Hogwash & Nonsense

Sketchbook Thursday

What better way to start a Thursday than with a big ole sketchbook dump?

I, for one, can't think of anything better.

An early sketch for the Book Cover Club project...

A warm-up sketch of working in the studio just post move... the studio is a liiiittle better now, though, admittedly there's still room for improvement...

A pre-Halloween warm-up sketch of Coco & Oscar...

Silly circus-ness...

And CHICKENS!

As part of my mail-project to N, I decided to start designing a deck of cards. I've always wanted to make a set, and it's a nice finite sort of project. For my deck, I decided that I wanted to play with the royal cards, and give each suit a different animal. I had been doing quite a few sketches and doodles of birds for an earlier project and arbitrarily assigned them to the spades.

The first thing I did was design the Ace. I needed to get a feel for the overall shape of the suit elements. Was the spade itself rounded, pointy, wide, skinny, elongated...?

After the ace, I did a bunch of the numbers just to play with layout.

And finally, it was time for the fun part, the royal cards -

The Jack, who I imagined to be a self-important, plump little bird.

The Queen, a regal but distant sort of lady bird.

The King, somewhat aloof and irritated, most often by his Jack.

Once I had all of the cards in the suit done, I had a basic sense of the color palette and the overall shapes and feel of the characters, and I was ready to design the back of my deck.

Stay tuned, dear readers. Next week, diamonds!

Belated Halloween

Happy November blog-readers!

This is not exactly a timely post, as Halloween has come and gone, but I just finished uploading photos and wanted to share. This year I ended up carving not one, but seven pumpkins - one for myself and six for a friend's Halloween party. I must say, I'm rather proud of the silly lot.

First one carved at home... he's so happy!

Party pumpkins.

The big guy in action.

Bleeeeeh!

Two more party pumpkins, note Jack Skellington on the left.

Boo!

I also did a bunch of crafting to pull together my costume - a sort of masquerade style peacock.

And of course, one gratuitous cat photo...

Mail!

I don't know about the rest of you out there in blog-land, but email just doesn't cut it for me. I like big yellow envelopes and brightly colored stamps and packages that arrive unexpectedly on your doorstep.

Recently an out-of-town friend and I agreed to start sending one another a piece of mail each week. I've been using my weekly letters as an excuse to do a little doodling and goofing around with my art. I started working on my first letter on the train and turned a subway doodle into a little four page book with a pop up letter. (Just a quick note... I didn't want to post any of the art from the letters until N had received my packages, so I made this particular piece about three weeks ago.)

Front page (note the purple tab at the top)

Interior pages (the purple tab is actually the letter!)

Back cover

Subway doodle

Just a quick post of a recent silly subway scribble-doodle I sent my sister about my day -

The Book Cover Club - Murakami

Hey there everyone.

I'm still trucking along on Coco & Oscar sketches, thumbnails, and preliminary book dummy, but in the meantime, I took on a few additional projects. (Do I smell a freelance job? Maaaybe! But I shall save that project for another day.) Today I wanted to share another book cover.

This month, Nowness.com hosted a competition for Murakami inspired artwork in honor of the release of his latest title, 1Q84. The Book Cover Club saw this as an excellent opportunity. Alas I missed the deadline, so my piece is not on the Nowness. It is, however, posted on the Book Cover Club blog. But do head over and check out all of the fab submissions (especially those by the inimitable Ryan Hartley, Philip Cheaney, Kristy Caldwell, and Jess Worby) and cast your vote.

In the meantime, here's a look at my cover for Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

Coco & Oscar

Hey there blog-readers,

It's autumn in Brooklyn, and what better way to celebrate the best of all seasons than with a post full of new characters?

Meet Coco. She's cute and silly and in desperate need of a best friend, someone to be the Selma to her Louise, the Laurel to her Hardy, the Robin to her Batman.

And then there's Oscar. He just wants someone to appreciate his love of checkers, tango, and the fine art of muffin-making.

Hilarity ensues.

And a few final images. A preliminary spread for the book -

Finally, in honor of the changing season, a few autumn related images of Coco & Oscar fun.

Double Self-Portrait

So this post requires a bit of pictorial explanation before I post the actual piece.

For those of you who I haven't seen in recent days, while I was out in Minneapolis visiting a friend, I chopped off all of my hair. (Do not despair, I donated it.)

Haircut:

I had a particularly inspired working day the other morning...

and yes, I work better in a silly hat

Gratuitous cat photo.

So pre-haircut, I had started a self-portrait project for a contest. The contest is being run by Tony DiTerlizzi's facebook fan page. The title is "Re-imagine Yourself", and the goal is to create a portrait of yourself within one of the many DiTerlizzi stories. There was no end to the possibilities, and the brainstorming itself was incredibly fun; I almost had too many choices.

In any case, I finally settled on a self-portrait as an imaginary monster in Tony's hilarious and ridiculous alphabet book, "G is for One Gzonk", using my crazy ginormous hair as a jumping off point. I created a monster not only entirely engulfed by the crazy ocean of red, but also whose hair becomes a character itself, creeping about and nabbing odds and ends and even other creatures from the original book.

But then I cut all of my hair off.

So I went back to the portrait, did a little revision, and voila double self-portrait, pre- and post-new-do.

The Rumprunkus

Double Self-Portrait

in the style of Tony DiTerlizzi's

"G is for One Gzonk: An Alpha-Number-Bet Book"

The rhyme in it's entirety:

The Rare and Red Rumprunkus

Is barely visible, you see.

Covered with a vibrant mane,

Her hair's as wild as can be.

That monstrous RED hides many things -

It hides baubles, bits, and bangles.

Even ribbons, rocks, and riches

Are caught up among the tangles.

But beware the creeping tendrils,

As they slither through the air.

With a strange life of their own,

They might drag you under there.

The Book Cover Club

Hallooo everyone,

Recently, a few friends from SVA started a new blog, The Book Cover Club. The premise - read a book, design a cover. In short, awesome. After I saw the first three posts, I knew that I wanted to get involved. So for the fourth book, the Club chose "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. (For cliff notes.)

I've never designed a book cover before, so I took a stab. Not my favorite piece, but it was a good experience. I knew that I wanted something dark and moody - which hardly describes my usual work - so I decided to experiment a little with the medium. I actually rendered the art by entirely coating a piece of foam core with dark watercolor. Then using a paintbrush loaded with water, I began to slowly remove bits of the paint off of the board. It's a subtractive process, rather than additive, and allows you to start with a really dark background and get progressively lighter.

I'm okay with the final product; I like the overall image and the texture, but there are things I would reconsider, especially the type treatment (thanks ESup). It was my first attempt at a book cover, I'm glad I did it, and I will definitely try another. My cover is below, but you should absolutely click on over to the Book Cover blog and check out the amazing things the other SVA kids created.

SCBWI Thank You

Hey there blog-readers,

I just realized that I never posted this. I set up a post about the conference back in August, started writing, and never posted it. Oops.

I don't know I can really do the entire experience justice. It was jaw-dropping, exciting, exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming, refreshing, satisfying, hope-inducing, doubt-banishing, jam-packed with people I absolutely adore and admire... I could continue adding adjectives to that list, but I still don't know that it would adequately capture the amazingness of the weekend. It was a very reaffirming sort of experience. I cannot imagine spending my life doing anything but this. And part of my love of children's publishing is absolutely the other people in the field; I have never met a group of folks more passionate about what they do. Just one example of dozens from the weekend - I went to a break-out workshop on picture books (an amazing soup-to-nuts overview from first manuscript to printed page), and the art director running it stepped up to the podium. Before even beginning her talk, she stopped and took a look around the packed room (and I do mean packed... wall-to-wall artists, writers and publishers).

"Who here loves picture books?" she asked. And before waiting for an answer, she raised her hand, "I do!"

Everyone I met at the conference loves what they do, loves the field, and loves books. That in and of itself was incredibly inspiring.

I was so grateful for the experience that I threw together a little thank you card for the staff, art directors, and editors who I met. (You may recognize part of the image. There's a reason I carry a sketchbook.)

And now just a couple of photos from the Illustrator Intensive Day. After the main conference weekend, there was a full day intensive, during which seven working professionals did a live demonstration of how they work. It was incredible. All seven artists are amazing, and I would absolutely recommend checking out their books.