Yellow Brick Road, Little Red Shoes

The Last Unicorn World Tour. And Me.

Hello peoples - Sorry I’ve been a bit out of touch over the past couple of weeks. I’ve moved into a new studio, and lucky me I’m enjoying a fine spring day here with a view over the canal. I’ve also been busy with a booth design for Book Expo America and wrote a story that I’ll be developing into a picture book. All good things.

But I wanted to give you a heads up about a poster I designed that will be on tour. Yes, on tour, like a rock star. There are screenings happening all over the place celebrating the 30th anniversary of the cult movie, The Last Unicorn, and there will be posters (and possibly t-shirts) available at some of the stops. I am sorry to say it is all happening very far away from me here in Amsterdam, but since there are a lot of dates coming up in Texas, I figure a few of my native peoples might be interested. Check out the tour dates here: http://lastunicorntour.com/

And if you are nowhere near a screening and are dying to get a unicorn on your own wall, they are of course also available on the Litograph website.

The church bells are pealing and it’s time for me to start some sketching. Stretch, yawn, carry on.

Treehouse Zoo illustrations: Adventures in Sepia

Hello dear Tumblrites. Here are some images I drew recently for an author in Canada. I thought I’d do a little shop talk and reveal my latest art experiment. I decided to try infusing my scanned pencil drawings with a sepia tone to warm them up and also soften the line. I have to say, as experiments go, I like the results of this one and will try it again in my laboratory. Er, I mean studio. It was actually something my agent suggested to me ages ago, and I only just got around to it and figured an easy way to execute it digitally - see my screenshots for the full reveal.

In related news, Milan Illustrations Agency will be at the London Book Fair, so if you’re there and want a look at my work, contact my agent. Ta!

I’ve been working on some designs for litographs.com - and most likely will continue to for some time. What a great assignment! Books, drawing, design. Add chocolate and coffee and I’m basically living in a personal heaven. From top to bottom: Pride and Prejudice; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Wuthering Heights; A Little Princess;  Pygmalion; The Bible (Old and New Testament); Madame Bovary. Since this is a rather unusual interpretation of Madame Bovary, I thought I’d insert the passage that inspired it below.

“One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.

The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at least flew up the chimney.”

A few new illustrations, fresh off the cintiq. 

Hello, folks. I’m still experimenting with new ways to apply color digitally, but hopefully not too heavy-handedly. Also, it was nice to finally work on more of a boy-themed story for a change. Who doesn’t love a happy-go-lucky, if slightly bone-headed, robot? Story: Dylan’s Robot by Farah Dalessio

DIY Publishers, 1st Edition.

There is something so satisfying about making a book. Not just drawing pictures, but making a physical flick-the-pages-with-your-fingers book that I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. Now that I’ve discovered the Make Booklet function in InDesign and figured out how to make it work with my beat-up old Epson printer, I think I will.

So this is a 24-page dummy for my work-in-progress, Ask Margie. I’ll be taking a couple of these to New York with me when I go next week for the SCBWI Winter Conference. I got some great feedback from my crit group on how to improve it and am forever grateful to them. One practical point that I’m so glad I applied myself to was improving the readability of text. Anne Awh pointed me to this article from Paper Wings on just that topic. I had some doubts as to how a ready-made font would work with the sketchier bits of my dummy, but it’s vastly improved and I’m glad I spent the time doing this. Now I am going to go curl up beside a teeny-tiny fireplace and read my teeny-tiny book. Purr.

The Christmas Rush 

Hello all. Just before Christmas I got a last-minute assignment for illustrating a chapter book - 5 images in 3 days. That’s a pretty tight turnaround! I thought this was a good opportunity to try a new technique I’d had brewing in my head for a couple of weeks. I want to bring more texture and translucency into my images, so my new approach was to scan in pencil sketches and apply color using various opacities of soft brushes in color chip masks (see screenshot). Definitely a technique I’ll try my hand at again!

LITograph DESIGNS:

For the past few weeks I’ve been busy with a different type of illustration project in conjunction with LITograph. Since these images are built of words – not just figuratively, but literally composed from the text of the book – It’s a type of drawing and designing that’s turned my hermetic little art world upside down and is making me think differently about what I do. I get to flex other muscles, figuring out how to represent a complex story in one frame, simply and with bold execution. My designs are stitched up as vector images in both monochrome (black) as well as with a limited color palette and involve some consideration about positive and negative space to work properly. That’s all fine and dandy, challenging in a kind of abstract “this is what I do” level. But what’s especially exciting about working on these is that my years of dedicated compulsive reading have finally paid off. I love books. I’ve read most of the titles I was asked to design. And now I get to play with them.

My first pick was Anna Karenina, which is one of my favorite novels and something I tackled with relish. I immediately had the vision of Anna’s white gloves demurely folded over the front of her black frock, and the challenge was to fit a train in the design somewhere in a way that would make sense visually and symbolically.

I’ve done eight other titles since, and though I was excited about approaching some juicy classics like The Picture of Dorian Gray and Oliver Twist, my best results have been the ones that come from the realms of science fiction and philosophy – War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Prince. I think it’s because these genres toy more with concept and use subject matter that pulls itself from the background of the humdrum and common. When I’m trying to extract some basic motifs to lay spatially within a design that should pop from a poster (or possibly a t-shirt) it’s somehow easier to pluck the abstract from the heady stuff. I’ve always had a theory that sci-fi and kid’s books are close relations, the reason being that both grab the beast known as “Suspension of Disbelief” and ride that horse as far as they can. At least the good ones do.

The Invisible Man was one title I hadn’t read, but skimmed a synopsis of and then poked around in the eBook for details. I was intrigued that the scientist was a specialist in the field of optics and used a kind of apparatus that worked on the basis of vibration. Now that’s stuff I can use. But my favorite discovery was of Griffin testing his procedure out on a cat. “…I gave the beast opium, and put her and the pillow she was sleeping on, on the apparatus. And after all the rest had faded and vanished, there remained two little ghosts of her eyes.”