Saturday, April 25, 2009

Heading up to Hill



A light, wet snow fell last night. Izzy and I are doing a book signing at Hill Air Force Base's kid's book festival. They have a great child development center there and I go up and read from time to time. I can't wait for Air Show to come out next summer- Treat and I will go up and read- taking turns being the tower and the plane- Navajo nine five Charlie Lima... Air Show is full of aviation speak, and the idea is that all you need is a cardboard box and the book for many happy hours of flying. The endpapers are the instrument panel from N95CL, Treat's airplane, faithfully drawn... I'll do a comprehensive post on Air Show soon with pictures of our journey from tiny Heber, Utah airport to the great Oshkosh air show with Treat Williams, two other pilots and their three teenage boys. It was a blast. There were ten thousand airplanes there from every era and of every type imaginable. It was aviation geek heaven. So that's a tease. I'll put something together soon. Here's some pics as an appitizer; Treat and I with an enormous Canadian Air Force Lancaster bomber (1942), the last one still flying, and Carl's Chinese MIG. (Carl is our co-pilot in the book.)

Friday, April 24, 2009

Wow! Ocean!




Good morning. I'm just having coffee and waking up...I've started in on the long awaited (by me anyway) Wow! Ocean! This first involved a trip to the public library and a giant stack of reference books. That and countless hours spent on the beach and in the water surfing... The plan is to cram every possible detail into each picture and then to label the major fish- by their common name- not scientific, which would be a major incursion into Latin.
The set up is very simple and goes something like this; "Izzy was a mountain girl, she lived up on top of the world. Izzy and her sister Jo, were really hot one summer, so...
They went to the ocean! and then we proceed with the wows...I'll have the girls in every spread doing a different aquatic activity. I wasn't sure how that would work, but, as often happens, once it's out of one's head and drawn on paper, it takes shape and makes sense...
A note on format; these drawings are simple thumbnail sketches to establish the general composition of each spread and to set the pacing of the book. These are then blown up and used as a general guideline for the pencil roughs, much more detail is added, and then the pencils are traced onto watercolor paper and the final ink drawings are done. Color is done on the Mac.



That's it for today...there's a lot of Wow drawing to do...and some magazine work too... and the kids come home early! (Friday).

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

This was done today for Slate.com about a young lady who has had Earth Day up to her ears!

Today is a beautiful day and I'm waiting for my editors to talk to me. In the meantime, I got an armload of ocean reference from the library and am just breaking ground on Wow! Ocean! For today's eye candy, I just finished a poster for the Arizona Theater Company's production of "Roger's Dead" about a wealthy Wall Street guy who dies in a skiing accident and leaves dependents so clueless and addle brained that they can't even have him buried... a commentary on the times, as it were....

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Time to get started


Good morning! One of my former students (Guy Francis, who's all grown up now) showed me how to do this . This is just a start, and a shaky one at that, but I am gathering a growing list of readers, and it's nice to have a place to post the daily goings on of the studio... For an intro, let's link to my interview on Seven Imppossible Things Before Breakfast, a fabulous blog on books and people who make them...
As I get familiar with this, I promise I'll get more sophisticated with the site's operation...