How to use this Page

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } untitled drawing 11:24:11, originally uploaded by dain. ink pen on paper, 14 x 17 in.

This is the second installment of our ‘Occupy Sketchbook’ series, a sketchbook essay from Sarah Glidden on Occupy Miami from the Novemer 17 Day Of Action marking two months since protests began on Wall Street. (via Cartoon Movement)

Shhh… the Harvest King is taking an “after the feast” nap!

This morning I stopped by the old age home in town and asked if I could meet someone who has no family around and never gets visitors.

They introduced me to Lester. He told me about Kingston across the river, where he spent his whole life. He remembered the milkman delivering glass bottles, the soda shops, the piano factory, and the brickyards. The way he described it, he seemed to think Kingston still has all that.

"Have you ever been to Maine?" I asked. "No," he said. "Someone gave me the hat."

Before I could finish the portrait, a nurse took him away for his medication. He had sensors on both of his shoes to keep him from wandering off in search of Kingston. "He used to have a sensor on just one shoe," an orderly told me. "But then he'd kick off that shoe and escape with one bare foot."

If you're looking for something for this holiday season featuring one of my characters,  but are unsure what's available please drop the by Mo Willems Stuff site. The site is NOT a merchant site, rather it posts info and links about my books, toys and plush, animation (both for schools and libraries and the general public), wearable stuff, and posters and art.  You can also search by your

Lots of cute little postcards for stocking stuffers, prints and art for animal and nature lovers. And NEW, art journal pages to cut out for the creative biz person. And, cute little fairy furniture earrings:

Go shopping here.

Dimitri Lebon is a up-and-coming sculptor from Belgium with some serious talent.

Inspired by Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide, given to him as a gift, Dimitri did a fabulous rendition of the Knocker. Check it out:

If you’d like to see more pics of the knocker (as well as Dimitri’s other work) check out his blog.

Nice work, Dmitri! Keep sculpting, keep dreaming!

A Dinosaur Tail that is Udderly Unbelievable!

If a freak milk accident that sparks life to a half-cow, half-stegosaurus isn’t strange enough, imagine how strange it’s going to get when Trip Stanley’s class drinks the milk!

"How to Milk a DinoCow", written by NC author Ian Sands, will be released on December 10th, 2011 by Peak City Publishing but you don't have to wait! You can purchase a copy online starting today!

You can find out more here -->
http://zonkeystreet.com/dinocow/



Readers, aged six to ten, will quickly fall in love with the baby hatched from an ostrich egg who grows to a full size DinoCow. Not sure what to feed the mooing animal, Jules and Trip feed him lemons, creating the deliciously addictive milk their classmates begin to demand. Believing they are drinking creamery milk, the students begin to look to Trip and Jules to provide more, or be deleted.

Or order online at Peak City Publishing

http://www.peakcitypublishing.com

i a n s a n d s : http://www.ponywombat.com

the pros of being a wheel-of-cheese boy? never having to ask anyone for a ride into town.the cons?crows. really hungry crows.happy friday! '-)

We have a winner of the drawing for a free, signed copy of I WANT MY HAT BACK by Jon Klassen. The winner is... Betsy!!! Congratulations - your book will be in the mail soon! And just as a reminder, here's the book trailer one more time...

– Enjoy this post? Leave a comment at http://dulemba.blogspot.com/ or share it with a friend.

This was the first part of the Gosh! London comics shop window project for Nelson Week, a scribble on a dinner napkin by our Nelson editor Woodrow Phoenix, after we had finished two full days in Leeds at Thought Bubble comics festival. (Well, Woodrow doesn't really scribble, he draws quite carefully.)



And here's an excellent video shot by Gosh's Tom Crowley! You can read all about it over on the Gosh blog! And do come to Gosh tonight (1 Berwick Street in London's Soho) at 6pm for our Nelson signing party, it'll be good fun!



I'll post a few more photos from our Monday painting session. Woodrow has posted a bunch more on Flickr here. I was just going to show up at the shop and paint something, but on the train ride in, I thought, hmm, I think I'd like to do a bit of pre-planning. So here's what I sketched on the stretch between London Bridge and Charing Cross stations.




Woodrow was stuck on messy trains from out of town, so I had a chance to grab a muffin in the lovely coffee shop next to Gosh, Foxcroft & Ginger and work on my Nel sketch a bit more.



When Woodrow arrived and Tom at Gosh gave us our supplies, Posca pens, I remembered them well from my mural painting session at Game City (blog post about that here) and how much they need shaken to get the paint running. Shake, shake, shake. It turned into a sort of dance session, while Hayley Campbell tweeted this photo.



Then Will Morris arrived, with much more polished preparatory sketches. Will studied on the same MA course at Camberwell art college as I did, a few years later, under Janet Woolley, and we're both big fans of her. Will's work is lovely.



We decided the lettering had to come first, before the character paintings. And no one does lettering as well as Woodrow, he's very exacting.



I asked him if 'e' was the hardest letter to draw, and he said, no, that 's' is much trickier, getting the two curves just right.





We were painting on the inside of the window (so passers-by couldn't pick it off) but I did a quick sketch in white on the outside of the window as a guide.



When JAKe arrived, here's the sketch he made, drawing straight from the book:

The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan.  I have been reading about them lately through books like Kayano Shigeru’s The Ainu (Tuttle Publishing, 2004.)  Kayano Shigeru, who died in 2006, was himself an Ainu and worked tirelessly to preserve and disseminate elements of Ainu culture to the world.  The Ainu had an oral tradition of tale-telling and one of their oral tales or songs known as kamuy yukar is translated into English by Kyoko Selden and given here on the website of the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.  As typical of many oral tales, it is presented as poetry.  As it explains on the website, kamuy yukar are songs of gods and demi-gods.  This particular story is of the wind goddess, Pitatakamuy and her encounter with the demi-god Okikurumi.    It is a revealing tale insofar as it shows how the Ainu relate to their deities — they relate to their gods not just with reverence, awe and respect but they also challenge and chastise the gods for wanton and destructive behaviour!  I remember being surprised by that when I read The Song of the Cicada by Shizue Ukaji, another Ainu writer and storyteller.  The old woman swept away in the typhoon gets angry at the goddess who has caused the terrible typhoon much like the demi-god Okikurumi becomes angry with Pitatakamuy.

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of poetic tale-telling, but little of it has been translated into English.  However this is slowly changing with the efforts of a variety of scholars and students of the culture.  I’ve discovered a wonderful blog called Project Uepeker: Introducing the Ainu Oral Tradition to the English-Speaking World that is chock full of information about Ainu culture in English.   In fact, it was at this blog that I discovered a new book called Ainu Spirits Singing by Sarah Strong (University of Hawaii Press, 2011) which is a study and translation of Ainu kamuy yukar as originally translated into Japanese by Ainu writer Chiri Yukie.  I hope more developments like this keep happening and that word gets around about the oral storytelling traditions of this indigenous people of northern Japan.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe.