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RISD student Kelly Berg said that one of the favorite parts of her job as monitor in the Nature Lab of Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island is handling the Madagascar hissing cockroaches. “The make great pets,” she told me. "They hiss a bit, but they’re quite friendly."

The lab’s collection gives art students access to living animal specimens to use as models. Besides the giant cockroaches, there are millipedes, rhinoceros chameleons, rats, frogs and turtles.

There’s also a large variety of animal skulls and skeletons. One room adjoining the nature lab collection had half a dozen human skeletons with drawing easels set up beside them.

Along the walls were cabinets crammed full of shells, seedpods, and crystals.


This student from nearby Brown University, one of the Ivy League colleges, was doing a careful pencil drawing of a stuffed squirrel. Brown students can share in RISD’s art offerings. In exchange, RISD students can broaden their education by enrolling in Brown’s first-rate courses in academic subjects to supplement the focused art curriculum.

RISD students also have access to the collection of the RISD art museum, whose collection ranks with some of the finest small museum collections of the northeast.


Illustration chairman Nick Jainschigg (above) toured me through the building which houses classes for the approximately 250 illustration majors. The school has graduated some notable illustrators like Chris Van Allsburg and has attracted some current high-profile teaching talent, including Jon Foster. Classes keep current with emerging trends, and include offerings in graphic novels, 3-D character animation, and video game design.


We met painting instructor Nick Palermo, here demonstrating a “View Catcher” device, which helps new painting students frame a composition. Palermo’s class was working on oil studies of a model posing on a stand with colorful props and upshot lighting.

Part of what makes RISD’s program unique is the winter session, sandwiched between the regular semesters. The six week winter session is both informal and intensive, allowing students to try out something outside their normal experience, like stone lithography or glassblowing.


The Fleet Library in the newly refurbished bank building contains not only a rich collection of art books dating back to the 1860s, but also a vast array of scrapbooks, sketchbooks, design collections, clippings, art prints and ephemera.

More than one person admitted that not enough RISD students take advantage of the school’s rich resources, and that the requirement to use them is not woven enough into the curriculum. But for a motivated student, RISD certainly has a lot to offer.

Last week I visited the St. Albans School for boys in Washington, DC for a "Parents and Sons" event. After a potluck supper I shared my digital slide presentation.

Both the students and their parents had perceptive questions afterward about dinosaurs and about the process of writing and illustrating. I signed a lot of books, sketching pictures of Tyrannosaurs playing soccer, hockey, and even hang gliding.

On November 2, I'll spend a day at the Carl Traeger Elementary School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Since the beginning of the school year, students there have been developing their own fantasy worlds based on their direct observation of nature.

The students have carried their sketchbooks into the tall grass of the prairie outside the classroom to sketch bugs and flowers, and in class they've drawn pictures of stuffed animals, shells, and skeletons. They'll create their own fantasy characters and their own utopia, which might be called "Pigtopia" or "Dogtopia."

This method of sewing together science and art with the golden thread of fantasy was developed by teachers Teresa Moucha and Alice Toepel, who wrote the grant and developed the curriculum.

It’s only a small step from the sophomore still life painting class, with its enticing linseed-oil aroma, to a balcony overlooking a palmetto-lined bayou, where manatees swim by from time to time. The Ringling College of Art and Design occupies a diverse group of Spanish-style buildings on its 35 acre campus in Sarasota, along the Gulf Coast of Florida. The school is still growing, actively acquiring new land, new degree programs and new students.


“We’re about destroying the myth of the starving artist,” college president Dr. Larry Thompson told me. Alumni polled a few years after graduation revealed that ninety percent were working in their field of interest. The school gives each student a fully loaded PowerMac Pro as they enter. According to Dr. Johnson, the two-to-one student to computer ratio rivals some of the top engineering schools. “Ringling is the MIT of colleges of art and design,” he said, reeling off a list of companies—Pixar, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, American Greetings, and Electronic Arts—whose recruiters regularly lure away graduates.


Ringling offers a comprehensive program in computer animation and interactive game design, the latter using the latest CryENGINE 2 software tools. The new five-storey Ulla Searing Center is lined with framed posters from movies that Ringling graduates have worked on. Seniors in the animation department were hard at work in air-conditioned computer rooms refining their long-range assignments, which includes storyboarding, designing, sculpting, rigging, animating, and lighting their own short films.


But the school is not all high tech and corporate. Old-fashioned animation tables donated by the defunct Disney animation studios are still in use for teaching the traditional methods. The library has a huge collection of art books. I was impressed that when one of the librarians in Ringling’s library saw the listing of recommended art instruction books on this blog she got right to work tracking them down.


Department chairman Tom Casmer, himself an accomplished children’s book illustrator, supervises 400 students in the illustration major, almost a third of the 1200 member student body. “We focus on the basics of painting, drawing, and thinking,” he said. “We push drawing for the first two years of study.” At heart, he said, illustrators are storytellers, and “the narrative aspect permeates all majors.” He wants illustration majors to be “scholar-practitioners.” Art can’t just be an end in itself. It has to be founded on primary research, timeless ideas and clear communication.

I met the students one by one as I signed books for two and a half hours after my Dinotopia presentation and was struck with their friendliness, their intense focus and their enthusiasm for art. Most of them were carrying sketchbooks and doodling in them. Illustration senior Andrew Wright regularly paints en plein air with a group of his classmates and with teacher George Pratt.

Jeanette and I regretted having to take off so soon for the long nighttime drive across the state, because we knew we’d have to miss the opportunity to join the Ringling students for a painting session. But we were happy to think of all of our new friends working so hard in such a beautiful environment, with such bright prospects before them.

Here are some snapshots from the Journey to Chandara Road Tour.

We stopped at Yeehaw Junction on the long drive across in Florida to scrape all the dead bugs off the windshield.


Getting fueled up with bagels, coffee, and wireless at Einstein Bagels.


I did a taping of "Weekends with Marcia." The two cardinal rules of TV appearances are: always bring a copy of your own book to wave in front of the camera, and always wear a jacket and tie. Oops, I forgot both rules.


At the Vero Beach Book Center, I did some dinosaur drawings for the kids from St. Edwards School.

The kids from the Willow School had good interview questions written out in cursive in their notebooks. "Do you ever get frustrated in your work?" "How did you come up with the idea for your pictures?"


And I was caught again scribbling on the wall with markers, a hobby of mine.

P.S. Thanks for the mention on Moleskinerie, a fun blog if you're curious what other people do with those nifty little sketchbooks.