About a Book Wednesday

There are SOOOO MANY picture books on store and library shelves. It is easy to miss some that are really enjoyable. Almost every time I spend time in a library or book store, or wandering blogs at 3 a.m., I find new illustrators whose work I love. A few stand out so much that I go through the trouble of tracking all their work down.

This week I want to mention an illustrator who has become one of my favorites. I’m guilty of buying books just because he drew them. I’m not sure that’s a good thing…but a sale is a sale in this day and age, right?

Leo and Lester is a cute, but perhaps overly complicated picture book by Becky Bloom illustrated by Pascal Biet. I have several books by Pascal Biet that I really enjoy and they are all written by Becky Bloom. My favorite books by this duo are probably Mice Make Trouble, and Wolf!.

Biet’s illustrations create a totally engaging and enthralling world.  They have a loose, gestural quality with characters who display a plethora (Whoo! I got to use plethora in a posting!) of emotions and attitudes. They are totally alive  to me. It’s a book that shouldn’t get lost on the shelves. If you get a chance, track it down.

Pascal Biet’s website.

More from Becky Bloom.

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Digital Perfection Paradox

What makes a good illustration? More specifically, a good picture in a picture book?

It’s subjective of course, as are all issues surrounding art. Styles that push draftsmanship to the front can feel stilted and overburdened by their attempt to reflect our visual reality. Styles that are design driven can feel aloof. Styles that celebrate looseness and abstraction can become too distant to make an emotional connection. Every solution has a strength and a weakness.

The only real test worth passing is that the pictures in a picture book should ‘work’ with the story in the book. Of course that is what editors and art directors spend much of their time on. Trying to make that perfect match between image and content. At first glance this seems an easy task. But the more you reflect on it and the more issues you take into account, the match becomes more magic than science.

Even though I work digitally, I have a system in place that leaves maximum room for improvisation and happy accidents. This took time to figure out. Most of the time digital work feels overly executed and excessively neat to me. It doesn’t take much for a beautifully drafted and wonderfully rendered page to feel staged and too precious.

Of course this is a personal taste issue. I have grown less and less excited by draftsmanship and execution as I get older. Especially in something that can be as personal as a picture book.

Animated films offer a great example. The modern, rendered, animated films are amazing to look at. The quality of art work that goes into them is overwhelming. Everything is perfect. I’m starting to think it’s too perfect in a way…(if that makes sense). I mean if there are clouds in the film, they get the best 4 guys who paint and draw clouds in the world. They get the best 4 people who design pirates if it is a pirate themed film. If it’s a film with monsters, they hire the 20 best ‘monster’ designers. So every element is designed and perfected. And the artists are great. I remember walking through some of the feature film studios and seeing projects in development and was completely overwhelmed at how great the work was.

But when everything feels that carefully executed and that refined and designed…it starts to feel dead in some ways. It’s definitely no longer a personal vision. (It’s not supposed to be, in an animated feature, I understand that…) But all that great art often adds-up to less than its parts. That’s the paradox I guess. It’s so beautiful, so tightly wound, that it doesn’t feel appealing.

In a picture book, over-execution can chill the story experience. I much prefer art that reflects something about the POV of the artist. Because the actual execution of the horse isn’t the most important factor. Over designed art often ends up feeling like reading too many adjectives in prose, everything starts to read CUTE, TENDER, LOVELY, FRESH, BOUNCY. What’s needed are just need the right adjectives and that’s the tough part.

I’ve written on this topic before for the SCBWI and on this blog. Here’s a piece I wrote for the Southern California SCBWI newsletter about working digitally. This links to a PDF of the newsletter. My article is on page 11. Now I have to go draw a horse, and if you read this blog regularly, you know how much I dread that.

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I’ll never be as good as…

I wish I could draw like Ronald Searle did.

I wish I cold tell stories like Stephen King.

I wish I could paint like Howard Pyle.

I wish I could draw like Walt Kelly.

I wish I could write like Charles Dickens or Ursula K. Le Guin or Kenneth Patchen.

I wish I could write and draw like David Ezra Stein or Peter Reynolds.

We choose our heroes haphazardly as the list above demonstrates. The ones who move us, the ones we admire, the ones we want to emulate. Hero worship is particularly rife in certain areas of the commercial arts. It seems a natural state for many cartoonists and illustrators.

When I was young my list went on and on and on. It was pointed out to me once, when I was too young to understand the implications, that this hero worship doesn’t do you any good in the long run. Of course you look around and find things that resonate with you. The art and the writing that you think is absolutely THE best. But you also have to understand that hero worship becomes a personal dogma, no more worthy to fight about than which ice cream flavor is best. Often it stands in the way of a person developing their own POV.

In the commercial arts it gets one step more complicated because commercial success seems tied to the creation of the artists. It’s easy to think, the secret to success is in how they draw hands, it’s hairless young kids talking like adults, it’s how they paint clouds or in how they introduce characters.

You don’t have Charlie Brown without Charles Schulz. But the mistake that is too often made is to try and reproduce that thing on the paper. The lines, the paint, the style of the words. But of course, that is a meaningless quest. The images and words left on paper are a manifestation of its creator/artist, more personal than a signature and the reasons behind its success are impossible to copy. And even if you did imitate the lines and the words perfectly, all you’d have is a forgery in the broadest sense.

I’m stuck with my solutions. Not as elegant as Walt Kelly, not as poetic as Ursula K. Leguin, not as grand as Charles Dickens. It’s a good thing to appreciate and admire the work of others. It’s good to look for ways to improve your work. But hero worship doesn’t help the heroes you’ve selected and it certainly doesn’t help you.

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Can I fire myself?

I spent most of my career working for very large companies. I lived my professional life in the land of cubicles, offices, booking conference rooms for meetings, trying to understand incoherent whiteboard presentations. Getting regular paychecks…

Now I am self-employed. A freelancer. A stay at home dad. A stay at home everything.

This place has less office politics than I ever imagined. Although there’s no ‘free’ soda or snacks. And it’s not a completely tension free workplace. Sometimes I have to sit myself down and let myself know that if I don’t want to work here, I can walk out that door and find something else. If I don’t want to give 110%, then find a new career.

I tell myself it is impossible to give 110%. You can only have 100% of anything.

Then I tell myself right back, Listen, if I want to be a smart aleck I can find someone else to do this job. Drawing silly cats, writing wacky stories, cleaning out the litter box which happens to be in the studio. (What’s up with that?) There’s no lifetime guarantee that you get to stay here Mr.

No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I say.

Good. Now, get back to work. You’re on deadline. And I wouldn’t mind seeing another draft of that last manuscript. Honestly, it kind-a sucked.

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Letters of Note that you can’t stop reading.

I’ll give you an advanced warning – this site will eat up an hour of your day before you notice and three hours later you’ll still be there reading.

It’s called Letter’s of Note and contains hundreds (?) of wonderful, articulate communications from the well known and the not so.

The E.B. White letter concerning his dog not being licensed is funny. But each post offers something valuable and/or insightful.I

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Proletariat of the internet economy.

Jaron Lanier has a very good piece in the New York Times (go read it!) about what the internet has turned into. He looks at the SOPA protests and compares it against – reality. Which is that the Internet has turned into a giant, traveling salesman now. The unintended side effect of ‘information must be free’ on the internet, is that your information is given away for free and is collected and turned into money by the companies that collect it.

Lanier makes some great points about how this freedom issue has lead to everything being ad supported online. And that has lead to our lives being a commodity in the great virtual sales matrix. Places like Facebook will build a tidy profit in hosting your life, in ways we can’t imagine. And none of the monies will be shared with you, the content creator. And he warns, maybe it’s all well intentioned social outreach now, but are people really prepared to have their entire life sitting on Facebook servers for the next…well, forever? What kind of business plan will the people who run Facebook in 30 years have for everything you’ve given them?

At the end of Lanier’s essay he writes:

“This belief in “free” information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.”

That sums up part of the issue for me. We are gladly giving up so much of ourselves, just to be liked (literally) that we are gladly handing over our actual life to companies who will sell it in ways yet unimagined. Most of us are the proletariat of the internet economy.

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Portland Book Review Interview (where I reveal the meaning of life)

The Portland Book Review has published an interview they did with me. In it I discuss the secrets to consciousness, the meaning of life and why I believe that frogs can talk.

Ok, none of that is true. Mainly it’s focused on my last picture book, The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot.

And I don’t mention any recipes. And I know recipes are the secret that keeps the blog-sphere from collapsing in on itself. Next time I will ready my favorite apple dumpling reciepe.

You can read it here.

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I’m having a bad drawing day…

I don’t don’t watch a lot of sports. But I do follow professional basketball. Have you ever watched a game where a usually great shooter, is just stinkin’? One night they go 15 for 18. The next, they make 2 of 26…If you take away the conspiracy theories about NBA games being manipulated, you are left with the notion that sometimes we can do something well and sometimes we can’t.

I have days when I can’t draw well. This fact scares me. And confuses me. Sometimes the stress of a project seems to overwhelm my faculties. Sometimes, I’m just having a bad drawing day. And it’s very likely that the next day I will be drawing fine again. Of course this is more subjective then making baskets or not but I have often wondered if other illustrators and artists just have ‘off’ days too?

At this point in my career I have some tricks to get through those ‘bad days’. I concentrate of various aspects of the work that needs to get done and come back to the stuff that’s not working later. I would guess that this is a universal issue. That all illustrators have a bad drawing day now and then, just as the best shooters in the NBA can have a horrible shooting night. I’m just glad there aren’t 3 million people watching me draw when it isn’t going so well. Of course book illustrators don’t usually get 14 million a year either.

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Ronald Searle

I almost missed this. The sad news that Ronald Searle passed. He was one of my all time favorite illustrators, artists, cartoonists, designers…you name it. We don’t get many like this.

Matt Jones has a wonderful blog about Searle which I have linked to before. It’s a great place to see a lot of amazing work.

Every drawing ‘just works’. They are inventive, unique, charming and at times they are scary and confrontational but also comfy and cozy, more than anything they display the very human perceptions of the artist. They reverberate the humanity of the act of making art. They are from the hand and from the heart. No greater compliment exists for me.

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Erik Johnson. Live and uncensored.

An now for something – a little different on the Blog. My first interview!

I’ve been impressed with Erik Johnson’s work since I met him in college. I can honestly say I’ve been jealous of Erik’s work for the same amount of time.

He is a designer-cartoonist-illustrator and has recently launched a Kickstarter project to publish a graphic novel/comic book he’s worked on for quite some time.

He was nice enough to answer a few questions about why he decided to go the Kickstarter route and his feelings about the current publishing dilemmas. I’d call what he is doing targeted publishing. If the project is funded he knows who will buy it (they already did) and by removing the hassle of distribution and the expensive risks in trying to find an audience by marketing a book, Erik may one-up even the digital distribution mavens by getting a nicely produced, finely crafted version of his story into the hands of people who want it. Erik’s answers are below.

1. What made you decide to try and do this on your own? And why utilize Kickstarter?

My intention was to become a comic book artist since childhood, but Iʼve always kicked the idea down the road due to my own feelings about being “ready”, or having “something to say”. Iʼve never been that interested in drawing other peopleʼs stories, and made a career as an illustrator and graphic designer. When this story actually came together, I had no experience with the comics publishing industry. Despite making several contacts and getting positive feedback, it became apparent that “The Outliers,” didnʼt fill in a succinct, marketing slot.

2. Have you considered releasing it digitally? Do you read any digital comics regularly?

I suppose Kickstarter is my digital means to a self-published end. Iʼm motivated as a designer and magazine illustrator by the same reason I wanted to become a cartoonist – I like printed art on paper (cheap CMYK on coarse newsprint, even better!) The way mainstream comics are colored, lettered and produced today on glossy paper, I think they should be enjoyed digitally. The artistry and creativity is still there, but not the lithographic charm. I have read a few digital freebies, but it rarely crosses my mind.

3. From your description of the book, this sounds like something that will be a nicer artifact than a typical comic book. Do you feel having a higher quality product is one way to fight back against the drumbeat of Digital Everything?

It feels that way, but only because of where publishing is right now. This is the same book I would have wanted to make 10, 15, 20 years ago- because itʼs just what I like. I honestly believe that when you make an artifact, itʼs showing a courtesy to the reader: you gift wrap the idea theyʼve invited you to share with them.

4. Thanks for your time Erik. I hope the project moves forward. I’d love to see the book. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you Mark, Iʼm really thrilled by the response (knock on wood). Youʼve seen this project from the first concepts, shared great insights and I always enjoy seeing your process as well.

If you missed the link above check out Erik’s project on Kickstarter and kick in a few bucks. I know you won’t be disappointed with the final result!

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