Jillian Tamaki takes my breath away. In her words:
A 6-page visual essay for Print Magazine’s “Trash” issue. Over about four weeks in April, I surveyed lost, abandoned, and discarded items on three blocks surrounding my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The “trash” ranged from the mundane to the bizarre to the seemingly-poetic.
Click through to see the full post, which is beautifully drawn, beautifully painted, and beautifully paced. *sigh*
Oh man. Jillian Tamaki’s Supermutant Magic Academy just keeps getting better. Nothing else like it!
“Think about the marks you want to make on the paper in front of you… the ones that bring you pleasure and satisfaction. You can’t control what other people think or if they’ll give you a job. You can only control your own actions and the work you produce. You have to be a little delusional to pursue a life in the arts, so throw caution to the wind and make pictures that excite you and hopefully the world will agree.”
- Some great illustration advice and questions answered for students (and non-students) in Jillian Tamaki’s new FAQ
Jillian Tamaki’s Super Mutant Magic Academy is my favourite thing on the Internet.
mutantmagic:
Art Project
How on earth have we somehow never noticed Jillian Tamaki’s webcomic SuperMutant Magic Academy? It’s a bit of a dark look at the mutant/magic academy genre. You know, Ronald Searle for the Hunger Games generation.
She’s made a mini comic with added strips but it’s already sold out. She assures us more is coming. More had better be.
mattforsythe:
Supermutant Magic Academy Fan Comic.
I made this fan-fic comic for one of my favourite webcomics ever made - Jillian Tamaki’s Supermutant Magic Academy.
It’s kind of a reverse nod to the character Everlasting Boy, who might be the only webcomic character who’s actually made me think pretty hard about how I am living my life.
YES YES YES. Panel #4: I love you.
Jillian Tamaki offers up some fine advice on keeping a sketchbook:
Your personal work (sketchbook) and jobs (projects) are not separate. Your sketchbook work should be experimental and free and represent what truly interests YOU. Discoveries made in your sketchbook can and should find their way into your paid work.
More on her site: Thoughts on a sketchbook.
Previously:
Where do you get your ideas?
It takes restraint not to re-post everything Jillian writes on her blog over here. But take a moment to check out her advice on drawing animals in this post – “There is no formula to trick to drawing animals, or anything else for that matter. Only observation (ideally from life) and practice will give you a fundamental understanding of structure and form.”
Check Jillian’s illustration gallery here to see how uses animals in her illustrations regularly to evoke motion and emotion to great effect.
Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: advice, animals, drawing tips, how to draw, How-To, Jillian Tamaki, tricks
Due to the sheer proliferation of book jackets featuring photographs rather than illustrations, I think the time is right to offer a little ode of praise to our brave illustrators who work so hard to give us great illustrated chapter book covers. In an age when it feels like all the teen covers are dedicated to giving us variations on the same theme, it’s refreshing to consider that some artists do more than just Photoshop a girl’s dress from pink to blue.
That said, sometimes it’s hard to tell who the cover artist is on an individual book. A lot of galleys and advanced readers copies may refuse to mention the jacket artist’s name, perhaps because they are reserving the right to choose a different cover at any time. As for the artists themselves, they’re not usually all that prompt with their online portfolios. With that in mind, these are the only artists I could think of off the top of my head that are doing more than one chapter book cover in the year 2010. If you can think of someone I’ve missed (or can identify another 2010 cover that is by an artist listed here) please let me know and I’ll add them as time permits.
Scott Altmann
Here’s a guy that sneaks up on you. You don’t notice him for a while and then BLAMMO! The dude seems to be everywhere. This year Altmann’s been impressing youngsters with …
The Smoky Corridor by Chris Grabenstein:
The Death Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean:
The Shadow Hunt by Katherine Langrish:
The Ring of Five by Eoin McNamee:
On the other side of the pond Altmann gets his own fair share of work. I was pleased as punch, for example, to see that they had reissued Astrid Lindgren’s Ronia the Robber’s Daughter over there this year.
Not that I don’t still love the original Trina Schart Hyman illustrations from over here.
While fellow artist Brandon Dorman does the Fablehaven books in the States, Altmann is doing them in the UK. He’s also doing the Charlie Bone series over there as well. All the more interesting that he didn’t do the UK versi
The morning began with Michael Cart giving an overview of some of the important social and political events related to LGBTQ issues. Next, Cart and Christine Jenkins presenting a list of all of the books with LGBTQ content from 1969 to 2010. They booktalked many of these, highlighting some trends (resolution by automobile crash, melodrama, impossibly good looking gay men and the women who love them), the breakthrough books, and the real dingers. It was like being back in library school, taking a class on LGBTQ YA Lit, but it was compressed. If you want to spend more time with these books and these issues, check out Cart and Jenkins’ book from Scarecrow Press, The Heart Has It’s Reasons.
If you get your hands on their bibliography and were not in attendance, please note that this is not a list of recommended books. Some are good and some are not so good. During introductions, we each chose books from the list to highlight. Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan and Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and Levithan got the most nods, along with the graphic novel Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. Please add your own recommendations in the comments.
After lunch of sandwiches and delicious chocolate cupcakes, there was an author panel consisting of: Lauren Bjorkman, Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Malinda Lo, and Megan Frazer (hey, that’s me!). We talked about what brought us to write our books, the challenges we faced, and what we hope to see in the future. We compiled a list of links that are on Malinda’s site.
After the author panel, I had to dash to the Body Positivity and Fat Acceptance in Contemporary YA Fiction pre-conference (which I hope someone else blogs about, because when I came in they were sharing some awesome ideas and resources), so I cannot give a first-person account of the breakouts that occurred — if anyone else would like to chime in, please do.
If you are in Albuquerque but missed the pre-conference, you can still hear about LGBTQ issues today at 1:30 at the breakout session: The New Gay Teen: Moving Beyond the Issue Novel.
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Makes me think of a teenage Lucy Van Pelt