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A revision of an old 2D game character of mine, called Hoi.

The new Hoi is available as a 3D-printed designer toy.

More about the old Hoi game.

More creations: MetinSeven.com.

Paul Pope is one of the indy comics/small press stars to emerge from the 1990’s. Premiering in 1994, his self-published comic THB is the futuristic story of a girl living on Mars with her super-powered, inflatable bodyguard. It’s hard to categorize Paul Pope’s work. I see that THB often gets lumped in with other genre indy comics of that era, like Jeff Smith’s Bone and James A. Owen’s Starchild. I see his work fitting better in the alternative/small press sphere, at least stylistically speaking. Maybe that’s just a testament to the uniqueness of Pope’s work; his fluid line work and stark sense of design.

Paul Pope has been living and working in New York City for most of his career. He’s created comics for many of the major comics publishers, including the multi-Eisner winner Batman 100 for DC Comics.

Recently, Paul Pope created the graphic novel Battling Boy for First Second, with the follow-up titled The Rise of Aurora West.

You can keep up with all things Paul Pope on his website here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

“We just want something really cool that has our ‘Unplugged’ theme and reflects the spirit of Topanga!”

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the direction I was given for a piece I did a few months ago for the 66th Annual Topanga Chamber of Commerce Awards dinner. Translated, that means, Yay, I get to play!

Topanga is a community in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California (my favorite). It’s somewhat rural, the people here love their trees, animals, festivals, flowy-colorful clothes, sunsets, and folk music.

Check out the final result:

This was the cover for the program. Heather, the event organizer, also needed it in oodles of different formats for flyers, posters, Facebooks posts, emails, and even table placards. Because I created the final art digitally, it didn’t take much more work to adapt the design for those oodles.

This is one of the most fun pieces I’ve done in a while and not only does the art reflect that, the responses of the attendees were off the charts crazy happy love love. Loose direction leads to fun art creation, which equals crazy happy love love. Yes?

Eloise Renouf’s Etsy shop features lovely prints of graphic leaves, trees and creatures. Her work quickly demonstrates her passion for nature. Her elegant use of texture and color make work that is instantly recognizable as her own voice. One of the unique strengths in Renouf’s pieces is her ability to create pattern-centric compositions that stand alone successfully as prints.

Not only does she sell work through her Etsy shop, but she has collaborated with companies like Cloud9 Fabrics, Land of Nod, Uppercase Magazine and Target. Some people have even gone so far as to use her work for tattoos!

You can connect with Eloise via Etsy, Facebook and Instagram.

Post written by Bryna Shields.

Have questions about the world of surface design? Let me know via Twitter! I’d like to turn your questions into helpful blog posts for everyone.

Coffee Roasters in New Mexico - branding, package design, illustrations.

Sunday Shopping, our new spring title released this month, is a whimsical and fun-filled story of a young girl and her grandmother who use their big imaginations to go “shopping” through the Sunday paper. We asked illustrator Shadra Strickland to take us behind the scenes for creating the art work used in Sunday Shopping.

Making the Art for Sunday Shopping

Making the art for Sunday Shopping was almost like making two different books. The two art styles were distinctly different. The illustrations of Evie and grandma in bed were painted in watercolor, much like the paintings I made for Bird. The second set of images were made with a combination of line drawings, acrylic paintings, and assembled digitally.

The most challenging part of making the art for Sunday Shopping, was making sure that all of Evie and grandma’s “bought” items were consistent in all of the small paintings. I had to draw the same small bits of paper in every scene as the wall of items grew and grew.

Once the watercolors were done, I drew all of the Evie, grandma, and cat characters on pieces of Bristol board. They were all painted in the same week to make sure that the clothes and skin tones were consistent. Even then, some colors had to be adjusted after I scanned them into the computer.

Once the characters were all done, I made drawings of the imaginary world with a wax pencil (also known as a China Marker). I drew on sheets of smooth plastic like drawing vellum. Those drawings were then scanned into the computer.

Next, I painted different pieces of newspaper in different colors based on all of the elements I needed in the book. Some colors were adjusted digitally, but not many. Most of the paper was used as it was painted.

After everything was scanned in, I began to “cut” shapes out in photoshop and compose them within the line drawings.

The last step was digital retouching. I had to go back into a few faces and digitally paint over some faces to make sure that skin tone was consistent throughout.

My wonderful editor checked all of the art for consistency, and after a few passes back and forth, we made sure all of the elements were lined up throughout.

Once all of the art was assembled, I worked closely with our designer to discuss page color and type design for the book. My favorite thing about making books with Lee and Low is how truly collaborative the process is!

You can learn more about Shadra Strickland and her creative process on her website.

I’m having trouble finding background information on Stacey Lee, so I’m mainly going to be sharing links to her social media presence. She’s new to me, but I think her work on the new Marvel series Silk is exceptional, so I thought I’d share some of her work here. Lee is from Boston, currently lives in New York, and specializes in graphic design and illustration. I hope her run on Silk is a long and memorable one; she’s doing great things with that character!

Stacey Lee’s website.

Her art blog and twitter.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

George Bletsis provided this week’s stunning Adventure Time cover, so he gets Comics Illustrator of the Week honors! Bletsis brings his carefully constructed drawings to life with rich, bold colors and seems to have a real knack for field of depth & space in his work. Working and living in Southern England as a freelance illustrator for print media and as an artist for the film/video game industry, Bletsis has collected quite an impressive list of clients thus far including Jamie Oliver, BBC, Penguin, and The Royal Academy of Dance, to name a few.

You can find more art by George Bletsis, including some pages of his own comic strip, on his blog here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates

by K.E. Ormsbee, illustrated by Elsa Mora (Chronicle Books, 2015)

From the publisher:

A green apple tree grows in the heart of Thirsby Square, and tangled up in its magical roots is the story of Lottie Fiske. For as long as Lottie can remember, the only people who seem to care about her are her best friend, Eliot, and the mysterious letter writer who sends her birthday gifts. But now strange things are happening on the island Lottie calls home, and Eliot’s getting sicker, with a disease the doctors have given up trying to cure. Lottie is helpless, useless, powerless—until a door opens in the apple tree. Follow Lottie down through the roots to another world in pursuit of the impossible: a cure for the incurable, a use for the useless, and protection against the pain of loss.

I’m so excited to be a stop on the blog tour celebrating the release of The Water and the Wild, which includes a chance for you to win a copy of this beautiful (literally and figuratively!) book.

First, let’s hear from K.E. herself. Welcome, K.E.!

Visualizing Limn: The Real-World Inspirations Behind Lottie Fiske’s World.

In The Water and the Wild, twelve-year-old Lottie Fiske travels through the roots of an apple tree into the magic-soaked world of Limn—a land filled with bustling cities, dense woods, magical yew trees, and giant spider webs. World building Limn was one of the most fun and challenging aspects of writing The Water and the Wild, and my inspiration for the look and feel of the fantasy landscape came from very real places.

Today, I’d like to share some of those inspirations and take a moment to gush about just how perfectly artist Elsa Mora captured the magic of Limn in her cover art and illustrations.

New Kemble – York, England

I’m a huge anglophile, and one of my favorite places in all of England is York. The city is rich with layer upon layer of history, as evidenced in its walls, its giant cathedral, and its winding streets. I remember first setting foot in The Shambles and feeling certain that something ancient and magical was at work there.

When I first drafted The Water and the Wild, the story actually took place in York. Over time and a number of subsequent revisions, York became New Kemble, a fictional island town off the coast of Massachusetts. But the inspiration for New Kemble remained thoroughly English. I still envision The Barmy Badger—home of Lottie’s best friend Eliot—on a street similar to The Shambles. And Lottie’s home in the boardinghouse on Thirsby Square is based on the real St. Paul’s Square in York.

Iris Gate – The Biltmore Estate

When Lottie first arrives in Limn, she stays at the home of the Wilfers—an old money family with royal connections and a fair share of secrets. The Wilfer family home is called Iris Gate, and Lottie is overwhelmed by the size and grandeur of the place. When describing Iris Gate, I tried to capture the intimidation I felt upon first walking into the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

The Biltmore is an imposing mansion even to full-grown adults, and I was ten when my family visited. I remember gaping at the soaring ceilings, ornate decorations, and sprawling gardens. Though Iris Gate is nowhere near as extensive as the Biltmore, its architecture and landscaping were written to resemble that of the Biltmore Estate.

Wisp Territory – Springtime in my childhood neighborhood

I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. The city is surrounded by rolling green hills, black fences, and horse farms. It experiences four distinct seasons, and the springtimes there are lovely. In my neighborhood, there were many dogwoods, magnolias, and Bradford pear trees. When all of those trees were in bloom, white petals would blow loose into the wind, and everywhere I turned the world seemed awash in white. I called it my Warm Winter.

I never shook those springtime images, and when I was creating Wisp Territory—home to the mysterious will o’ the wisps—I wanted to convey a similar aesthetic. The world of the wisps is, by and large, colorless. The grass, the trees, and the leaves are all white. The royal home is made entirely of glass. This wintry appearance does not vary with the seasons, and it’s my homage to the Warm Winters I experienced as a kid.

* * *

Clearly, I have some very distinct ideas about how the world of Limn looks. What I was most nervous and excited about during the publication process was seeing how an artist would render a world that had for so long existed only in my imagination. As it turns out, I had absolutely nothing to worry about. When Melissa Manlove, my fabulous editor at Chronicle Books, first gave me Elsa Mora’s name, I of course went straight to Google to do some major image stalking. After only a minute, I knew I was in the best of hands.

Elsa’s papercuts are pure magic. There is so much detail, care, and whimsy in each of her creations. The cover of The Water and the Wild conveys not only the fantasticalness, but also the danger of Lottie’s journey. The way in which the characters and their natural surroundings blend so effortlessly captures my own attempt to make the world around Lottie as much a character as she is.

Inside the book, you’ll find a papercut plant accompanying each chapter heading. These illustrations reinforce the importance of the natural world throughout the book. And, you know, they just so happen to be GORGEOUS.

It’s been almost seven years since I first wrote down the image of a magical green apple tree. Now, as Lottie Fiske’s story officially hits bookshelves, I couldn’t be happier with the way that image and others came to be realized in the art and text of The Water and the Wild.

——–

If you’re anything like me, you’re dying to read more about Lottie and Limn. So! Tweet this post anyway you’d like on Twitter, and include the hashtag #dpb for a chance to win a copy! I’ll be in touch with a winner in a week.

Check out The Water and the Wild’s teacher guide here, and a sneak peek at its beginning here.

And be sure to check out tomorrow’s stop on the tour at Green Bean Teen Queen, where K.E. talks libraries!

I’m so impressed with artist Dan Mora’s work on Michael Alan Nelson’s Hexed, that I had to share a sampling of it here with all of you! The little bit that I can find out about Dan Mora on the web is that he lives in Costa Rica, he’s done graphic design work & many illustrations for numerous print/online publications, and loads of concept art/character design work, as well. In it’s previous incarnation, Hexed introduced the great artist Emma Rios to the world, and now it’s Dan Mora’s turn to find legions of new fans.

Hexed, published by Boom Studios, is up to issue 9 now; it will be interesting to see if Mora sticks with that series a while longer or if one of the “Big 2″ scoops him up. Either way, I’ll be following for the good arts!

You can find more of Mora’s artwork, and see many revealing artist process posts, on his “Behance” site here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates

By Chloe

Sticky Monster Lab is a multidisciplinary creative studio based in Korea. They cover various mediums from illustration to motion graphics, graphic design to product design. This wide spectrum helps make their work so unique and dynamic. Sticky Monster Lab have great wit and attention to detail which has allowed them to collaborate with Nike, Nissan and MTV.
If you’d like to see more work from Sticky Monster Lab, please visit their portfolio.

A big project that's been underway since December, my website.

I have many goals for what it can provide my customers and potential clients, yet until all those goals are met, there are a few that have been reached and I feel the site is ready to be revealed.

What Does My Site Offer Now

• My watercolor book and coloring book
• Shop etsy while still within my site
• Request form and details on private commissioned work
• Contact form you can reach me at
• A comprehensive portfolio showing my range of work

Goals For the Site

by Donald Lemke and Bob Lentz

Guys. So if book-gifting isn’t a thing for April Fool’s Day, then it totally should be. These books aren’t a joke, but they are a huge bunch of laughs.

Here they are in action:

How funny is that? Such clever design. A perfect accessory.

Hipster popularity aside, these punchy beards provide a secret identity for the preschool set. It’s dress up meets poetry meets a barrel of laughs.

And these guys don’t stop there! Beards have some series teammates in Book-O-Hats, Book-O-Teeth, and Book-O-Masks.

Sure to spice up story time!

by Morgan Morano (Race Point Publishing, 2015)

And now for a little something different. And delicious.

Last week we spent a bit of time in Paris, so won’t you join me in Italy? It’s only a hop, skip, and a spoon away.

I’m not the only author in this family. Our cousin Morgan is a superstar in the gelato world, and her debut book holds all of her sweet secrets. She’s a traditionalist. A purist. An artist.

Forbes called her gelato the best in America, so you don’t just have to take my word for it.

Take a look.

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Morgan’s expertise and love of this art form are fingerprinted here. And for someone who just learned how to make pancakes (me!), she’s an encouraging teacher.

And it’s beautiful. Hard not to make such a confection look so lovely, but the attention to composition and warmth in these pictures is a real treat.

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We’ve been pushing the mid-90s here in southern California, but for those of you still under winter’s freeze, the thaw is coming. And it looks delicious.

You can pre-order The Art of Making Gelato here or here.

And why not pair it with Olivia Goes to Venice? Or grab one of M. Sasek’s sharp and simple classics This is Rome or This is Venice.

That’s some tasty reading!

PS: Thanks for all of the Cat Says Meow support! Congrats to our giveaway winner, Clark Haaland!

My very first intentional collection, from start to finish. A sweet Easter lamb surrounded by tulips, joyful bold colors, and a hint of earthy textures.

Post by Jeanine

I’ve been a long time fan of the super talented design, illustration, and printmaking team known as Strawberry Luna. My art crush on this husband-wife studio might have a little to do with the fact that some of my favorite rock bands are among their impressive client list. And because they hand pull their beautiful silkscreens the super old-fashioned way. Or, because they hail from my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. But, mostly I just am in love with their distinctive and smart graphic style! Best known for their silkscreen prints and posters, they also work on custom illustration and design projects including CD & vinyl packaging,web-ready icons, t-shirt designs, and logos & identity packages.

Their impressive client list includes Belle and Sebastion, Camera Obscura, Andrew Bird, Feist, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie and many, many more.

It was hard to choose just a few favorite pieces to share, so be sure to stop by their website and Etsy shop to see more!

by Greg Pizzoli (Viking, 2015)

I’ve read lots and lots and lots of books for kids. I’ve read lots of questionable ones and I’ve read lots of spectacular ones. And then I’ve read a handful that are simultaneously spectacular and fresh and inventive and completely honor how smart kids are.

This is one of those.

You might know Greg from that burping crocodile or the hound with a need for speed, but did you know a book about an impossible con is exactly what the world of kids’ books needed? Meet this Greg.

Actually, meet Robert Miller.

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A normal kid, one who leaves home to become an artist despite his parents’ best efforts. A normal kid with a penchant for billiards, poker, and gin.

A grifter known as Count Victor Lustig.

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This liqour induced pow-wow below the Totally Legit delivery truck might be one of my favorite moments in this thing. It’s accompanied by a sidebar of Totally Legit information about the Prohibition. This blend of grit and truth and history hangs right in the suspense of Vic’s story. It feels like Saul Bass made one of those The More You Know PSAs right there on the page.

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One of the greatest tricks in this whole book is how we see the silly, unsuspecting faces of Vic’s marks, but never his. Only a thumprint. Both the clearest and fuzziest identification.

Mixed-media collage always yields great texture, just by its very nature. But Greg adds custom-made rubber stamps, actual photo texture from the floor of the Eiffel Tower, and like we’ve already seen, his very own thumbprint. This approach is as layered and grungy as Vic himself. This book can’t be slick and clean and soft–it needs depth and dirt and intrigue. That’s what it’s got.

That’s no con.

Check out these endpapers. Brick wall, posted bills, danger, and suspense.

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Why does that not look like the full width of the book, you ask?

Because then there’s this:

In the best of places, that sneaky space under the dust jacket, where unsuspecting grownups don’t dare peek. Kids do. They know where the good stuff is. And this is the good stuff: The Ten Commandments for Con Artists by our hero.

I think 8 is my favorite. Or 5. Or 10.

And now, don’t miss Greg and Julie’s chat about this book over at Seven Impossible Things. Lots to digest. Commandment 2 will be an impossibility.

I received a copy of Tricky Vic from Viking, but the comments are all my own. And speaking of Viking, huge kudos to the publicity team that sent the book like so:

By Chloe

Dean Gorissen’s illustrations are packed with character. His warm colour palettes and subtle textures add depth to his work and give a slight retro feel. Dean Gorissen has worked for a large variety of editorial clients and has also illustrated several picture books.

You can see more of Dean Gorrisen’s work here.

Sarah Andreacchio is an illustrator living in France. Her playful patterns are packed with florals and happy critters in cheerful colorways. In all of her pieces there is an energy and rhythm that keeps a captive audience while eliciting a happy mood. Her work has appeared on journals, cards, silk scarves and even dimensional object such as rings, little sculptures and pendants.

Be sure to follow along with Sarah’s creative adventures on her blog, or add some of her cheery prints to your art collection by visiting her shop.

Written by Bryna Shields.

by Michael Arndt (Chronicle Books, 2014)

This book won me over when I saw it last year, and it’s one that is fun to peek into again and again. And how is that the case with something so simple, but so sophisticated? So spare, but so complex? That’s the best truth of design.

Here’s what’s happening. Each spread shows an animal and its sound. And each animal is mostly made up of the letters of that sound.

It’s a fun puzzle to unlock. The portraits are bold and saturated in color, often different than we’d see them in the wild.

But here they are, wild anyway.

I do love an animal book that goes beyond the usual suspects, don’t you? A mosquito! Not my favorite friend by any means, but he looks good and menacing here.

This small volume is a perfect primer on both typography and onomatopoeia.

And it’s got killer endpapers.

A portion of  proceeds from Cat Says Meow goes to support animal rescue organizations, including the ones from where Michael’s dog (Clooney!) and cat (Aiden!) were rescued.

And for more type fun, play this kerning game and see how your eye stacks up to a designer’s. Or this one on letter forms, which is a bezier curve bonanza.

Would you like a signed copy? And these one of a kind bookmarks and vinyl stickers! You do, yes. Leave a comment here or share this post on Twitter before midnight on March 8st, PST. Good luck!

All images are © 2014 Michael Arndt. Thanks to the artist for sharing them (and an awesome giveaway!) here. And be sure to check out his Instagram if you love all things type, animal, and lovely. It’s a great one!