Scenes from the cafeteria

These are from last year, drawn on the spot in the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory cafeteria. I was using a wonderful fat pigment marker at the time.

The LDEO campus used to be an estate; it retains vestiges of that past. There's a Victorian garden, an apple orchard, old buildings. And there's the cafeteria, which used to be the pool (or natatorium, perhaps). The pool itself is now a basement with tiled walls (!), messily storing lots of outdated science equipment and people's old files. But the cafeteria part has the pool's huge old windows, good for catching a lunchtime patch of sun. I can only imagine how lovely it must have been to swim there.

Over a couple of months, I drew lots and lots of scientists eating. I tried to be sneaky, but I'm sure some of them caught me at it.

Mo dances

Testing out some animation tools:



(music by the Klezmer Conservatory Band; used without permission but I hope they don't mind)

Sketchity sketch sketch

When in doubt, mine the sketchbook.

Book dummies of the future?

A book dummy is a mock-up of a picture book containing sketches and text, used for planning a book and submitting it to publishers. (More here on picture book construction.)

One way to set it up (image by Bob Staake, whose work I first encountered as an impressionable yet wiseacre teen via the Style Invitational in the Washington Post)

Although some literary agents now accept manuscript submissions via e-mail, digital book dummies are, perhaps, not as straightforward. Maybe it's the large file sizes or the absence of physical page turns...or maybe it's just inertia. We book people like to hold paper in our hands.* Still, I expect dummies to go digital sooner or later. The technology is ready and waiting.

*On the other hand, we book people appreciate not having sore arms and backs from schlepping multiple 300-page manuscripts all over the subway and creation. An editor friend of mine recently got an e-book reader for looking at manuscripts, and boy, is she happy!

Photos as illustration

Illustration often loses turf wars to photography; I wish it weren't so. For some venues, though, photography is the more appropriate choice. In news coverage, for example, you often want the literal reality that a photograph can provide.

Lately, I've found myself noticing photographs for their illustrative qualities as well. Many news photos simply provide a window into the story, and that's fine. But some news photos are more conceptual; in addition to showing literal reality, they encapsulate the idea of a story. The New York Times frequently uses this sort of photo, especially for the front page.

These photos, which accompany a recent New York Times story about a rare snowstorm in London, provide a decent example (the first image is from Reuters; the second, from Getty):


Why are these photos also like illustrations? One of the main ideas of the article is this: "It snowed in London." They could have used any number of snow scenes: children playing, people struggling down the sidewalk, backed-up traffic, snow-covered trees. We often see photos of these things after local snowstorms. But these snow photos contain iconic London buildings: Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Even better is that British flag umbrella, which contains the ideas of "Britain" and "foul weather" all in one swoop and provides a nice graphic punch to boot. These are elements a conceptual illustrator might use.

BEAT THE TIME!

This Sesame Street sketch with Guy Smiley and the Count is a great example of character-driven writing. Of course this is what happens when you put these two in a room together.

Books as museums

On his blog about children's nonfiction, Marc Aronson has an interesting post comparing older children's nonfiction to a documentary. I've often thought of children's nonfiction as a museum--a combination of words and visuals, sometimes more narrative, sometimes more browseable. As Holling Clancy Holling (author/illustrator of Paddle-to-the-Sea and other epics about American history, geography, and natural history) writes in Minn of the Mississippi:

“A natural history museum is simply a roofed group of four big boxes holding specimens. These four ‘departments’ with ‘divisions’ hold four kinds of things—specimens of our ‘Earth’—its plants—its animal life—and its people.”

Loosely speaking, I think he's made a good description of his own books.

Suburban renewal

Here's a conceptual experiment (I think it's probably not working but I like the idea and the colors) based on a recent bit from the NY Times website.

From the other night at the Society of Illustrators:

Quentin Blake

I think Quentin Blake was the first illustrator whom I really studied. He's best-known, especially here in the States, for illustrating many of Roald Dahl's books, but he's done covers or interiors for literally hundreds of books, from classic literature to picture books he wrote himself.

It's the quality of Quentin Blake's line that has compelled me to spend so many hours with my nose an inch away from the pages of his books. His drawings are loose, expressive, and full of energy. They look as though he dashed them off without half-thinking. That's not quite accurate--he uses a light box--but it takes a practiced hand to make it look both exactly right and easy as pie. And as many illustrators know, it's a hard thing to maintain the energy of your sketches in your finals.

Quentin Blake is British; although he's merely well-known here, he's famous there. He was appointed the first Children's Laureate, from 1999-2001. The Library of Congress recently invented a similar position, which is called the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Ambassador, not Laureate, because laureate is a tricky word for Americans and because children's books here are a matter of civic duty rather than artistic achievement. Anyway, that person is currently Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Stories and many other hilarities. But I digress!

Many British illustrators--Simon James, Polly Dunbar, Tony Ross, Charlotte Voake--seem to have taken technical and stylistic cues from Quentin Blake, so much so that I think of their work as distinctly British. Whether Quentin Blake is the progenitor of this look or whether he and others are responding to something else entirely, I do not know.

Quentin Blake's website is a treat for both readers and illustrators. It's full of his work, of course, but it's also got photos of his studio, an explanation of his process, and even a short film showing him at the drawing board.

Some charcoal and a big piece of paper

These sketches are from a figure session with Greg Manchess (no, it's not him!). I like drawing clothed models sometimes because I think the drape and fold of fabric can be put to good expressive use.

You, too, can have smoochy lips

These sketches were a hoot to do.

They're actually an exercise in illustration for marketing (though I didn't worry too much about staying consistent with their current brand image, as you can see!). I spent so much time thinking about Burt's Bees that I get a little jolt of recognition every time I walk past a display. In other words, I have successfully marketed to myself.

The man in the paper mask

You (the New York you) know Saul Steinberg's work, even if you don't realize it. He's probably most famous for this piece, a classic New Yorker cover that is New York chauvinism at its most hilarious.

I've loved Saul Steinberg ever since I discovered The Passport, an early volume of his work, on my parents' shelves. He's a master doodler, a drafter of fake documents, and he also photographed himself wearing simple masks.

Hence the following experiment (thanks, roommate!):

Obligatory kowtowing

OK! After a loooonnnnng hiatus, here's the new, live, really and truly active blog.