Yet Another Pirate

Another Pirate

Pirate Drawing

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

My Favorite Model

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

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. 

The Longest Winter For Cricket Magazine!

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

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

More monsters to give you the creeps...

More Mini Monster Drawings

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

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

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...

More monsters for my monster book. 

This would be a Dwarfis Creepus Insomnilopus:

And a Backwards Forwalpus:

50 Monsters in Progress

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

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.

Red Fox Racer, Early Memories of Saturday Morning Cartoons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Cherry Blossom Silhouettes

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.

Woman in a Japanese Kimono

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.