ICON is coming!

And Greg Nemec is feverishly finishing editing a video he is creating with James Yang. It is all about illustrators living in unexpected places, or somewhere far from either where they are from or where their clients are. The short film will be part of a long weekend of discussions, studio tours, and lots of other things. Illustrators or anyone into illustration can learn more about the conference and sign up here. Here is a still from our film's fantasy sequence. Oh yes, it has a fantasy sequence.

I don't know where they come from

People sometimes ask me how I get my ideas. I guess that is the most frequent question for most writers and visual artists. The answer seems evasive ("It depends.") but it is honest. You might as well ask how the human mind works. But I can tell you what I do with the idea once it is in my head. I refine it. And if I have time, I refine the refinement. Here is a piece I did recently for a magazine article about the mortgage mess. There are now lawsuits springing up against the "predatory" mortgage lenders who may have misled their customers. In this case, the idea came pretty much instantly from the word "predatory."

Here is the series of drawings that show the process the idea went through from "aha" to final artwork. This first one shows the idea being put on paper just to have a record of it.
The problem with this drawing is that it could be a housecat just passing by. I thought it would look better to have the predator really stalking its prey, and also changed to a higher point of view.
This sketch was good enough to add some quick color and submit to the client for approval. But I still wanted to make the predator more graceful and low to the ground. So I did a third sketch just for me.
I based the final art on this sketch. I still changed some things, like making the leading paw more enlarged, when I drew the final art. 

All the lines you see in the final art were done by scratching black and white lines on scratchboard. I then used Photosphop to turn them other colors. But that can be discussed another time.

shameless self promotion

Sorry it has been a while, but life has a way of taking over when one should really be blogging. 

I would like to take this opportunity to let everyone know that the website is live for the book I illustrated and cowrote, "The Official Guide to Dysfunctional Parenting."

The premise: a parenting advice book full of terrible advice. 

My co-author Fred is my wife's brother, who I have known since he was in high school. At the time I was an art school nerd from Des Moines and he was a skate punk from Queens. This is a book that Fred and I have been chewing on for over a decade. Since we started the idea, he has become a doctor in clinical psychology, gotten married, and had two kids. In that time my wife and I also have had two kids. Fred is no longer (at least visibly) a skate punk but I will always be a nerd from Des Moines. So anyway, we started as smartass twenty-somethings but did the bulk of the writing as older, wiser, hopefully funnier thirty- and forty-somethings. So far the response has been favorable from friends and friends of friends. Here is an illustration from inside. It is one of several "books" within the real book. The book cover designs were a satisfying part of writing the book as they are a truly collaborative melding of our ideas.

Jennifers

The cashier at the supermarket today was a grandmotherly type with a "Jennifer" nametag. Now, if there is one name associated with my generation, it is Jennifer. Only a gen-Xer would write a song that begins "I went to school with 27 Jennifers." Ben Affleck has been involved with two Jennifers (that we know of). So I asked this white-haired woman if she was the only Jennifer she knew growing up. She said she was, having been born in 1945, until "Love Story" was published and there was an explosion of Jennifers. This led me to wonder: where do modern names originate? There were no Brandons or Madisons a hundred years ago, right? Well, a little research told me a few facts about Jennifer.

1. It was a rare name, then George Bernard Shaw named a character Jennifer in a 1906 play, which started its ascent in popularity.

2. It was already the number three name by the time the book and film "Love Story" appeared in 1969 and 1970. (That makes sense, since I was three at the time and was already surrounded by Jennifers.) "Love Story" is possibly the reason it shot to number one and stayed there until 1984.

3. Where did it originate? It's a variation on Guinevere. So like many things, it goes back to mythology or the Bible. And to all you Jennifers who think you have a common name: cheer up, it's royal!

a guy making cool things

My friend John Bergin had a story to tell. It's called "From Inside" and it has had a few incarnations over more than a decade. It first appeared as a story in black and white in a 'zine (kids, ask your grandparents about 'zines). Then it was expanded into a big full color graphic novel. John is the kind of guy who wants to tell the story his own way, so when a producer offered to make it into an animated movie, John sat down and taught himself how to make an animated movie. And he and his computer basically didn't stop for two and a half years. Now he is in the final stages of the movie. He had some help from a few crucial people, but mostly it was a one-man operation. It is based on his artwork so closely (way more than Sin City or Beowulf or 300) that he rightly calls it an "illustrated movie."

Why tell you this? Mainly because it is so cool that he did it. But also because of my tangental connection. I am sure I wasn't the only one, but when I first saw the story in its embryonic 'zine form, I urged him to keep going with it. Make it bigger or longer or something. It was too good and too strong to just exist in a form that so few people would ever see. And I wanted to go deeper into the story too. Also, I kind of got to be in the graphic novel, and it looks like I made it into the movie too. Here is a still John posted on his movie-making blog:

This image is based on a photo of me from a long time ago, which John aged to make me look like a decrepit old religious nut. I am quite disturbed to see how much it actually looks like me now. It's like I am the Gertrude Stein to his Picasso.

Want to see more? Go here to see stills and the first three minutes of the movie. Remember, one guy did this.

Pardon me?

Here are two sketches I did last week for the NYTimes op ed page. The piece was about the number of requests for presidential pardons and the current administration's minimal effort when it comes to dealing with them. Art director Brian Rea provided the layout with the "hole" and I worked my sketches to fit.




Here is a detail of the final art, which appeared on Monday, Feb. 4. Click on the image to, like, WAY enlarge.

Stop the commotion with stop motion

Here's a movie we made when a few college friends got together recently. Shot in istopmotion, a really easy animation program to use, and edited in imovie.