The future is a guess

A few times here at the illustration blog I have linked to materials outside the focus of illustration, art, literature and entertainment. In other words material about real life. This Bill Moyers show is worth watching no matter what the political feelings you carry. It is a fascinating look behind the scenes of how this country works politically, how decisions are made and how wars are entered into. So many ideas are represented as facts, so many timelines presented with no questions asked, it’s scary. If you watch the entire episode I think you will find yourself hoping to hear someone have the bravery to come out and say, “This is a no win situation. Let’s save the lives of all these kids and get the heck out.”  Maybe someone will this time.

From his site -
Bill Moyers considers a President’s decision to escalate troop levels in a military conflict. Through LBJ’s taped phone conversations and his own remembrances, Bill Moyers looks at Johnson’s deliberations as he stepped up America’s role in Vietnam.

Bill Moyers Journal, November 20th 2009.

Happy Holidays from The Book That Eats People

If, by chance, you are giving a copy of The Book That Eats People as a Holiday gift, here’s the perfect add-on! A Book That Eats People gift tag. Download, print and carefully cut out to make the perfect package a little less perfect. Of course it looks great on any book you decide to give.

Download a high resolution JPG here.

Small World Tees For Sale Online

Small World Tees are finally available for sale online! There are 6 or 7 designs in sizes and shirt colors galore. They offer two types of shirts and can be easily ordered online from the Infinite Inks store site. Or if you are a retailer drop them a line.

I will probably shamelessly flog these shirts for a time. The store is located here. So stop in and buy hundreds. Or not.

As the old saying goes: Buy a small world tee. Monkeys like cheese. Shirts to wear. Bears beware.

 

Of course these shirts feature my artwork. So if nothing else stop in and look at the pretty pictures. They feature aliens, lions, chickens, birds and ungulates. Just like a high school reunion.

Something like that anyway.

Does this idea suck?

I’m not sure how other writers work but I tend to have 5 or 6 projects going at once. Some are similar and only one of the group will fully develop. For instance, I have 3 picture books I am actively working on. But I suspect only one has the legs to move on. If I was a corporation I would have to wonder about all that wasted time on ‘bad’ projects. Of course, how else do you get to the good ones? I suppose, maybe, perhaps…someone as amazingly prolific as Stephen King has the ability to make bigger jumps. Perhaps one of his innate abilities that was refined in his career, was to know a little faster than others that “This idea just isn’t going to work.”

I have to spend quite a bit of time on something before I can say that.

I enjoy working in a couple of different genres at once. I have a high fantasy/detective/film noir graphic novel I am editing. A middle grade, horror novel that is slowly turning into a graphic novel (once I hit upon what made the story intriguing, I realized it works better as a graphic novel). I have the sci-fi graphic novel I am working on for Chronicle Books, an animated short that will take me 10 years to finish and a few other projects that dare not speak their names.

Projects I like to call ‘cellar’ projects. These projects are probably too much of a mash-up to ever find a home at a publisher. But I am driven to complete them. Get them out of my head, so to speak. They take up a lot of time, but I enjoy the creative adventure and the opportunity to just make something that hits the beats I want to, with little concern about what demographic they are for.

What amazes me is how much time goes into projects that never quite make it. The creative process is pretty bizarre. You don’t know exactly what you are going to get. That’s why Hollywood is such a non-traditional business to try and manage. Millions of dollars on the line and still it’s filled with fickle starts-and-stops. Good ideas that never quite develop. Films that are labored over and fine tuned only to die quickly and painfully once released.

At least I get to go through the process of creation and destruction in the private on my third floor studio. Only my dogs see the fits I go through as I try and find an idea with legs. An idea that works through beginning, middle and end. It’s become obvious to me that every project I do, no matter if it finds a published home or even gets finished, is simply practice for the next idea that takes up residence in my mind at 2 in the morning and gets in the way of my life until I have no choice but to jump in with both feet and let it start eating up time.

SCBWI – Inside Story 2009

I’m trying to catch up with posts. But in catching up I just get further behind. Maybe it’s my artistic temperament. Remember, go back to my desk, settle down, focus, and catch-up!

I was a guest at the SCBWI of Western Washington’s wonderful event Inside Story on October 28th. I was up there to discuss, what else, The Book That Eats People. It was held at a great independent book store called Third Place Books in their Lake Forest Park location. We had an enthusiastic audience and a bunch of wonderful writers and illustrators who gave the Inside Story on their projects. I got to meet old and new fans of the book (amazing considering it’s only been out since August I think, but one person already had two copies for me to sign and bought another). And of course I got to look at a mountain of beautiful books and hear from an array of writers working in different genres.

Mike Cressy even showed up just to let me know I couldn’t get into Washington without the Oregon Alarm sounding.

Below are some rather bad iPhone pics from the event. Thanks to Meg Lippert and crew for putting together such a cool event.

The Book That Eats People and Philosophy

I just came across a fascinating review/discussion of The Book That Eats People on a blog called-  human behavior. Based in Australia, I believe, they bought the book Down Under. That makes me happy.

I see the author, John Perry, has read the review and wrote a great comment afterwords.  I love the fact that this book is dynamic and offers so many POV’s and can stimulate a discussion about so many different ideas. This reviewer is especially interested in the moral aspects of the story. Is it a good book? Is it scary? Does it have a moral perspective? How exciting to be able to think about these issues as part of a picture book discussion!

Here’s a link to the review at human behavior.

2009 Gift Tags Available

I changed the theme of my gift tags this year to Cats and Dogs. The new set of tags are posted in my Free Gift Tag section. Or you can click here to see them and download a high-res file for printing at home.

Oregonian Book Review

The Book That Eats People got called out in The Oregonian on Sunday.

Read it here – Review by Helen Babbit, or see below.

Here are three children’s books that come with teeth, lots of teeth. The first is “The Book That Eats People,” written by John Perry and illustrated by Mark Fearing, who lives near Portland. The book comes with a warning: “This is not a bedtime story!” It tells the story of a people-eating book while actually being that book.

The book’s victims include poor Sammy Ruskin, who tasted of peanut butter, and Victoria, who was gobbled up beginning with her pink toenails and ending with the question, “Have you ever heard a book burp?”

Fearing’s illustrations incorporate collage, seasoning the book with depth, humor and vibrancy. Perhaps it is time for a book with teeth, considering the millions of books that have been devoured by readers.

- The Oregonian – 11-1-2009

The Book That Eats Reviews

Two more review are out for The Book That Eats People. The reviewers seem to get the attitude of this book, which is great. I had one discussion with someone concerned about what age child the book is appropriate for. I don’t think age is as big of issue as is the personality of the child. I know a certain three year old who, while she thinks it’s scary, LOVES how bad the book is, and doesn’t think it’s real. Not like VAMPIRES. Or bears. This three year old is REALLY scared of bears. Except blue or pink bears. Those aren’t scary. But I digress…

Certainly the book will appeal more to kids 4 and up. But I believe it’s too funny to be REALLY scary. I think watching ‘commentators’ on TV ‘news’ is far scarier.

First up a review from The School Library journal.

In this tale of tongue-in-cheek terror, a breathless narrator warns readers about a book gone rogue. Beginning with a peanut-butter-fingered child who pages through it and is gobbled up, the book leaves a trail of bones, chewed pages, and missing children and grown-ups as it takes advantage of its prey’s cluelessness. Finally caught by police after someone sees it in action, the jailed book is transferred to the zoo. But readers are holding the very book and are warned at the conclusion, “…this book is always hungry. And it eats people.” This hilariously dark story is illustrated with collage elements using Photoshop in a jazzy, jangly style that is part noir and part graphic novel. Big-eyed characters are stalked by a wonderfully sinister and pointy-toothed tome. Readers who love monsters and a good scare while still delighting in silly proceedings will definitely want to brave this tale.

—School Library Journal, November 2009

And from the Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Book

“The title gives you fair warning, but in case you’ve missed the point, the text underscores it firmly: “This is NOT a storybook. It is NOT a book of rhymes. It isn’t a how-to dictionary. It’s a book that eats people.” Apparently the book got a taste for flesh by snacking on a young owner, and since then there have been various, only intermittently successful attempts to contain its savagery; now it’s up to the current reader to look out for him/herself. This isn’t a plot, exactly, but it’s still a deliciously dark piece of comedy with a pleasingly horrific air, and the history of the volume’s malfeasance has the well-honed feel of a scary campfire story. The illustrations, created in Photoshop, encompass a startling variety of styles and effects. The colors have a bright opacity reminiscent of acrylic paints with a smudgy frescoed texture; thin lines, droll caricature, and beady eyes on the figures suggest European animation; sinister nibbles round the edge and bits of collage elements, especially burped-up print, offer reminders of the menacing message, while quick views of the glowering, toothy book (and one look into the dripping-fanged abyss) itself leave no doubt of the text’s veracity. This has the same jaunty literary irreverence as Kevin O’Malley’s works, and his fans will appreciate this as a bracing counterpoint to all those gentle self-aware book stories (like Gerstein’s A Book, BCCB 7/09); it could also simply add interest in the library for those kids who’d rather destroy books than read them and who will therefore be tickled by the idea that there’s one prepared to fight back.”

—Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books, November 2009

And for an extra treat, some more early art for The Book That Eats People. This is from the page where we let readers know it is NOT a book of rhymes or a fairytale. It has several smaller elements on it, each of those was painted large and reduced to fit in the overall layout I established. This is an early draft with some type for placement only. I wanted it to look older then the typical illustration on the pages. At the same time I didn’t want to push it o far that it was ‘antique’ looking.

Amanita Design

I’m usually not a big fan of video games. I mean, I play them – when I have time…if I have time…when I USED to have time. But the standard 3D graphics have gotten stale to me. There’s something about the ’shininess’, the surreal amount of texture detail, the hang-up on recreating reality (Look how real it looks!  Who cares? Have you ever looked at a  Van Eyck? He had hyper-surrealism/hyperrealism down in the 15th century. )

And I am not a fan of Flash as a development platform, an animation tool or whatever Adobe wants to sell it as this week. I do some work in Flash. But I rarely find it the ideal tool for anything other than hyperactive, marketing driven websites where the first thing you do is turn off the music, turn off the animation and try and find an HTML version where you can at least bookmark specific links… ANYWAY, the following post deals with a video game that’s done in Flash. So much for my cranky dislikes.

I saw this game on the Apple download page and decided to look into it and it’s really quite a cool game. The free demo works on OSX. The game play is pretty inspired. It’s not HALO – thank goodness – the body count isn’t the defining accomplishment but it’s fun to interact with, inspiring to look at and I wasted some time with it and it felt good!

The company is from the Czech Republic (Is it still called a Republic?) . Their website is here and they have some fun point-and-shoot type games (look under FLASH GAMES at the top of the page). They all feature inspired art direction, intriguing character design and innovative interaction with the scenes. Wonderful, fanciful illustrated worlds that feature a great deal of humanity in the art. They give me a real sense of seeing things from another human beings perspective. And that, for me, is usually a defining factor in what makes Art. Show me something about how you perceive the world. It doesn’t have to LOOK like the ‘real’ world. In fact,  don’t let the real world interfere if you have a strong enough vision. That’s why this work feels special to me. 99% of video games out there have no interest in presenting a point of view that resonates beyond what we precieve as ‘reality’. Even the most ridiculous, outlandish constructs in video games are rendered with the upmost care to make sure they look JUST LIKE WHAT WE SEE all the time.

This company has been doing work for quite some time and once again I am behind the times. Nothing new in discovering that. But it’s new to me and I really enjoyed it.