Before the movie fades from awareness, let’s look at some not so exalted celebrations of Maurice Sendak’s strangely theatrical Caldecott Medal winning-story, Where the Wild Things Are, opera for toddlers.

From Wikipedia:  “The original concept for the book featured horses instead of monsters. According to Sendak, his publisher suggested the switch when she discovered that Sendak could not draw horses, but thought that he ‘could at the very least draw ‘a thing.’  He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles, whom he had studied critically in his youth as an escape from their weekly visits to his family’s Brooklyn home.”

Children’s author-illustrators  influence our world.  Like a good ghostbuster I have video proof that I’ll share with you now. Monica Kelley posted this clip on her blog,  My Place For Art recently.

It got me looking at more of them.  So next it’s Jammin’s Crazy Chalk Drawings — the Wild Things’ island rendered on a blackboard.

And Max in his boat:

Here’s the Disney version, which luckily the public never saw.  It has Max in his wolf suit, chasing his dog.  Except he scurries  around his home and room like one of the baby squirrels from Snow White.

This next one one has feet of clay.  I don’t know what the journalism school students were doing working on this project, but I hope they all got A’s.  I think they brilliantly captured the spirit of Max.

Of course the  ballet companies pounced on Sendak’s premise that always seemed more suited to dance and backdrops than to words.

These are but a few of the many versions of Max’s odyssey on YouTube. They range in kookinesss and fun. They demonstrate how an  artist’s idea can inspire a chorus of creative interpretations and loving imitations  — in this case, 47 years after the book first rolled off presses at Harper & Row Publishers.

* * * * *

We had fun at our group call last night in the children’s book illustration class — even if it was a call without sound. We saw some great work by students.  Learn more about the online course, Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks at this 0 Comments on Wild Things as of 1/1/1900

What does this short animated clip have to do with John Singer Sargent  or children’s book illustration?

A quoi ca sert l’amour,  a short animation by Louis Clichy, with thanks to illustrator  and animation/game artist Amanda Williams for finding this.  She called  it “brutal and adorable.”

If a child-friendly story had illustrations with these lines — and visual characters as memorable as these,  and color the way John Singer Sargent used it in his painted scenes, it would be some picture book, right?

I’m assembling my fantasy football — I mean  illustration project  — team here.

So, starting with the cartoon: What makes these stick figures tug at your emotions as they do?

The honesty? That we know these people? And been these people?

The “simple” (but oh-so-sophisticated) graphics with their varied perspectives and 360 degree “camera revolutions”?

All the fast cutting and surprise transitions?

The song? Edith Piaf’s and Theo Sarapo’s singing?

The subject?

Could some of this aplomb be translated into picture book illustrations?

Are these enough questions for now?

OK,  so let’s add some color and texture.  John Singer Sargent had a knack  for these.

Thanks to Chicago based painter Raymond Thornton for finding this.

I know.  Sargent is the painter who gives all other painters inferiority complexes.  We don’t now a lot about how he made his palette choices. (We know that he looked carefully.)

So enough with dream teaming. We’ve got some housecleaning items today.

Two powerhouse chapters of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) have announced their 2010 pow-wows — both set for early next year.

It’s Time to Mingle in Texas

Awesome Austin

Austin SCBWI comes first with Destination Publication featuring  a Caldeecott Honor Illustrator and Newberry Honor Author, along with agents, editors, more authors, another fab illustrator, critiques, portfolio reviews and parties.

Mark the date – Saturday, January 30, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.  Get the full lowdown and the registration form here. Send in your form pronto if you’re interested — more than 100 people have already signed up. Manuscript crtiques are already sold out. But a few portfolio reviews are still open at this writing!

Destination Publication features Kirby Larson, author of the 2007 Newbery Honor Book, Hattie Big Sky and Marla Frazee, author-illustrator of A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, and more recently All the World penned (all 200 words of it) by Austin’s own children’s author/poet Liz Garton Scanlon.

Frazee teaches children’s book illustration at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.  She and Scanlon plan to talk about their collaboration. You can read wonderful essays by them on this very topic here.

"All the World" by Liz Garton Scanlon and Marla Frazee

The  faculty also includes: Cheryl Klein, senior editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, Lisa Graff, Associate Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, Stacy Cantor, Editor, Bloomsbury USA/Walker  Books For Young Readers, Andrea Cascardi agent with Transatlantic Literary Agency (and a former editor), another former editor, Mark McVeigh who represents writers, illustrators, photographers and graphic novelists for both the adult and children’s markets,  and agent Nathan Bransford.

The conference also features authors  Sara Lewis Holmes, Shana Burg, P. J. Hoover, Jessica Lee Anderson, Chris Barton, Jacqueline Kelly, Jennifer Ziegler, Philip Yates,  and illustrator Patrice Barton.
Read more about everyone here.

Happenin’ Houston

Houston SCBWI has announced the (still developing)  lineup for its conference just three weeks after Austin’s:   Saturday, February 20, 2010.  Registration is NOW OPEN.

It headlines Cynthia Leitich Smith, acclaimed author of short stories, funny picture books, Native American fiction, and YA Gothic fantasies,   Ruta Rimas, assistant editor Balzer & Bray/HarperCollin, and Patrick Collins, creative director at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. Collins art directs and designs picture books, young adult novels and middle grade fiction.

Among the recent picture books he has worked on:  Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, Old Penn Station and Rosa, which was a Caldecott Honor book.

The conference also features Alexandra Cooper,  senior editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, Lisa Ann Sandell,  senior editor at Scholastic Inc., and Sara Crowe, an agent with Harvey Klinger, Inc. in New York.

You can download Houston conference info and registration sheets from this page.

No, you don’t have to be Texan to register for either of these big events. You just have to be willing to get here for them.

Remember that just about any SCBWI conference or workshop is a great education for a very modest investment.

* * * * *
Speaking of  great educations for a very modest investment,  Mark Mitchell, author of this post and host of this blog  teaches classes in children’s book illustration at the Austin Museum of Art Art School and online. Learn more about the online course here — or sample some color lessons from the course here.

Wear the book.  Be in the square. Make test books. Do it on tracing paper.

Author illustrator David Macaulay puts words to his latest process in this video shot by fellow author-illustrator Thatcher Hurd for the San Francisco Center for the Book’s recent exhibition,’Once Upon a Book.’

English born, an honors architecture  graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, David Macaulay has delighted the world with his books that look at the inner workings of things — from 16th century caravel sail ships, to grist mills, to  more complex machines like, well, the human body.

He won the Caldecott Medal in 1991  for his book Black and White, of which ALA Booklist said, “It’s a story. It’s a puzzle. It’s a game.”

He’s also received one of those MacArthur Fellowship “genius grants.”

Judging by this video, he also has one of the coolest art studios, anywhere.
I would love to work in there every day.

Thank you, Diandra Mae for sharing the fantastic video clip page from the SFCB site with our Wiggio Children’s Book Illustration Group!

Jon Gnagy was the first artist to draw pictures on television, and I was there! I mean, in front of the TV screen. I may not have been in school yet.
“We would both watch him and be spellbound,” my mother tells me.

Shadows and shading, the cube, the ball, the cylinder and the cone…
The lessons were simple, though dazzling as magic tricks for the millions of children who watched him.

Andy Warhol learned to draw from him, or so he said.

“Mr. Gnagy, who was self-taught, was an advertising art director in New York before offering weekly art courses on television in 1946. His NBC-TV program was called ”You Are An Artist.” He switched to CBS-TV in 1950,” reported the New York Times in his obituary.

He passed away on March 7, 1981 at the age of 74.

A plain-talking midwesterner, the son of Hungarian – Swiss Mennonites, Gnagy did attend some evening classes at the Kansas City Art Institute as a young man. He became a company art director who won prizes for his paintings and poster designs.

There’s a wonderful (2006) article about him at the Dali House blog by crackerjack  arts writer and journalist Paul Dorsey.

Gnagy was not paid anything for the 700 telecasts he did over 14 years at the CBS and NBC networks, Dorsey says.  His revenue came from royalties on the sales of millions of  his art sets, “The John Gnagy Learn to Draw Outfit.”

I finally became the proud owner of one of these, at the age of six or seven. The kit had gray pastels to go with the black (and white) pastels and charcoal. The gray pastels were for stuff  like shadows. That seemed terribly interesting and sophisticated to me.

Alas, I lacked the concentration to stay with most of his exercises. His subjects — barns in the woods and vegetable-filled baskets on toolshed tables — seemed a little overwhelming and hard.  (I’d never be as good as him.) But, oh, how the thought of those lessons tantalized.

Maybe I should find another Learn to Draw set.  (You can still buy them!)
Really buckle down this time.

Because it’s never too late to ponder the cube, the ball,  the cylinder and the cone –  ahh, and those marvelous snow shadows.

* * * * *

Mark Mitchell, the host of “How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator” is blogging tonight because he’s so behind in writing Session #12 of his course.

More from the amazing Dick Termes.  His one-man show, Thinking In the Round will be on display through the end of this in Rapid City, South Dakota.

What can children’s book illustrators learn from his work? I think, that we grasp artistic perspective most easily when we think in a round way.

                                                                   * * * * *

Austin illustrator and designer Marsha Riti  gave a great interview to children’s author and kid lit blogger Tara Lazar, recently (and I’m not just saying that because she mentions me there.) You can read about Marsha’s path into the world of children’s books and the art history that inspires her here. 

Marsha has a B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and is active with both the Austin Society of Children’s Book Illustrators and its elite swat team of  picture book writer-illustrators, The Inklings.

She also maintains what I would describe as exemplary illustrator’s blog. I recommend that you check it out — for fun and also if you are looking for ways to do an art blog right. It’s on our blog roll and  right here.

                                                           * * * * *
Tuesday night we conducted our first group conference call for the
Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks! children’s book illustration course.
We looked at students’ work and just talked about it as if we were all sitting around in a studio classroom eating pizza — except we were at various points around the country — California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas, as it happens. We had all four directions covered!

And you can be a part of this!  Technology has made distance-learning suddenly very, very easy. How easy? Find out for yourself by signing up for the  course — and join the  meetings. 

You can test drive  a huges section of the course content for free, while it’s still available,  by going  here. 

                                                              * * * * *

And now back to our spherically scheduled programming.

Mark Mitchell hosts the How to be a Children’s Book Illustrator  blog.

 This Google Video clip from the promo documentary Finding Lady: The Art of Storyboarding  has been circulating around the art and cartoon blogs recently.

Disney animator Eric Goldberg explains how the Disney artists have always used storyboards as a developmental first step in their animation productions.

The clip goes on to show how movie makers from Alfred Hitchcock to Kevin Costner have used them as perhaps the crucial planning tool in a film.

Finding Lady came out to herald the 1991 release of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and the “renaissance of the animated film” that some say began with The Little Mermaid  in 1989. 

It’s not exactly the way storyboarding is covered in our course  on how to illustrate children’s books. 

The storyboard thumbnails we talk about are quite different animals from the sketches and drawings you see tacked up on Disney’s storyboard wall.

But the same big ideas apply:  Using the storyboard to work out the the  ”bits” of stagecraft,  the action and gags. Pacing, story flow and the economy of the viewer’s or reader’s attention.

For the movie director, storyboarding saves costly waffling around on the set, the video points out.  Because the details and the sequences have all been worked out in advance, the director can “edit in the camera.”

For the children’s book artist, storyboardings helps to gestalt the entire book on just one page. The simple very exercise  of it can spring  ideas free and save weeks of unecessary drawing and painting. 

To enlarge the video for better visibility, click on the Google Video box, then hit the enlarge screen button under the video on the Google Video page.

For information on the online Children’s Book Illustration 101 course”  look here.

Or to check out the free color lessons from the course (while they’re still available)  click here.

 
 The Texas Library Association  (TLA) has been raffling a chance to own this beautiful original art piece by children’s book illustrator Don Tate. 

The $5 you spend for your raffle ticket will go to the  TLA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which will go to help libraries hit hard by Texas storms along the coast last year. The Rosenberg Library in Galveston lost its entire children’s book collection (it was on the first floor) in the flooding that followed Hurricane Ike. (Most of Galveston Island went under water.) It was one of many libraries along the Texas coast that suffered damage.  

The TLA Disaster Relief Fund auction has been helping Texas libraries contend with natural disasters since it was started by Jeanette Larsen and Mark Smith in 1999 –  always with original art donated by children’s book artists. 

Read an interview with the co-founder Jeanette Larson by Cynthia Leitich Smith in Cynthia’s blog Cynsations here.

Tate, of our Austin chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) joins the ranks of  renowned  
 illustrators such as Rosemary Wells and Diane Stanley who have furnished paintings for the fund. 

The winning raffle ticket will be drawn at the TLA annual conference, held this year, appropriately enough,  in storm-pummeled Houston March 31 - April 3.   You can buy as many as you want. Go here, print your raffle tickets and mail them (with your check, of course) to the TLA office  at 3355 Bee Cave Road, Suite 401, Austin, Texas 78746-6763. Straightout donations to the Relief Fund are also accepted of course.

The Duke Ellington piece is for a book Don is illustrating by musicologist Anna Harwell Celenza, about how the young Ellington and composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn collaborated on their own version of Tsaichovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

Publisher Charlesbridge is said to be looking at a 2010 publication for the nonfiction work tentatively titled Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite.

There’s also an interview with Tate on his illustrations for the Ellington story in Cynsations here.  (Cynsations and Don’s blog, Devas T. Rants and Raves!  are on this  blogroll.)  

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Speaking of the storm ravaged Texas coast, I just got back from there last night. I was a guest children’s author at the Victoria Public Library’s 2009 Victoria Reads community reading program, and spoke at the library and a stunning historical museum, the Museum of the Coastal Bend on the Victoria College campus, where I saw Native American decorative pieces — scrimshaw-like carvings and patternings on oyster shells dating back 5,000 - 8,000 years  B.C. 

The region surrounding Matagorda Bay apparently teemed with First Americans. Victoria County was a crossroads of Indian trade routes (not more than well travelled Indian trails, really), which explains why various spearpoints and arrowheads on display at the museum can be traced to South America, Mexico, and Canada.
It’s like NAFTA existed back then. 

I had a great time talking with museum director Sue Prudhomme, volunteer archeologist Jud Austin and many other supporters of the museum.
                                                                       * * * * *

Returning home from that trip, I saw a blog post that I wish I’d alerted  you to earlier — about your chance to win, among other goodies, a T-shirt with one of the coolest YA  novel logo designs ever! 

Logo for "Eternal"

You have a chance to win a shirt sporting  the impossibly elegant Princess Dracul logo (designed by Gene Brenek), a book,  a finger puppet, a signed bookmark,  stickers and more – well, just look at all the loot.

It’s the Eternal Grand Prize Giveaway  – a contest celebrating the   release  on Tuesday of the second novel (Eternal) in the Gothic YA fantasy trilogy by Austin author Cynthia Leitich Smith, who has been called “the Anne Rice for teen readers.”

Eternal is preceded by Tantalize, which is set in Austin and features vampires and assorted were-folk. (Austin is kind of a bat capital of the South, in truth. ) Eternal also has vampires and other new characters you can sink your teeth into — wait, I mean it the other way around — and one of these in particular, Princess Dracul  inspired the great glyph by artist-author Brenek (also of our Austin SCBWI chapter!)  It’s one of  many supernatural/regal emblems he’s designed for the book. (They convey such a  spooky verisimilitude. ) See for yourself and enter the Eternal Grand Prize Giveaway.  But go quickly. The give-away cutoff is Tuesday, February 10, when Eternal goes on sale!

Cynthia interviews Gene here.

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Author-illustrator Sarah Ackerley, a member of our SCBWI chapter’s Inklings illustrators group  who now lives in San Francisco sent a link to  this funny video about a year in the life of children’s book author-illustrator Jarrett Krosoczka. It features guest appearances by Jane Yolen, Tomie dePaolo, Mo Willems, Jon Scieszka and some of the  Blue Rose Girls .

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You can get some free lessons on color and a group of surefire palette strategies here.  They’re from  my online course about how to illustrate a children’s book,  Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks!   

Northern California artist Susan Sorrell Hill  wrote me Thursday about how  these lessons helped her:

“In all of my research (on-line and in books) in the last several 
years, I have never come across a clearer, more work-able approach to color that can be applied practically to a painting…and I have 
looked far and wide for this information, recognizing that it was of 
major importance…. The need for a sustainable, predictably 
successful approach to color, for illustration as well as fine art, 
became crystal clear to me when I switched from oil painting to 
watercolors…the old ‘keep messing with it until it’s right’ approach 
just was NOT working with watercolor…

“As you predicted, the results are immediately recognizable. I heave a huge sigh of relief!”

You’ll find the signup for the free lessons here. 

Collage illustrations

 
A cat’s journey to find the meaning of her name leads her from her Kyoto home to the pine trees at the foot of Mount Hiei.

And there from a wise Zen monk-ey, our questing cat learns ‘a way of seeing’ that is at the heart of the culture of her land. 

Wabi Sabi, the Japanese and Tao zen concept that is also the cat’s name, ”finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest and mysterious.”

“It can even be a little dark, but it is also warm and comfortable.”

Wabi Sabi, by Mark Reibstein and renown illustrator Ed Young (published by Little Brown and Company) was named one of The New York Times “Ten Best Illustrated Books” of 2008.

A native of Tientsin, China who was a child in Shanghai during the World War II years, Young  came to the United States in the 1950s and worked as a graphic designer before turning to children’s book illustration. He has illustrated 8o books, several of which he has written.

He has worked in many mediums, from authentic Chinese paper cuts to the soft, bright pastels of Lon Po Po, his 1989 telling of a Chinese “Red Riding Hood” fable, in which three sisters outwit a wolf who comes to their house.  The book published by Viking Penguin imprint Philomel won the Caldecott Medal.

How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator  recently interviewed Young about his pictures for Wabi Sabi.

Here, Young employed standard and some not-so-standard collage techniques.
“I’ve always used it in doing other mediums, because it’s easier to lay out compositions and make decisions with collage,” he said from his home in Hastings on the Hudson, New York on a Saturday morning in early November. 

(A collage is a work of art created by gluing bits of paper, fabric, scraps, photographs or other materials to a flat surface, often combining the imagery with painting and drawing. Young has cited the collage designs of Henri Matisse as a major influence on his work.)  

“It’s easier to change around, nothing is permanently pasted down,” Young said. “It’s flexible and alive. With other mediums you often get tight too quickly, then you get attached to it and it’s hard to change. Collage was something I used for sketching in the past. Now I use it to finish my work.”

Conversely, he drew pencil thumbnails in his sketchbook to get the idea formation process going for Wabi Sabi.  When he begins to work on an actual collage illustration, Young will place an item such as “a piece of bow” on the paper, and adds from there. For this he keeps several boxes of scraps, ribbons, colored tissue  — arranged in color schemes.

“I work flat until they are arranged in a way that’s satisfactory, then I’ll fix them to the paper with a little dab of Gluestick on the corner so the pieces won’t fly all over the place.

“It’s really play. You don’t get down to make something firm until the [pieces] start to talk to you.  Then you listen. “

“Illustrating children’s books is like making a movie,” Young said. “You’re making a series of pictures that tell a story. Those pictures are also like words made by you to lay out the moods.

“When you have the pictures together it’s like phrases. The phases have their own spirit and that becomes a poem of some sort — if they hang together right. But it’s very different than making a singular picture.

“In the concept stage, I am placing things down to start telling the story. Then several stages down the line, I introduce the colors. I play around with colors when the composition is right.

“These [colors and shapes] shift around. They have to work with the page. They have to flow from one to the other one so that when you flip the page, you’re either surprised by something, or staying in the mood for the next picture.”

The sequence is something to behold in Wabi Sabi. The viewer does indeed  feel like he’s moving from mood to mood, experiencing all the contrasting sights and emotions, epiphanies and wonderment of this cat on her journey to find who she is.

The story behind the illustrations should be made an epilogue to the book in the second edition.
Young’s first set of illustrations,  which took him two years to complete, mysteriously disappeared after he dropped them off on the front porch of his agent’s house.

(While taking his wife to the hospital, Young had dropped the bundled illustrations in an envelope at the agent’s doorstep, but they never showed up at the N.Y.C. office of his editor Alvina Ling. The agent never saw the package. Police and parcel delivery services were called. Locations were scoured to no avail.)

A few months later, when everyone came to grips with the idea that the art truly was lost, he had to start over with only weeks until his deadline. In the meantime, his wife had just died of cancer.  “I was in crisis mode,” Young said.

He had already cleaned out and re-organized his studio. The brightly
colored paper and tissue scraps and slivers that had been the raw materials for his pictures were gone. He had also tossed all of his visual references — except for some angled, distorted  snapshots that Ling had made of the collages in his studio.

By now, though,  Young knew that in his second go-around he would take a radical approach.
The look of the book would be quite different.

“Wabi Sabi is a term used for celebrating the common things that people overlook and seeing beauty in them,” Young said. “When I did the first round, I used beautiful new things, many done from scratch. And fresh things, although the pictures were beautiful, didn’t really develop the idea of wabi sabi.

“So when I started my second version, I decided to use wabi sabi materials.

“Wabi Sabi does not occur when something is newly made because it hasn’t got to that point where the soul is revealed. New things don’t have stories to tell.

He would have to work very fast. He recruited his 12 year old daughter to help him.
“In the end papers, you see cat foot prints, for example. When they were pouring concrete on my garage driveway, the cat actually walked on it. I wanted the images because that said something about the journey. So I had my daughter photograph that.”

Pine needles that Young’s daughter brought home from summer camp clump and adorn the trees of the forest on the book’s back cover and elsewhere in the pages. (In the original first set of collages, the pines were merely tree stem shapes cut from colored paper.)

The tree bark texture is actually from a large weatherworn outdoor thermometer in his back yard.
(Young is fond of this artifact.)

The autumn leaves on pps 17-18 are … autumn leaves, collected by Young and his daughter.

Other bits of photographed foliage and nature and urban scenes were –in time honored collage tradition — clipped from the covers of Smithsonian and other glossy magazines.

The bamboo leaf shapes are scissored from real corn husks.  A rug mat the cats in the story sleep on is made of lint scraped from the Youngs’ clothes dryer. The speckled cover of a college composition book provides the textured background for our cat heroine in one of Wabi Sabi’s epiphany moments near the conclusion.

The mottled brown pattern of the cat herself throughout the book comes from the rusted surface of a portable cook stove Young owns.

All of these materials  — the leaves, the pine needles, the dryer lint, even the big thermometer and the stove! –were  taken down to a neighborhood copy shop, layed on top of the glass of a color Xerox machine– and photocopied!  (”It probably isn’t something you could do at Staples,” Young offered.) Then he and his daughter merely cut around the myriad shapes and patterns in the color copies — to create the images for the story.  

“I try to take the time to find the soul of a story I illustrate,” Young said. “And, well, Wabi Sabi gave me the theme I needed to make use of that challenge,” Young said. “We were using things people have discarded, things people don’t want to celebrate. And I was reminded that this — and everything — is part of a process.

“With illustration, it’s no different. If I lose this set, I’m not the same person any more — so I’ll do another set.  One round is one telling. The next round is another  telling. I’m just finished for this round.

“The lesson is that nothing is frozen. If the book is ever to be made again, it can be retold by another person in a different way.  And it could be just as good, or better.”

                                                               * * * * *

 The missing set of originals have been alluded to in press releases, a review in School Library Journal  and other sources. I got additional details from Mr. Young and a video he loaned me of a talk he gave this fall at the Hastings on the Hudson Public Library.  The talk was in conjunction with an exhibit of the Wabi Sabi artwork at the library — All the art, Both sets!.  The once-missing original pictures showed up almost a year after they disappeared — in a Lutheran church where Young teaches Tai Chi classes!

“I’ve had Individual pieces of my art that were lost before, and even whole sets of illustrations.
But I never had a set of illustrations that was lost — and then found!”  Young told his appreciative library audience. 

                                                                        * * * *

My warm thanks to Mr. Young,  Tara Koppel with Raab Associates Inc. and Celia Holm, Children’s Librarian at the Spicewood Springs Branch of the Austin Public Library for their help with this article.  Mark Mitchell

Lon Po Po (inside illustration)

I saw this animated film on an art blog and knew I had to commandeer it for my own blogging purposes.

It’s an older work by Seattle animator Tony White who posted it on youtube a few weeks ago: a life of Katsushika Hokusai – with convincing animations of  a few of the great images of this 19th century woodblock print master. 

I remember sitting in the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas years ago, sketching, copying a Hokusai drawing for an assignment in Life Drawing class — and just marvelling and admiring.

White suggests that this always modern-seeming draftsman (who died in 1849) would have been an animator if he were alive today.  I look at his work and think “children’s illustration.”

Of course you can’t invoke Hokusai without also mentioning that other print master of Edo (Tokyo) whose name also started with an “H.”

June is so yikes-hot in  Austin, Texas.  So enjoy this video of the wintery Agano Snow Scene by Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige.  He was influenced by Hokusai, who was just a few years ahead of him.
 

Hiroshige has an out-of-this-world-distinction as a graphic artist.  A  crater on the planet Mercury is named after him.

BTW, my ASK survey for my upcoming How to illustrate Children’s Books online course  is winding down. However you can still get four free months of the class by going to

 this link

and answering the question you see on the screen. 

The class begins in just a couple of weeks.  Your suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Author-illustrator Mark G. Mitchell hosts “How to be a children’s book illustrator.”

  
Clay sculpture in a diorama                                                                     

Illustration, diorama and mini-lesson by Theresa Bayer
http://www.tbarts.com

When I used to do a lot of clay sculpture, I got to the point where I didn’t need much reference. Over the years I developed the ability to sculpt something straight out of my head. When I started painting, I tried doing it purely from my imagination, only to find it much more difficult than sculpting that way. With sculpture, I didn’t have to deal with foreshortening, chiaroscuro (light/shadow), and composition. When I started painting from my imagination, these three aspects of painting confounded me, and I realized I was out of my depth, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Conversely, I found painting from life the simplest way to go. Easy enough to find reference by setting up a still life, or going outdoors to paint, or painting from a live model. But how to tie this in with composing from imagination? Photographic reference was good, but didn’t supply everything I needed for each project. Sketching from life was good, but it still presented some problems: it’s really hard to draw something that doesn‘t hold still, and I’m not skilled at photographing such things.

My answer came in the form of sculptural reference, ie., creating a little scene, or diorama, and painting from it.

I wanted to do a small, whimsical painting of a cat playing with a moth. I sculpted the cat from sketches of my two cats, plus photos I found of cats. I picked out a moth from Animals, by Dover Publications. This book has copyright free reference for artists– although whenever I am using reference such as clip art or photos I always change it around to keep my work original. I made a model of the moth using a clay body and cardboard wings. I set up the models in a box, and added some greenery–the boxwood hedge from our yard had tiny leaves, just the right size. I added a small pan of water for the pool. I painted directly from the diorama; the photo here is strictly for illustrative purposes.

There are three kinds of clay that can be used to sculpt from: pottery clay, which is water based, poly clay, and plastiline clay, which is oil based. The advantage of pottery clay is that it can be kiln fired, making the model permanent. Poly clay can be made permanent too, if it is oven baked. The advantage of plastiline clay is that it never dries out, so the same figure can be adjusted. I use both pottery clay and plastiline clay.

Creating your own models saves time and frustration. Last year I had a 24 hour deadline for an illustration of a hang glider.The photo references baffled me; I did not see how I could use them without running into copyright issues. I accomplished the task by making a model of a hang glider out of cardboard and wire, with a tiny clay figure of a man. I used several photos for reference for the model, and ended up designing my own hang glider (I have no idea if my design would actually fly). The model was fun to make, and easy to draw. I made my deadline.

Commercial figurines and toys also make good 3D reference (again, they should be changed for the sake of originality), but there’s nothing like sculpting your own models. Your own style comes through, reiterated in your painting or illustration. You can light sculptural models any way you want, and reuse them for other projects. To sculpt from any kind of clay, all you need is a book to inform you of the technical aspects of that kind of clay, or take a sculpture course or two. Once you’ve made the models, placing them inside a diorama makes it easier to come up with a good composition.

   Theresa couldn’t find reference of a cat in the pose she imagined for this scene, so she made her own cat of clay, and her own moth of paper and string. Then she assembled her own little stage set, replete with twigs and texture, to place her critters in.  After creating her world in 3-D, she felt comfortable recreating it in watercolor. 

 Theresa Bayer, a professional artist in Austin, Texas received her B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.  See samples of her watercolors, acrylics, sketches, sculpture, caricatures, professional illustration, ceramic art, including ocarinas at her website http://www.tbarts.com and her three blogs: 
http://tbarts.blogspot.com (fine arts),  http://tbarts2.blogspot.com (fun arts) and  http://waterlark.blogspot.com (watercolors.)