen. What is being copied, is potential information. If it's a book you're not selling paper and ink. If it's a movie, your not selling the cameras you used to shoot it with. More so than ever before, the product you're selling is completely intangible.

All that digital media exists only in the transfer of bits and bites, and the storage space for those bits and bites is in your physical possession, your hard drive, not theirs. They don't lose anything physical in the transfer. Ones and zeroes are what we use to represent the information, but they are not the information itself. Information does not exist independent of its human receiver. All those ones and zeroes only represent potential information. In the end, you still need a human being to interpret the information through some form of media, through sound or images. It's an imperfect process, since, like any form of communication, it relies on interpretation. We couldn't share this information if we didn't share some kind of language, since language aids us in equalizing the difference between expression and interpretation. Language helps, but doesn't do the whole job. I can't experience your ideas, I can only experience the expression of those ideas.

Intellectual property means quite literally: the ownership of ideas. It's a pretty weird concept, when you think about it. Movies and songs and books are expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. It takes time and work to share your ideas, and the process is imperfect. The method of expression determines how those ideas manifest. You can't take an idea and spit it out onto the film or onto paper. The expression of the idea is not only a translation of that idea, but the idea is shaped by both media and language. Even images in your head are shaped by how you see and interpret information. Some aspects of language are innate--babies very early on will begin to recognize s smiley face symbol as a face. Some are learned: An aboriginal tribesman upon seeing his first photograph cannot interpret the information in the photograph in the same way that you and I, who have been exposed to images that portray illusionary space our whole lives, will interpret that same photograph. The way we interpret illusionary space is learned, and this form of interpretation is a part of our understanding of language.

So the concept of selling an idea, of selling intellectual property is a fundamentally absurd one. You can't extricate the idea from its mode of expression, since ideas are shaped and discovered through their expression. Expression doesn't even have to involve physical execution--simply thinking of an image in your head is a process inextricable from the language we use to interpret that image, and in this way, the image is shaped by language, and cannot exist in our heads independent of its interpretation.

I don't know when the concept of selling an idea was first established, but the commerce of digital media has required us to distill this concept to its ultimate end, putting this fundamental absurdity in stark relief. Now merchants and corporations are forced to deal with this absurdity more directly. Before recording technology, and eventually, digital media, the expression of an idea had to take physical form. To read a book, you had to have a physical book that had to be manufactured. To experience a performance, you had to see or hear the performance live. Books could be copied, but performances couldn't. As technology developed, we had the additional means to listen or watch a recording of a performance. As digital technology developed, we had the ability to distribute that information instantaneously, or almost instantaneously.

Live performance is often considered one of the few experiences that can't be duplicated. The experience of viewing art made by a human hand in a museum or gallery can also not be duplicated. With immersive digital media, or virtual reality, we're getting closer and closer to closing the gap between these in-person live experiences and recorded experiences, or experiences that can be consumed by proxy. Just as we can watch a live performance on video, some day we may be able to experience a live performance remotely through immersive technology. As this gap begins to close, these in-person experiences will no longer have the same significance. There will be few media experiences that can't be simulated, if not perfectly, than very very closely, at least when it comes to the audio/visual. We don't know to what extent immersive technology may expand, and as technology develops, the gap could close even more. With this, the gap between the expression of an idea, and the communication of that expression also closes. Distribution of your expression has infinite potential. Potentially, more people can experience these forms of expression than ever before. But how do you sell something that doesn't exist tangibly?

This is the dilemma that artists currently face, and the problem will only increase. But infinite potential, is not the same as infinite reality. People need to be informed that your art exists, and they need to have access to it. This is becoming easier, but we still rely on people and corporations who promote and distribute art. If you want to get the word out on your own, you can take on this role yourself, but individuals still aren't able to do this quite as effectively as corporations. There will long be a discrepancy between what a corporation can do, and what an individual can do in this regard. The web can only exist through a global communications network owned by corporations. There will always be people who will try to hack, or hijack this means of distribution, but this can only go so far. The vast majority of us will continue to be in its thrall.

Corporations are faced with the same dilemma as artists: they can't control copying. They can limit it, but they can't eliminate it, and as technology develops, copying only becomes easier. DRM is only a temporary measure, and consumers are already beginning to balk--we like to have control over the stuff we own, and l doubt we'll tolerate DRM for very long. A new economy has to emerge, and none of us truly knows what it's going to look like. As long as artists rely on corporations to distribute their stuff, artists will be beholden to those corporations on some level. Some of us will be able to circumvent this, but most of us won't. Net neutrality won't be sustainable if corporations feel that it will compromise their hold on us.

The concept of intellectual property is a powerful one, and more than artists or individuals, corporations have fought to sustain it more than anyone else, since they stand to gain from it more than anyone else, but its a concept that is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Whatever the new economy may hold, the concept of owning an idea will have to be adjusted, and corporations are terrified of this prospect. I can't help but think that this is a good thing.

Ink Wash Portrait

2011-07-30T03:45:00.000-07:00

Another image for the project I mentioned in the last two posts.

This is done in ink wash--the objective was to draw a spontaneous looking portrait that could possibly be made with found wet media and whatever might be at hand. I used a sort of crappy brush, but the idea, in this case, was that the drawing was supposed to have been done with a napkin and coffee. I've never tried to paint something with a cup of coffee, and I imagine it would be hard to do, but this is more of an idealized version of what that might look like.

I won't go into the specifics at this point, but the mood of the piece is meant to be somewhat eerie. It's rare that I get to do something this expressionistic for an illustration, so it was refreshing to be able to paint this loose, and not have to be too fussy about it.

Drawing a Fishing Boat: How Do You Draw a Machine When You Don't Know How It Works?

2011-07-29T05:07:00.000-07:00

This is for the same project as the previous post.

When drawing a plausible boat or ship, it all comes down to this: you can't fake the rigging.

You can generalize it or simplify it, but just like bad anatomy, the viewer can spot if the mechanics don't look like they make sense. A fishing boat is the worst, because there are no sails. All those lines have something to do with hauling in a net, and there are a lot of them, more than I've pictured. In the front, what you can't see because of the angle is a kind of big spool, and I think the long arm there is what hauls in the net. While I don't understand everything at work here, I was able to distill the main components that I kept seeing in my reference.

So how do you draw a machine when you don't know how it works?

If you draw a lot, you probably do it all the time. You can draw a car without knowing how an engine works. You can draw all the appliances in a kitchen. A boat is no different.

This involves asking myself the same question I ask when I do any illustration: what's essential to telling the story. In this case it's a machine that has to look like it functions. That's all it has to do. I don't have to understand everything about a ship, but I do have to identify what makes it look like something that works to me.This is not a scientific process, but it's also not really as hard as it sounds. If you have enough reference from enough angles, you're going to keep seeing a lot of the same components. Maybe someone who really knows ships or boats is going to be able to spot that it's wrong, but on a basic level, it looks like it functions, and as far as I'm concerned, that's all it has to do. Also, in this case, drawing all the rigging in silhouette didn't hurt. In the final drawing, much of the boat's in shadow anyway, and it's going to be reproduced at literally the size of a postage stamp, but even at that size, those details make a difference.

And I still have no idea how this thing works.

Seagull Drawing

2011-07-28T06:48:00.001-07:00

This is a sketch I recently rendered for a project that I thought was long defunct, but that I recently had the privilege to revisit. It's not entirely a new sketch, since it was gleaned from part of a pencil drawing I initially did for the project when it was first offered to me.

The new sketch is a bonus sketch I included for some promotional material that's being sent to a publisher by an agent who I'm now working with. The sketch is meant to accompany a manuscript for a YA novel that she's submitting. I love the book, and the agent is someone I really respect and admire. The hope is that the publisher will pick up the book, and I'll be the one to illustrate it, but there are, of course, no guarantees. I'll talk more about this project as things develop.

Some Giraffe Studies, A brief List of My Favorite Caricaturists

2011-07-23T03:21:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of giraffe studies for an new project.

Having fun stretching the giraffe anatomy a little bit, but I'd like to still take it a little further. Reg got me an early birthday present--a big Gerald Scarfe career spanning monograph. Scarfe is truly my favorite contemporary caricature artist by far, and he's a little bit of an influence on the exaggeration in these pieces.

Caricature

There's a trend towards a more photo real approach to caricature today. They wow you with their rendering skills and all these beautiful textures, but there's a sameness to the style. I occasionally see someone who works in this style who does impressive work, but they all tend to blur together in my head. You don't see the nuance of a Drew Friedman, who doesn't distort his caricatures in that obvious way so many caricaturists do who work in that mode. I don't mind this kind of elasticity in more line based caricature, but in the more photo-based stuff it gets a little old.

The other caricaturists I like are Jack Davis, Steve Brodner, Jack Levine and Phillip Burke. Illustration savvy folks will probably see these as the usual suspects, but there are other greats from the pre-Jack Davis era, and lately Drew Friedman has been featuring a number of them on his blog. You can see Friedman's blog:

here.

You might have to backtrack a few entries to earlier posts before you get to these artists, but it's worth the journey to check out some great examples of Friedman's art as well, including the legendary Barfo toys he did for Topps.

Here's one by Friedman:

And here's one by Jack Davis:

But I like him even more for stuff like this:

and even more than that for his early work in E. C. war comics:

And one by Steve Brodner:

Phillip Burke:

and Dave Levine:

But Scarfe continues to be my absolute favorite, and you can see why,

you can see more of Scarfe's work,

here.

Part of the reason I love Scarfe is his amazing line. I've always been a line guy, so his work really appeals to me.

Oh, and I almost forgot Al Hirschfeld, who's right up there with Scarfe, but who recently passed away. I'm not sure how I could have forgotten Hirschfeld. Another all-time favorite next to Scarfe.

You can see more of Hirschfeld's work,

here.

Still waiting to hear about the sketches for the SCBWI Illustrator's conference project that Joann Hill from Disney/Hyperion is art directing. I should be hearing back from Hill on monday. A recap: 15 people attending the conference signed up to do two pages and a spread for a picture book text selected by Joann Hill, who will art direct sketches, and critique one finish at the conference. We're all new to the industry so it's a valuable exercise. The giraffe is unrelated to the Hill project.

Lucian Freud, 1922-July 21st 2011: His Influence On My Work and Thinking

2011-07-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

Freud and Naturalism

Lucian Freud was a painter who rose to prominence in the late sixties. During a time when abstract expressionism and minimalism were in vogue, Freud chose a less fashionable subject, the figure (And yes, he is related to Sigmund Freud. He's Sigmund Freud's grandson).

Lucian Freud was my introduction to naturalism in painting. Naturalism was something I would later discover in the films of Mike Leigh, and ultimately in the single most influential artist on both my art and life, John Cassavettes, but it all started with Lucian Freud.

Naturalism isn't the same as realism--realism in painting usually refers to photo realism, and photo realism has as much to do with the two dimensional record of the photograph as the resulting painting. A photograph is a single moment captured in time, inert, and unchanging. A painter may choose to elaborate or accentuate the information in the photograph, but this doesn't change the fact of the photograph.

Naturalism is something different. The subject is typically painted or drawn from life. From life the painter records a different kind of fact--the fact of a human body that exists in time and space. Lucian Freud painted his subjects over many sittings, and the results are a kind of painstaking observation, an attempt not to render the subject realistically, but to record a kind of truth about the subject. This is not an act of precision, but of interpretation. His paintings weren't cold and objective, but a dialogue between subject and painter. The American painter Phillip Pearlstein employed a similar kind of observation, but he painted his human subjects like still lives. Unlike Pearlstein, there's an essential humanity in Freud's paintings--he truly captures the character of his subjects. It's a kind of magic you sometimes see in painting that you can't really define, and Freud's paintings definitely had it.

Freud's influences included his teacher, Walter Sickert.

Here, Sickert attempts to capture the truth of his subject, but his paintings are more about the human figure itself, rather than the personality of an individual. From Sickert, Freud borrows both this search for the truth of the figure, and Sickert's heavy application of paint. This heavy application of paint is inspired in part by impressionism, but the impressionists and post impressionists had a different objective in mind. The impressionists--even painters like Toulouse-Lautrec, who very much tried to capture the character of the people he painted--employed a more romantic treatment of the figure, and Sickert aimed to eliminate this kind of romanticism from his paintings in an attempt to capture the essence of his subjects.

Freud's other great influence was Stanley Spencer.

Though Spencer would sometimes paint more classically influenced narrative subjects, his greatest achievement was his portrait and figurative work. There's an element of expressionism in Spencer's work, but it's mixed with acute observation and a more contemporary, naturalistic approach to his subjects that is closer to Sickert's approach than expressionism.

Contemporaries of Spencer were the German Expressionists like Otto Dix, and Oskar Kokoschka:

I discovered the German Expressionists before I discovered Freud, and they too, had a great impact on me, but for different reasons.

Expressionists pushed the fact of their subjects in a different direction--their approach is more visceral, exaggerated, and sometimes almost caricatured. Like Sickert and Spencer, there's no attempt to romanticize the subject, but it's a different kind of truth, and naturalism is a distant concern.

The German Expressionists were really my entry point to modernism. I discovered comics before I discovered painting, and German Expressionism had more of a relationship to the style of rendering in the comics that I loved. Like cartooning, it was an approach to the figure that was mannered and expressive, but there was a compelling and sexy vulgarity to the German Expressionists that reminded me of E.C. horror comics. I imagine E.C. cartoonists like Bernard Krigstein and Graham Ingels were more than a little bit influenced by the German Expressionists.

Freud too, had a more mannered approach in his early work:

But he was still searching for something. The Spencer influence is most apparent to me in these early portraits, but unlike Spencer, he doesn't quite capture the essential truth of his subjects. These portraits are neither truly expressionistic or truly naturalistic. Here he starts to get a little closer:

His technique, here is starting to resemble his later work. He doesn't employ the same thick bodied approach to paint, and he still hasn't quite captured that illusive quality of naturalism that he does in his later work, but it's getting there.

Here's Freud in his most mature period, but I'll just let the work speak for itself:

A contemporary of Freud that also knocked me out at the time, was Francis Bacon:

I discovered Bacon before Freud. Bacon, both more expressionistic, and more visceral than Freud, seemed like the ultimate consequence of German Expressionism. I wanted to be Bacon as much as I wanted to be Freud. I couldn't get enough of him.

Then I discovered Freud's other contemporary, Frank Auerbach, and it all started to gel:

Auerbach, who is still living, has similar ideals to Freud, but with a little more romance. He's a little bit Freud, and a little bit Giacometti, but Auerbach is mostly Auerbach. Each painting is done from life in a single day, though painted from multiple sittings, and he's as meticulous in his way as Freud. At the end of each day, if he's not happy with the painting, he scrapes off the paint, and his studio has a couple of inches of discarded paint on the floor from this process. But Auerbach too, is after his own version of the truth, but more like Sickert in the sense that he's trying to capture the unvarnished truth of the figure in the space it occupies, rather than the personality of his subject.

In his drawings he will work the surface practically raw with an eraser:

There was something about that stubborn persistence to find what he was looking for in his drawings and paintings that was, and continues to be really attractive to me.

But back to Freud.

Freud As a Personal Influence

I discovered Freud's work in college, when I was 21, and it blew me away. I immediately started attempting to achieve this sense of naturalism in my own work. In my own romantic attempt to get to the "truth" in my painting, I worked from life and painted with thick acrylic paint, directly with my hands, without brushes, which at the time I considered to be pretty noble of me. This painting was one of the few I held onto from that period. My dad sat for it. He spent most of the sitting napping. I have a lot of pictures i've made of my dad napping.

It currently hangs in my living room, and it's probably the only painting I did in school that I'm still happy with.

Like most art students I took myself pretty seriously. I remember a particularly annoying guy I went to school with then, who also took himself just a little too seriously. It's easier to dislike in others that we don't like about ourselves, so I took an immediate disliking to him, and when I found out he painted with his fingers, I started to realize just how pretentious I was. It was a tough lesson.

OK, maybe I didn't learn my lesson:

This was the kind of work I was doing when I graduated: giant drawings (I think the first one is something like 30 by 40 inches) in crow quill pen done from life. When you graduate from art school you're confronted for the first time with the reality of having to live your life without the shelter and support of art school. In art school, it's easy to come to the conclusion that you're brilliant. Some people will even tell you that you're brilliant. Eventually you discover that maybe you're not so brilliant. It's a bitter pill to swallow. Then there's the reality of trying to make a living, of trying to figure out what you're good at, and what you're good for. It's taken me a very long time to figure that out. I'm a bit of a late bloomer that way.

So if you know the work I do now, you'll notice that it's about 180 degrees from what I did then. All those high ideals and pretensions were causing me to get in my own way, and I lost track of why I wanted to make art in the first place. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to be an illustrator. But it took me till just a few years ago to find out what truly gives me pleasure in the work I do. But I can't blame myself entirely. Freud, and the London figurative painters in general were pretty powerful influences.

And to close, here's a painting Freud did towards the end of his life:

Comparing it to his somewhat earlier self portrait above, it's almost as if he's returned to his roots with a more Sickert-like approach, while still capturing the essential character of his subject. Freud will be missed.

How Do You Make an Income From Your Work In a World of Perfect Copies?

2011-07-20T05:07:00.000-07:00

There was a recent discussion on Google+ about the future of digital media, and print on demand technology. Fabricator technology has been around for a while, but the quality of the manufacturing material has recently improved, an continues to improve. So what happens when you can not only print a book that looks just like a traditional book, but you can print consumer products like this, on demand? Or even more complex objects, like computers?

There's a great short story by sci-fi author Corey Doctorow that explores this idea, about a future where fabricators are illegal because they violate intellectual property laws. So in the story, after being released from jail for breaking this law, someone builds a fabricator...that builds fabricators. There's simply no stopping, copying. So what kind of future will we have when you can make a perfect copy of just about anything in your living room, no matter who originally owns the patent or copyright?

Below is a video that suggests what the future may hold for 3D printing:

Recorded information takes up space in the form of bites and bits, but the storage space is yours. You have X amount of RAM, and when you use up that RAM, it's used up. You don't take someone else's RAM when you copy their stuff. Case in point: you can copy someone's data without them knowing about it, because they have lost no data as a result. You have gained something: you have gained their data, but now both of you have the same data. There is no difference between the data that they have, and the data that you have. Your data is identical, but without loss in the transfer, and without the expenditure of physical RAM on the part of the person you're copying from. They've lost nothing physical, and you've gained nothing physical. This is why the metaphor of stealing a CD or DVD from a store that the big media companies are so fond of doesn't quite apply. Nothing physical is taken or lost.

If I can take a digital copy and produce a print or physical copy that's indistinguishable from a mass produced copy, we're talking about something very very different than an inferior copy of an original. Only in the case of original art is this not the case, but as far as publishing or any other kind of reproduction, the difference is already becoming increasingly minimal.

The ethics of the practice of copying is arguable, but it's important to consider this idea of the perfect copy that digital reproduction allows when we talk about the value of digital reproduction--value gained, and value lost. When we both own the same bites and bits, we both own the same product. So what does the person who copies take from the person who creates? The best that I can gather, assuming that proper attribution is given, is control--someone can take your creation and remix it or manipulate it however they wish--and potential income--income that you would expect to gain if you were able to sell copies of your work. So what we're really talking about is the perceived loss of potential income, a potential income we can't predict, since people who copy aren't always the same people who would otherwise buy if they couldn't copy.

In the new digital economy, you have to consider that you don't have control of either of these things. You can do what you can to maximize that potential income to your advantage, you can try to take legal action against people who alter or manipulate, or copy your work, but it's an uphill battle. As long as those perfect copies can exist, we have to think about media--how we consume it and sell it--in a whole new way.

The Creative Commons

I should say first that I'm not qualified to discuss the Creative Commons with any authority or depth, but I recommend searching the names, Cory Doctorow, and Nina Paley, for a more in depth discussion on the subject.There are even better authorities, but I don't have the names on hand. At any rate, I'll try to scratch the surface, but I'm still learning about this stuff myself.

Through Creative Commons licenses, some artists have been offering their work to the public for free, or limited use. For instance, Corey Doctorow offers his books for free as downloads under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing, but not selling.

Nina Paley wrote and animated a feature film released under one of the most liberal Creative Commons license that allows sharing, selling, remixing, and just about any kind of copying as long as attribution is given.

Paley is making more from lecture tours, merchandising and donations than she would have ever made if she released the film traditionally through a distributor. Corey Doctorow says that giving his books away for free as downloads actually increases his hardcopy book sales. But the creative commons, or allowing your public to copy and distribute your work with limited boundaries, is still unproven as an effective means for an artist to make a living, at least on a wide scale. These success stories are still few and far between.

You can learn more about Creative Commons licenses:

here.

Cartoonist Colleen Doran, the creator of the long running comic book series, A Distant Soil, discusses:

here,

what she thinks about online copying and how its effected the sales of her work. She's none to happy about this trend, to say the least.

George R. R. Martin And The New Internet Impassioned Audience

Here's the reality that I think the marketplace must accommodate: People aren't going to produce work of a very high quality that involves a very big big time investment--as in, full-time employment--without compensation or a means to support themselves. The public is accustomed to a very high level of craft in the products they consume. They're not going to tolerate a shoddy product, and when they like something they want more of it. Especially now in the new environment where artists have a direct connection to their audience.

The vehemence of George R. R. Martin's fan base is a prime example of how this direct connection has impacted the marketplace. George R. R. Martin is the author of the popular and best selling Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of books that was recently adapted into the TV series, A Game of Thrones, by HBO. Martin's recent installment of the series, A Dance With Dragons, took longer than any of the previous installments for him to write, and the release date continued to be pushed forward to the frustration of his fans. His fans felt entitled to a new book, and were angry that he wasn't coming through. Nothing like this kind of entitlement existed before the internet. This kind of passion is double-edged--on the one hand, this new audience feels as if they own part of the author in way that has only been paralleled in the world of TV and movie celebrities. They feel the author owes them. On the other hand, passionate fans are passionate consumers, and I believe that his audience is so passionate about what they love, that they would be willing to support his efforts even if they had access to the books for free. The question is how much they would be willing to support that work, and how much they would be willing to remunerate the artist if they didn't have a need or willingness to buy his books in a traditional retail outlet. But would this audience support the artist directly, or would their still be a need for an intermediary, like a publisher or distributor, or even something more akin to a promoter or publicist?

So this question of potential income, and how artists will support themselves in this new environment of perfect copies continues to be unresolved. I don't have an answer here, but it's a question that all artists and creators are going to have to confront, eventually.

Please Check a Box Below

Once again, just a reminder of the check boxes below. Though I have stats on the number of people who visit the blog, I don't have a way to gauge interest, so I've added the check boxes below to give me a better idea of what people like to see. So please check, "more posts like this" if this is the kind of thing you like to read, "or less posts like this" if you'd rather see less of this kind of thing.

Comics: The Bullet Proof Medium, or Why No One Can Mess With Us

2011-07-18T03:37:00.000-07:00

Why Painting Can't Die

Every so often you hear someone say, "painting is dead." It's a statement that was more popular in the 80s, but every once in a while you still hear it said by academics and people who have spent entirely too much time in graduate school. This all comes from the myth that art must always be progressive, that if you're not doing something that's formally new, it's not worth paying attention to. Invention as a measure of value makes sense in the sciences, but not in the humanities.

For some reason, the visual arts focus on this idea of progressiveness more than any other discipline. You don't see this in literature, or dance or music. Value is placed on progressive formalism to some degree in these other disciplines, but not nearly to the degree that it is in the visual arts. A novel that is formally traditional isn't by default considered outmoded. But what is considered contemporary in painting focuses on the formally progressive. The idea that "painting is dead" is all about this focus, that somehow at some point there will be nothing new that can be done formally with painting. But it doesn't make sense that formal innovation is the only thing to be valued in painting. It would be like saying, because rock music has been thoroughly explored, there's no reason to write another rock song. Or since modern dance (and what could be more dated than modernism?) has been played out, there's no reason to explore it any further.

Formalism has long been the focus in visual art since the turn of the century, when formal innovation in the visual arts began to develop at a rapid pace. If you wanted to be contemporary, you had to keep up with Picasso. But Picasso's formal innovation (and the formal innovation of those that followed) is supposed to have freed us, not stifled us.

Comics: The Bullet Proof Medium

One of the things that attracts me to comics, is that formal progressiveness is a sideshow to the main event--comics as a literary form. A lot is being done formally with comics, but since comics is primarily a storytelling medium, it has more of a relationship to literature. The best part is: fine art academia still has no idea what to do with them.

One of my favorite cartoonists, Chris Ware, one of the most formally inventive cartoonists working today, was featured on the cover of Art in America a number of years ago, but since fine art academia tends to be naive about comics, they had no point of reference to discuss the formal invention in his work.

Robert Crumb is similarly celebrated by the fine art academic community, but in a similarly clueless way. They seem to know it's important, without quite knowing why. Comics, in the past two decades, as a form, have reached a kind of critical mass--there's too much being done of quality to ignore, and much of it, more for its subject matter than formal concerns, doesn't resemble what has been done before in the medium. Comics, at this point, is the last true visual art medium that is essentially bullet proof. Fine art academia simply doesn't know where to begin to discuss what is, and isn't formally progressive about comics. At least not yet. And even when they do, comics are so tied in to literature, there's no separating what we value in the novel, from what we value in the "graphic novel" (a term I loathe that we're pretty much stuck with at this point).

Comics: The Last Vestige of Modernism in a Post-Modern World

Chris Ware: fine art academics still don't know quite what to do with this.

Comics, aside from those that are technology based, is the youngest of all contemporary mediums. It Is the last contemporary form to be developed that involves the direct application of the human hand, a 2D medium that stands on the foundation of the complete history of painting, mark making, and symbol making, applied to storytelling in a truly unique way.

Though it is an arguable point, the medium of comics as we know it today, was developed at the early turn of the century. When the first long-form comic or graphic novel was developed is another arguable point, but the proliferation of the long-form comic, or at least, comics that were not first serialized as strips or magazines, essentially emerged in the later half of the 20th century.

The assumption is that everything that is done in contemporary media and art is post-modern by default. This is essentially true, but what is progressive in comics formally has more of a relationship to modernism than post-modernism. The formal inventions in comics involve signs and signifiers in a way that is not by design, self-referential. It is invention that comes from necessity in the same way as the progressiveness that occurred in painting in the first half of the twentieth century. Formal progressiveness in painting occurred through a practical exploration of the process of painting. Formal progressiveness in comics comes from a practical exploration of the process of visual storytelling. And while there is still a lot to be explored formally in technology based mediums, comics is the last new medium that involves the direct application of marks to paper, that last new medium in which anyone with the most basic tools, can create.

Please Check a Box!

Edit: I recently added two check boxes below each post, "more posts like this" and "less posts like this". The idea is to get a sense of what people like to read on my blog, without their having to make a comment. Though I do get stats on how many people view the blog, I have no other way to gauge peoples interest besides numbers, so do check a box, even if it's "less posts like this". Maybe you want more art, and less jabber? Maybe more jabber and less art? Or jabber and art? You tell me!

Wednesday figures, Remembering to "Draw Through"

2011-07-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

A five minute, and a twenty minute pose respectively.

Drawing Through

We had a long pose last night as well, but I choked. I tend to really stiffen up with the long poses, and I forget to "draw through" or basically, to lightly gesture in where a limb is covering up another limb. Not gesturing in where one part of the anatomy falls behind another often ends up in a disjointed looking drawing with poor anatomy. Drawing through is something I do all the time with figures I draw from photos or my imagination because I'm more conscious of reinventing the figure on the page to suit my needs, but I need to treat life drawing in the same way. Lesson learned.

Another Running Cow, Getting Submissions Ready for the 2011 Bay Area SCBWI Illustrator's Conference at Fort Mason

2011-07-13T04:57:00.000-07:00

Here's another running cow for the same project, another piece of a larger composition. All my pencils and sketches are done for this one, 2 pages and a spread! On friday I send my sketches to the art director who will be evaluating the entrees for the conference. The entrants get feedback on the 29th, and we submit our finishes on September 10th. This isn't exactly a competition; there are 15 entrants who signed up, and one will be chosen for the critique, but there's no real "winner" or "loser". Since most of us are newcomers to the industry, we've signed up for the project to get a better sense of the process of of putting together a picture book in collaboration with an art director. The art director will be Joann Hill from Disney-Hyperion.

Some illustrators submit really tight roughs, some really loose sketchy ones. I probably fall somewhere in between, but usually I can ink directly onto my roughs, since most of the hard stuff is resolved. One illustrator I know, Tin Salamunic, submits sketches that are practically finished illustrations!

Inevitably the art director will ask me to make some changes, so it's important not to fall too much in love with your compositions. There's a lot more work ahead.

Diner Drawing, 3D models, and when Detail is and Isn't Necessary in an Illustration

2011-07-10T04:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a diner I designed for my current project.

Perspective has always been difficult for me, and I've recently taken to making 3D models on Google Sketch-Up to make my life a little easier. Here's a basic model I made in Sketch-up that I then put under my light box to add details.

Then I added a little distortion to the drawing so it would have a more organic feel and wouldn't be so perfect. The approach still requires me to use vanishing points for some of the details, and I need to use vanishing points to conform the other elements in the picture to the model, (after I've posed my model to fit with my composition the way I want it to, first) but generally it makes my life easier. I can now turn my diner in any direction I want. This has been a approach I've used quite a bit with architecture, mostly using primitives and grids.

You'll also see here that I originally planned to have a standing sign, but opted instead for 3D lettering. The way I did this was by taking my typography and distorting it in photoshop so it would be in perspective. Then I added depth in the drawing.

This diner was based on photos of a number of different diners, so that I could come up with one, archetypical diner. Archetypes and symbols are useful in illustration if you don't want too much specific detail to distract from the focal point. How much observational detail I add to an image is relative to its importance. If I want to portray a very specific place or kind of car or house, I try to add those little unique details. But if I want to portray a "diner" rather than a diner, I keep things simple. Illustration requires you to consider the hierarchy of your subject matter: where do you want the viewers eye to fall? What distracts from, and what contributes to the story you're trying to tell?

Say you're illustrating a kid's messy room. The objects in the room should relate to the story you're trying to tell about the kid. If you have some odd or distracting prop that catches the viewers eye too much, that prop might take on more importance than you intend. A kid's room is a very specific place that requires very specific props. You can really express who a character is by showing where they live, but at the same time, you need to take care that the viewer is paying attention to what you want them to pay attention to. There's a difference between a stuffed toy monkey crammed on a shelf with a bunch of other props, and a stuffed toy monkey sitting on the foot of the bed. Putting it in so prominent a place makes it seem important, while as just another background element it takes on less importance. Make sure, when making an illustration, that your decisions are deliberate, and not simply happenstance.

This is the difference between a painting or drawing done for its own sake, and an illustration or sequence of images done to tell a story: with images done in sequence, or images that are meant to tell a specific story, the narrative takes precedent over the task of simply making a picture.

Why Kids Need Scary Stories

2011-07-09T03:23:00.001-07:00

The first printed stories for children were based on folktales. From the Brother's Grimm to the English penny dreadfuls, stories for children weren't occasionally scary, they were practically always scary. And these weren't just a little bit scary. These stories were terrifying. Witches ate children. Giants ate children. People were tortured and murdered and otherwise dismembered. For some reason the German's were particularly good at this, but it was a tradition that went back long before The Brother's Grimm:

A popular character from English folklore, Krampus would collect bad children on Christmas, put them in chains and steal them away in a barrel.

The Brothers Grimm collected folktales that were told for generations.

You can sugar coat it all you want...

That witch wants to eat those kids.

With these classic tales, illustrators working today, for some reason, are given a little more latitude than they are with more contemporary material. Here's one of my favorite contemporary versions of the story illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger:

One of my favorite German children's books was a book written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffman. It was originally released with a title that translates as, Funny Stories and Whimsical Pictures with 15 Beautifully Coloured Panels for Children Aged 3 to 6, and later released under the better known title of Struwwelpeter. In Struwwelpeter, there's a story about a about a girl who plays with matches who burns to death. There's another story in which a boy is warned not to suck on his thumbs. When he fails to take heed, a tailor comes to cut his thumbs off with giant scissors.

Oh, he doesn't threaten to cut them off--he cuts them off...

Recently, children's author and illustrator Bob Staake did my favorite version of Struwwelpeter to date, when he was asked by progressive publisher Fantagraphics if there was any book he wanted to do that traditional publishers wouldn't allow him to do.

I'm not sure that a lot of parents bought this one, but they should have!

One of my favorite Russian Folktale characters is Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga is a witch with long spindly legs who lives in a cabin that walks around on giant chicken feet. She might help you out, or she might eat you (and she dines principally on children, of course), depending on her mood at the time.

And then there are the French and the English. Here's a charming illustration by Gustave Dore for Tom Thumb...

Now this isn't exactly the version of Tom Thumb that I would suggest you read to your kids, but it might have been more appropriate at the time. But I'll get into that more, in a moment.

Jack the giant killer...

Well, killed giants.

You can sugar coat it all you want...

But the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk "smells the blood of a an Englishman" because he wants to eat Englishmen.

So why are these stories so scary? Were parents trying to torture their children? The way some of these tales were told did have something to do with a less enlightened form of child rearing, but the harsh morals became more obvious as times became more puritanical. The earliest of these stories didn't typically have an obvious moral. Maybe the moral of Hansel and Gretel is "be resourceful" or "avoid temptation", but whatever the moral, it wasn't quite as in your face as Struwwelpeter. I don't think the moral was the objective of the story. So what was the objective, beyond telling a compelling story?

"Objective" might be overstating it. Theres no denying that violent stories are compelling. The threat of violence is the easiest way to put your character in jeopardy. But I think there's another reason these stories are so brutal, even if it wasn't a conscious one. Before modern medicine, children were surrounded by death; death in childbirth, death by disease, death from violent mishap. People simply didn't live as long, and you never knew when someone you loved or cared for might die some horrible death. I think these kinds of stories served as a buffer for that. As a safe container for, and point of transition to accepting real death and real violent misfortune.

One interpretation of the classic Beauty and the Beast tale reflects another reality of the time: young girls were often married off to older men of means who were thought to be able to better provide for them. The story was a metaphor for discovering the "prince" inside old men whom these young women (and by young, I mean barely in their teens) might otherwise find less than appealing. The men didn't always turn out to be princes, but regardless, the arrangement was a practical necessity. There were less choices in general for women back then.

Even with the introduction of modern medicine and a greater level of gender equality, adulthood was, and continues to be filled with many difficult and terrible realities. Many of these realities present themselves to us at a very young age, and until very recently, children's stories continued to reflect these realities.

And even in more modern tales for children, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

It wasn't always pretty. These ladies want to put that baby in that steaming pot!

Entering the 20th century, children's stories continued to have an edge to them. L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, in many ways, wasn't any less terrifying than The Brother's Grimm.

This is one of the original illustrations by W.W. Denslow for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

In the late 1800s, Randolph Caldecott wrote and illustrated some of the first true picture books designed for young children. In Caldecott's books, the pictures were as important as the words. It's Caldecott for whom the Caldecott Medal, the award for excellence in children's picture books, was named for.

These stories were based primarily on children's nursery rhymes, but at the time, young children were still read the Brothers Grimm, and other folk, and modern tales.

Later in the 20th century a trend towards greater censorship began, with morals groups rallying against what was considered harmful or obscene. The Hays code was introduced to censor film in the 1930s, and in the 1950s Fredric Wertham cracked down on comic books, which were then thought to be the cause of juvenile delinquency. By the late 50s, picture books in particular had taken on an even more saccharine tone. It started with the Dick and Jane books in the 1930s--some of the first books available to young children designed to teach them to read. These books were incredibly bland. The object was first to teach, and to entertain, came a distant, to nonexistent second.

In the 60s, Dr. Seuss was given the task by his publisher to use the same basic vocabulary used in the Dick and Jane books to write a book that was genuinely entertaining. His answer was The Cat in The Hat.

And the Cat in the Hat changed the face of early reader books forever. I remember as a kid in the late 70s still being subjected to Dick and Jane in school, but now these books are long gone.

There are two kinds of picture books: those designed for children to read themselves, and those designed to be read to children. By the 60s, books designed to be read to young children were starting to emerge that were just a little more scary. One of the greatest examples of a picture book that dared to be scary was Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

The Wild Things gnashed their terrible teeth and threatened to eat Max, they loved hims so. For a young child, it's scary stuff, but it's a kind of scary kids need. It's also the kind of book that it would be hard to get published today.

In the nineties, scary started to come back in a big way in the form of middle reader chapter books.

Parents tend to hate the popular Goosebumps series, but kids loved them. I wouldn't call it great literature, but for the first time, preteens had their own Stephen King. What you might not remember is that these books predated Harry Potter by a number of years, and in a way, primed its audience for something a little more sophisticated. And that's when the young adult fantasy revolution began:

And continues to this day. Right now, young adult books are the only growth market in the publishing industry. Even authors popular in other genres, like John Grisham and Carl Hiaasen, have taken to writing for the young adult market, but fantasy themed books still dominate.

But when it comes to scary, picture books still lag behind. In the eighties, picture books really lost their footing, returning to an earlier era of squeaky clean.

Good Dog Carl epitomizes this trend to me. Harking back to Dick and Jane blandness, it was the kind of book that appealed more to grandparents looking for a good gift for their grandchildren, than actual kids.

Somewhere between a Good Dog Carl and a Harry Potter there needs to be a transition point. You don't need to terrify children, but you do need to give kids a safe container for their nightmares. Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for, but more importantly: kids like scary stories. But they need scary stories that are appropriate for them.

Where scarier material for children has been introduced in recent years, is in animated films like Toy Story 3 and Shrek. Movies like Toy Story 3 aren't written for young children, and have a level of adult sophistication that doesn't accommodate a kids understanding of reality, but adults take their kids to these movies anyway. There seems to be a real disconnect between what kinds of picture books are appropriate for kids, and what kinds of movies are appropriate for kids. It's a disconnect that I don't quite understand--what makes a scary movie "family fare", and a scary picture book "too scary" for kids? So though I do think kids need scary, they need scary that's specifically written for them, and with them in mind. Not in a condescending way, but in a way that truly speaks to them. Publishers need to understand this, and we need to reintroduce scary stories into the picture book market that make sense for contemporary kids. We owe it to them, both as a developmental tool, and so that they will become better readers. Besides, good scary never fails to entertain.

Running Cow

2011-07-07T03:22:00.001-07:00

This, for a project that I won't post for a while, but I'm doing a lot of drawing, and there's not much I can post right now. So here's an irate running cow.

Inspirations Old and New, Part 3: More Inkspirations

2011-07-05T04:57:00.000-07:00

In this installment I'm going to feature more ink guys, both in the children's book field and in comics, since a lot of the best work in ink right now is being done in comics, some of it little seen. To start with, one of the truly great cartoonists who's still working today::

Ronald Searle

English artist Ronald Searle has done everything from children's books to adult satire...

and is known for his wicked sense of humor.

Searle's influence runs deep--there would be no Steadman or Scarfe without Searle.

William Steig

Steig is an American contemporary of Searle, and first gained his reputation doing cartoons for the New Yorker in the early days of the magazine:

Yes, there was a time when, more often than not, New Yorker cartoons were well drawn and funny. There are still some standout artists, but you just don't have talents of the caliber of Steig and Charles Adams working for the magazine anymore. Steig's relationship with the magazine continued until his death in 2003. By then his work had reached its full maturity, with a direct and spare pen and ink approach.

But I grew up on Steig's children's books. He's probably best known for Shrek because of the movie franchise. Shrek! was published when I was a teen, in 1990, so I didn't discover it till later. Not surprisingly, the book is very different than the movie.

But I grew up on books like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble...

And my favorite, Amos and Boris, about a mouse who rescues a whale.

Heinrik Drescher

One of my favorite children's book illustrators and authors is Heinrik Drescher. I first discovered Drescher as a teen, from the children's program, Reading Rainbow. Reading Rainbow was hosted by LeVar Burton who was famous for his role in Star Trek The Next Generation, and the focus of the show was primarily on picture books. It featured picture books narrated and animated with limited animation, and best of all, would often take you into the artist/author's studio. One of those artist's studios was Heinrik Drescher's, and the featured book was Simon's Book.

In the book, Simon's doodles come to life, and I loved Drescher's lively, scratchy, doodle style. I remember Drescher showing Burton all this cool stuff in his studio, including a hand made folding book that featured a monster eating a kid. There was some weird tension between Burton and Drescher that I couldn't figure out, and Burton seemed unable to contain a general sense of being underwhelmed. But I loved it!

Here's Drescher's Pat the Beasty, a Pull and Poke book, a parody of Dorothy Kunhardt's classic "touch and feel" book for babies, Pat the Bunny. In it, a girl and boy abuse a hapless beasty, as you're instructed to pull on his rubber boogers, annoy him with scratch and sniff dirty socks, and generally abuse him. In the end, the beast is unable to take it anymore, and he eats the children. He also eats you, as his mouth folds open pop-up style and you see a little mirror inside. It's a fantastic book!

And more by Drescher:

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Drescher is also known for his gorgeous, mixed media and collage sketchbooks:

Now for the comics guys. I'll start with:

Richard C. Thompson

For me, Cul-De-Sac is the last of the great newspaper strips, as good as anything in the history of comics. Consistently funny, and character driven.

If that weren't enough,Thompson does great editorial work as well.

Greg Ruth

Greg Ruth has done children's books, illustrated classics like Jack London and Sherlock Holmes, and comics. It's amazing work all around. His dry brush technique is unparalleled, and looking at Ruth has changed my whole approach to dry brush.

Perhaps his best work is his comics work, and he's one of the few artists who does high fantasy whom I really appreciate. I've never been a great fan of Conan the Barbarian, but somehow Ruth makes it work. Here's Conan as a child doing some horrible injury to a wolf. He certainly catches the mood.

And more comics, this time in rich, painterly black and white. Some of his work reminds me of the German expressionist, Käthe Kollwitz.

Everything from figures to andscapes, Ruth treats with effortless-looking facility and evocative mood.

Sammy Harkham

Sammy Harkham is best known for the progressive comics anthology, Kramer's Ergot (Stubbornly pronounced by Harkham as ur-got. I always feel like a jerk when I call it that, though. I remember asking for it at a convention and calling it this, and being corrected by the publisher, so basically, at this point I give up). Every issue of Kramer's is packed full of beautiful work by veterans of the field and artists whose work is seldom seen. Harkham has done only a handful of comics, but all of them are worth tracking down. Early on he did a story called, "poor sailor" about a sailor lost at sea, that continues to be an influence on many of his peers. Unfortunately it's a hard story to track down. It was printed in an issue of Kramer's and in it's own little hardbound book from Buenaventura Press. Both are rare and hard to find.

Jordan Crane

Jordan Crane did a picture book called, The Clouds Above, which is ostensibly a comic book, but no more a comic book than In the Night Kitchen. it was published by a publisher primarily known for doing alternative and avant garde comics, so it fell under the radar of the children's book community. As a result, it was ignored by Library associations, children's book critics and just about everyone with any influence who cares about children's books, but I feel its destined to be a classics once it is discovered by the right people.

And this is Crane's infrequently published anthology for adults, Uptight. Jordan is well known for his expert use of spot colors, as you can see here. You can also buy his beautiful silkscreen prints on his website.

Last but not least, the great...

Rick Grimes

I first discovered Grimes in the comics anthology by Steve Bisette, Taboo, with his story, Hell's Toupee. I was about 16, and the story made a huge impact on me:

As did each successive Grimes story in later issues of the anthology. Grimes work seemed to be, in part, influenced by German Expressionists like George Grosz, but like Jim Woodring, it seemed like he was channeling some unique and fully realized world.

Grimes' work is little known, and even in the comics community, seldom seen. His work represents a truly unique vision, but remains under appreciated.

Ryan H., a few years ago, discovered that I had mentioned that I was a fan of Grimes on the cartoonist, Mark Martin's blog, and said he was putting together a fan site. He put me in touch with Grimes and I decided to write Grimes a letter. Grimes replied with a long handwritten letter that I still keep and treasure, and later sent me various magazines in which his work had appeared. This became the start of a correspondence and online friendship, and I continue to keep in touch with Grimes. To his credit, Ryan H's fan site turned out to be this monumental and comprehensive tribute to Grimes, and is where you can see virtually his complete body of work.

Speaking of Mark Martin, Mark is another long time online friend, and I've been corresponding with mark for over 10 years now! He does some of the funniest comics I know, and his work is well worth tracking down. I wish I had some better images to post, but you'll have to settle for these, until you check out his website:

I just checked, and Mark's website seems to be in a state of transition while he works on his current project, but check back! I'm sure he'll be posting there, soon.

You can see more of these artists work on their websites below:

Rick Grimes, Ronald Searle (another amazing tribute site), William Steig, Heinrik Drescher, Richard C. Thompson, Greg Ruth, Sammy Harkham, Mark Martin and Jordan Crane

And I think that covers it! Let me know if I left anyone out. And thanks for reading! It might be a while till my next installment since this has proven to be more time consuming than I thought. In the meantime I'll try to post at least a little artwork in the weeks to come, but I'm a bit preoccupied right now with a project for a competition that I'd rather not post until the competition is over in mid September.

Thanks for reading!