Monsters

One of a set of 6 ‘classic’ monster faces I created. Not sure what to do with them. T-shirts?

All the art in this series are based on recollections of some of my favorite monsters.

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How Martha Signs book in Portland!

I will be reading and signing copies of my newest picture book, How Martha Saved Her Family from Green Beans at the entirely appropriately named, Green Bean books in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, May 4th. Stop by around 2 to join in the fun. Drop in about 1:45 to see me sweating and worrying that I forgot what I was going to say.

Green beans are welcome as long as they behave. I’ll read, draw some beans and answer questions about green beans. But I won’t pick any green beans up. They bite.

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Little book, big book, book friends…

I am in no way an expert on the history of books that are small in size, but I have collected quite a few through the years. I don’t know why…I just realized that I have several boxes of some very odd, almost always mass-produced (these are NOT artisan creations) books that are just really, really small.

This is named, obviously, Chooch, The Little Engine. It’s copyright states it’s Vol 2, book 13, from 1966. A series produced by Cracker Jack Miniature Books. It measures 1.25 x 1.75 inches. A double page spread would be a whopping 2.75 inches wide, though it has no double page spread.

I recently acquired another book released a few years ago from IDW. It’s a collection of the cartoon work of Sergio Aragones, who was and still is my all time cartoon hero. Called Groo The Wanderer, Artist’s Edition. It’s one of a series of books printed by IDW that are at 100% size of the original art done by the artists. They shot the actual art pages, white out, notes, printing comments and all. It’s beautiful. Remember a few months ago I was going to stop buying books…well not so much.

It measures in at 12.25 x 17.25 inches and DOES feature double page spreads that are 24.5 inches wide. WOW.

Here are the two books and a Sharpie for reference.

Little book and big book getting along just fine. But sharing the same shelf is probably not in their futures.

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Night Rise

Third in a series of new quick sketches.

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How Martha Saved Her Parents – Before and After

As I’ve mentioned here a few times before…How Martha Saved her Parents from Green Beans pops into bookstores in April. Written by David LaRochelle and illustrated by me, it’s no doubt the greatest children’s picture book ever created. Ever. In all of history. And I mean that on a galactic scale. OK…So I’m filled with hyperbole. Give me a job in marketing then.

Anyway, Here’s a quick example of a before and after.

This is the rough sketch. This is the BEFORE stage. Notice how my rough outlines are so rough, I can’t even follow them…What is wrong with me?

And below is AFTER I run the ‘Illustrate This Page’ Photoshop plug-in. Amazing isn’t it? The bad part is the Illustrate This Page plug-in actually takes about 4 days to work and I have to be there the entire time.

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Something in the cave

Another in a series of quick sketches with a limited palette.

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Inspirations outside your comfort zone

I’ve been inspired in my work by radically different artists. I admire many graphic designers because of the clarity of their communication, some cartoonists I admired because of their fussiness and looseness. I love some painters because of the emotion they leave on the canvas and some painters I admire because of the lack of emotion on display.

Graphically I can love two styles that have not a thing to do with one another. This is puzzling to me from a professional POV.

One artist I keep coming back to is Kenneth Patchen. A poet who ‘designed’ and illustrated wonderful free-form posters. I’ve written about him here a few times, but I was once again thinking how much I like his work and how I’d like my work to look more like his. Below is one of his more well known picture poems.

Through the years I have collected practically all of his books and researched his life. His work continues to inspire me.

And isn’t this a time when we need more poet-illustrator-designer-painters?

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Troll hole as night falls

clicking makes it biggerer….

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Today is always crowded.

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Pictures vs. words.

Back in December of 2011 (so long ago, I was but a young lad…) I wrote a long winded post headlined “Can graphic novels make you smarter?” It discussed how combining the act of reading and looking at pictures to absorb a story activate different parts of the brain. You can read that post linked here.

At the time I hadn’t looked at the issue from the perspective of two interesting words which are usually used in the field of linguistics but have great resonance for the issue of using pictures and words together to tell stories.

Diachronic is a term for something happening over time. and ‘synchronic‘ refers to something that happens at a specific point in time.

In linguistics diachronic and synchronic have been defined as relating to the issues of examining language from a historical POV vs. a topological one. But I am interested in the broader meaning of the terms.

The big idea is that you gain meaning from language as it unfolds through time e.g. “Once upon a time there was a bear and a monkey who were best friends.”

Whereas you can absorb the impact from an illustration immediately e.g. an illustration showing a bear and monkey playing video games together.

Of course you can study the illustration, and gain more from it, but when you combine the experience of reading a story using words and have part of that story use visual imagery the brain is doing some extra work to build a larger meaning and context. Contradictions can arise and new levels of similarity can be gained.

I began to realize that a graphic novels and picture books activate different processes for a reader. And perhaps part of the intrigue and interest is that the brain is conceptualizing the narrative in different ways because of how we understand language vs. an illustration. (See this intriguing article from Science Daily about how a brain understands images) We read and gain understanding through time, while the image not only informs us in one ‘blast’ but they physically use different parts of the brain to gather meaning.

The brain likes to be surprised in a narrative. And by combining the use of language and image it’s a more dynamic experience.

I’m not saying that the more elements you add to a narrative creation the better it is. But it may explain why a graphic novel or a picture book brings such great pleasure and satisfaction to a reader.

I also suspect that better understanding how we experience words and pictures in different ways can help illustrators and writers better exploit what makes each form interesting and dynamic.

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