Art Thief

This is my cat Dino, who enjoys keeping me company while I illustrate. Although sometimes I think he becomes irritated when I am working instead of paying attention to him- as was the case shortly after I snapped this photo. I went to the kitchen for a few minutes and when I returned my illustration was... MISSING. I spent an hour looking for it, until I was convinced that either I had gone mad, or a thief came in my house for two minutes, and my unfinished illustration was the only thing they stole. Turns out the thief was my cat, who pushed it off the drafting table and hid it under a shelf on the other side of the room (where I am sure he was hoping it would stay.) I took this picture because I thought he was so sweet watching me work, but now I know he was actually plotting. In the future I will have to tape my work to the desk if I want to take a break.

Jade

This was a fun personal project to work on for my three year old niece Jade. The letters sat in my studio for a few months, but once my sister and I painted her walls with "Pluto" (from the Disney paint collection at Home Depot) and pulled some other colors and decorating elements into the room, I knew exactly what to do to with them. The twigs and leaves are paper bags and newspapers painted with watercolors, and the little birds I (carefully!) cut from a Mary Blair painting that I printed off of my computer.

Girls, Inc.

This Girls, Inc. project is one of three that was commissioned through the Sioux City Art Center for a public works fundraiser. I was honored that the director of Girls, Inc. personally requested me, and I was filled with excitement when she took me on a tour of the building and I was able to meet so many of the girls and see all of the activities they were involved in. I love Girls, Inc. and what they do, and it was personal because I have my own great memories of spending time there as a child.

This is one of the biggest challenges I have ever had in illustrating. There were so many things I wanted to express about all the things Girls, Inc. stands for, and I wanted to do it in the most simple and powerful way possible... and I wanted it to be beautiful. I went through lots and lots of awful sketches before the idea finally came to me. I have always been a fan of silhouette art, and decided to incorporate that into the pieces by taking side profile photos of eighteen of the girls at Girls, Inc. (they were more than eager to volunteer for me.) Every single silhouette was unique, and that was the theme of my paintings for them- that every young woman is unique and beautiful. The tree in the paintings represents their strength as a group, and unifies them. I am so proud of how they resulted, and that I found a way to make it personal- the director was able to identify every girl in the painting just from the silhouette, and of course the girls were thrilled to look and find themselves.


This photo was taken about 6am, after being up all night finishing details on the larger one. The 30"x30" hangs inside the building and the 4'x4' painting is located...


here!

Children's Book Week

This is an illustration I've recently completed for the Sioux City Public Library, and very fitting to post today because this is Children's Book Week, an annual celebration of children's books that goes back to 1919. The Children's Book Week Posters book by Leonard Marcus was a wonderful reference to look through when I was searching out inspiration for my own book-themed illustration. Here are a few of my favorite CBW posters, I have the first two hanging in my office that I found on Ebay, and I would love to get my hands on a copy of the poster by Jan Balet (my most favorite)... have not had any luck in my searches so far.

William Penn DuBois, 1950



Garth WIlliams, 1955



Jan Balet, 1953


My other inspiration for this piece came from one of my favorite artists, Grant Wood. Whenever I have to take a drive across the state I always look out on the green, rolling hills and rows of corn and think of Grant Wood's paintings. I knew from the start that I wanted my library illustration to also represent the beauty of rural Iowa, something I am proud of because of my family's long history with farming in this state. This is Grant Wood's painting Young Corn:


And I'm not done! This is a small illustration, but over the next few months I will be recreating it twice- on a 30"x30" canvas and 4'x4' masonite board. Both with be hung at the Sioux City Library's main branch for public viewing when they are finished. Stay tuned!

Illustration Friday: Journey

The word for Illustration Friday this week is Journey, which I love because it fits perfectly with a piece that I have been meaning to get posted for the last few months. The illustration is of Heidi, from the classic book by Johanna Spyri. I entered a contest last December for the Tomie dePaola Award, and in the guidelines were the first few paragraphs of the book, detailing Heidi's journey with her aunt to the top of a mountain where she would live with her grandfather. After a few weeks of sketching several ways this scene could be illustrated I decided that Heidi must have felt scared and also in awe, so I chose not to do a close-up shot but instead wanted to make her feel small in her wide open and large, completely new environment. I didn't win the contest, but it was a wonderful challenge that I put a lot of thought into, and it's a great addition to my portfolio.

Please click on the full illustration if you would like to see it larger/better detail.

From the Sketchbook...

I took another exercise from the book Drawing Lab by Carla Sonheim, in which she suggests making a visit to the library and browsing the shelves for a few minutes until something should catch our eye. It was up to us how much time we wanted to spend sketching from the inspired book or books.
I have no trouble finding inspiration at the library. After a few minutes I came across a book on Topiary Gardens. This appealed to me immediately because (if I have failed to mention before) trees are among my favorite things to draw. I love the shapes, the branches, the negative spaces, and the variety- everything about them. I'd never studied topiaries in detail so I thought it would be fun to try drawing them.

Noah

I wanted to share this photo of my nephew Noah taken at ArtSplash, an annual Labor Day festival held on the Missouri River. He'll be four years old this week and I was thinking today about the months leading up to his birth and how I was so excited to become an aunt, and I thought about all the things I wanted to eventually share with him. Encouraging him in art has been easy- drawing, painting, collage, he loves all of it. I feel very lucky to be the aunt of such a wonderful little person who is growing up so fast!

Illustration Friday: Star Gazing

When I was a kid I did a lot of star gazing- old movie stars that is. This was before specialty cable channels like TCM- most that I saw were checked out from the library. Judy and Mickey were my favorite, but I also loved the comedy teams like The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and Laurel and Hardy.

I've been wanting to do some kind of Laurel and Hardy drawing for a while now, and when I saw the topic for this week I had an idea. Drawing caricatures is something I find challenging and haven't taken time to do many of them, but if there ever were a pair of people who would be fun and interesting to caricature, it's these guys. And they have been, by many artists- including several from the master of caricature Al Hirschfeld. Even in one of my favorite books by Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen, the three chefs are all Oliver Hardy. I was delighted by that when I would read it as a kid.

I looked up both of their bios and listened to an interview that Stan Laurel gave in the 50's. He said that he loved to be out on his boat fishing whenever he was not in the studio, which gave me the idea for him to be catching his stars with a fishing pole. He also said that he was so thankful for his fans, and he responded to every single piece of fan mail personally throughout his entire career. I love hearing things like that- a wonderful, talented human being. Both of them were, and this was a fun little drawing to pay homage to a couple of stars that I've enjoyed gazing (and laughing) at since I was a kid.

If you'd like to see a little more of the detail just click on the image to enlarge it!

Contours and Scribbles

Today I tried lab #31, Scribble Drawings, from the book Drawing Lab by Carla Sonheim. Directions were to make random marks on your paper, adding loops or curves for interest. Then study them, perhaps turning the paper to get a different perspective, to see if you can see the beginning of something like a face or an animal. Very fun and a good challenge to see how inventive I could get. This will be a fun, easy drawing exercise to continue whenever I'm stuck in a waiting room or airport and need a good boredom buster!

"One Cat Leads to Another." - Ernest Hemmingway

Or the alternative title of this piece, " What happens to your furniture when you own cats!"

The Sketchbook: Dutch Inspiration

A few weeks ago I took a trip across the state of Iowa to attend the IA-SCBWI conference in the Quad Cities. Along the way I planned a few sightseeing stops, one of those being the town of Pella (I made it a week before hundreds came for their annual tulip festival.) The tulips were absolutely stunning, lining every street and the town square. What I was even more surprised by was the beauty of the Dutch buildings and homes (and the trees, I loved those trees!) The entire downtown area looks like it could be a village in Holland (and having always wanted to see Europe, I got to pretend for a few hours.) The rain didn't bother me as I walked around in awe with my camera (although it IS difficult to hold an umbrella and take photos at the same time!) and then did some sketches later (in a warmer, drier place.) I'd been inspired by the colors, dress, and the architecture of the Dutch and would love to do a finished illustration featuring them. Next weekend I'll be at an SCBWI illustrator get-together in Orange City, another Dutch town a little closer to home, and hoping to do some more sketching!

Photos from Pella:

The Teddy Bear's Picnic

I love the old song The Teddy Bear's Picnic. I think it would make a great picture book, as there is a lot of room for an illustrator to tell a story beyond what the words are letting on about these bears and what goes on during their picnic in the woods. Here are a few of my initital sketches from thinking about what the bears would look like and what activities they might be doing.

My Bed is a Boat, Part Two

This is a companion piece to the My Bed is a Boat illustration that I posted previously. I'm planning on having postcards printed with that illustration on the front and I needed a black and white image for the back. I wanted to use the same children but it took several sketches because I was trying to decide how I could continue this "story" on the back of the postcard. I decided to put them safely back in their room, but there are details to suggest why they might be dreaming such a dream- a toy train and sailboat, a pet fish, and curtains in the same polka dot pattern that they use for the sails.

My Bed is a Boat

During one of my exhibits in 2005 I received a message that a children's musician from Minneapolis had looked at my work and really liked a painting titled My Bed is a Boat, inspired by a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. Fast forward to 2009, when I received an email from him saying that he was ready to work on the lullaby album and hadn't gotten the image out of his head of that painting. The size of that painting would not have worked well for a cd format, and I figured it could use a good update anyway, as I have grown a lot as an artist in the last six years. I still wanted to give the mood of serenity and wonder, but I wanted to add a sense of place. In my original painting there are only bare hills in the distance.

In the new version, it's a warm and exotic locale- palm trees, a tropical bird and turtle, and mountains in the distance. As I have said in previous blogs, music has a strong impact on the creation of my work and with this illustration I found myself listening to Stan Getz- that smooth 50s jazz that you'd expect to be playing in some sleepy little club in the wee hours of the morning somewhere in South America. I added two children instead of just one in the beginning simply because it made the composition more dynamic, but it really gave the illustration less of a lonely feeling and became more about two children sharing the wonder of a new, adventurous experience together.

Dress-Up Time

This is a quick little illustration I did as a birthday gift for the mother of the children I nanny a few days a week. I've spent many hours observing these two little girls, and I decided to go with one of their most popular activities, dress-up. The three year old likes to pretend she is a princess and dance around while the baby enjoys examining all of her pretty accessories.

Alice in Wonderland

When I was eight years old my family took a trip to California- and the mother of all amusement parks, Disneyland. My sister and I were each allowed one souvenir to remember our visit, and I chose an Alice in Wonderland tea set. I think it was the box with it's colors that excited me more than the actual tea set, though. I grew up loving all of the Disney films including that one, but it wasn't Alice that drew me to the story- it was Wonderland itself that I found to be the most intriguing character, and I was absolutely fascinated by all of the strange and unusual shapes and colors in that curious land.

It wasn't till I got a little older that I discovered the woman behind all of those wonderful colors that I loved, and she quickly became one of my favorite artists. Her name was Mary Blair and she was a color stylist and concept artist for Disney in the 40's and 50's, contributing to Alice and other classics like Peter Pan and Cinderella. The colors she used were completely unrealistic... I loved that. No one before had ever used color the way she did. A green moon, purple grass, red trees. It's no wonder her use of color and unique style was a perfect match for Wonderland, a place where nothing is as it seems. Here are a few examples of Blair's work and a photo of the artist:






When I found out that my local theater was putting on a youth production of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I jumped at the chance to use a "Mary Blair" palette, which meant blue-greens, yellow-greens, red-violets, blue-violets, pinkish-lavenders, and so on. Shades of purple played a big role in my designing a color scheme for the set- it's a color that has the ability to evoke a sense of mystery, magic, and whimsy, and that was the mood that I wanted for this setting. One of the other elements of Mary's work that I wanted to bring in was her use of black- in combination with the other brighter colors she used, she gave Wonderland a dark and curious atmosphere without it being scary enough to frighten small viewers.

Designing a set, I have found out, is a huge undertaking and I broke it down into steps early on so I wouldn't get overwhelmed. I had my inspiration, a list of the scene changes, and I spent a few days creating a small model out of a shoebox and models of the moving set pieces (I hope to have that to post up someday, but it was lost somewhere in the theatre during the process). Afterwards I took my model to the paint store where I collected about a hundred of those paint chip cards (the employees must have thought either I had a really big house or I was extremely indecisive!) and I spent about a week getting it narrowed down from 100 to about 12. Here's the color charts and a couple of my little set piece models that didn't get lost:






Another thing I have learned about set design- you have to work fast. There isn't much time between productions, and time to prepare for the Alice production was cut even shorter due to the many blizzards this winter. But the other thing I've learned- it always gets done, the show always goes on. With a set. Here are some photos of the finished design:



Believe it or not, I actually painted the forest scene on that sliding door curtain in about three hours. I don't think I have ever painted anything that fast- it was still drying an hour before the opening show.










If you are interested in seeing more of Mary Blair's work, there is a wonderful book called The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. Also, a few years ago someone had the genius idea of putting her concept work from Cinderella, Alice, and Peter Pan into children's books with retellings by well-known children's authors... I drool over every single page. They're all available on Amazon.com.