Mapping the Big Apple with Children's Lit

What is it about New York City that makes it such a likely backdrop for children's stories? Is it the urban landscape of brownstones and playgrounds that lends the perfect aesthetic? Could it be the incredible human diversity and rich history of the city that makes is such fertile fodder for compelling stories? Is it simply New York City's status as a publishing colossus that makes it a natural mecca for authors and artists? It is probably a mixture of all of these factors. Whatever the reason, after delving into a good amount of children's literature, I could not help avoiding the fact that so many of the stories took place on the fair isle of Manhattan. Whether it was Stuart Little's foray into sailboat racing on the Sailboat Pond in Central Park, or Claudia & Jamie Kincaid's temporary residence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City's grid is a veritable celebrity map of the who's who in children's literature. Take a look at the map!

Children's Literature Map of New York City

Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know in the comments!

Josh

New Work! (And How I Did It)

Hello all. I recently finished an illustration for a picture book I am working on and thought I would share a few words on my process.

I always start with a thumbnail sketch. My thumbnails are about 3" tall. The picture book I am working on has about 15 illustrations so I draw the thumbnails within the context of the whole book. That way, as I am working on the thumbnails, I can see how they are all relating to each other and the overall flow of the book.

When I am happy with the thumbnails, I move on to a tighter, final sketch. This is the part of the process I enjoy the most. I am by nature, a drawer, so the final sketch is where I really inhabit the illustration.

With this particular sketch, however, I was not quite satisfied with some of the elements. It was almost identical in composition to the sketch that precedes it in the book, and I felt I needed to zoom out a bit to give it some intrigue.

To fix the problem, I cut the drawing up in Photoshop so I could scale and move each figure to achieve a more dynamic composition and point of view. I also dropped in a different view of the house from another sketch!

When I was happy with the Photoshop work, I printed it out and traced it onto a new sketch. You'll see that I also made some updates to the characters to make sure they were more consistent with the other drawings in the book.

Next I produced a color comp in Photoshop to make sure I had a color scheme that was working and since this is the first illustration I completed for the picture book, I was mindful of the costume colors and how they would work in other illustrations throughout the entire book.

Now it is time to paint. First, using an inkjet printer, I printed a fairly faint image of the sketch onto the cold press illustration board. I paint in watercolor. I started with an underpainting of ultramarine to determine how all the shading will be distributed.

I continue painting.

Once the painting portion was finished I drew over the illustration with a black colored pencil, to emphasize line and bring back the "drawn" quality of the original sketch.

Here is the final product. I hope you enjoyed following along, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Josh

Our Third Year with Vito!

Here is our video sharing some memorable moments from our third year with our dog, Vito. Please enjoy!

We're All In The Mood For a Melody

This month, a local creative group I belong to called The Placer Creative Community posed a creative challenge to it's members in which a theme or subject is chosen and the members contribute a related creation by means of whatever their artistic talents may be. The theme settled on for this month's challenge was, "I love this bar". At the group's last meeting we were talking about some local entertainment establishments that are coming soon to our community, Toby Keith's "I Love This Bar" being one of them, and somehow "I Love This Bar" seemed like as good a theme as any!

My contribution is based on the fact that I love piano bars. I love the way that great songs banged out by amateur piano singers are somehow great enough to bring an entire establishment of patrons together in sing-a-long appreciation. For my cast of characters, I could think of no better source than the regular crowd from Billy Joel's "Piano Man". There's, John at the bar who's quick with a joke. Paul, the real estate novelist. Davey who's still in the Navy. The waitress, ever practicing politics and the old man making love to his tonic and gin. But of course, let us not forget the man we've been coming to see, to forget about life for a while.

Josh

Thank You Mr. Sendak

If I had to pick one aesthetic experience from childhood that has stuck with me into adulthood, it would have to be reading "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak. I remember the old copy we would check out from the library time and again. I remember the way the scuffed cellophane around the dust jacket would crinkle. The way the spine would crackle as the book was pushed open. The lovely, musty smell of library, ink and paper inside. Most of all, I remember the illustrations. The soft, sure coloring of the brush. The wild, yet contained cross hatching of the ink pen. The strangely intelligent faces of the Wild Things. The scruffy thatch of Max's hair when his wolf suit was pulled back. In fact, the series of drawings that depicted Max's room growing into a forest, after he was sent to bed without supper, set my 5 year old imagination off on a course that I am, to this day, attempting to navigate with my own art.

Beyond the aesthetic, however, were the feelings the book stirred up in my young psyche. Max's naughtiness and "mischief of one kind...and another" stirred feelings of anxiety and anticipation for the consequences that would surely follow. The rough sea on which Max sailed "in and out of weeks and almost over a year" stirred up a sense of wonder and amazement that a boy could be brave enough pilot his own boat across an ocean to another land. And the soft, pink sunset after the Wild Rumpus while the Wild Things dozed and Max sat awake in his tent stirred in me a feeling of longing and loneliness. Finally, when Max returned home to find that not only was his supper waiting for him, but that it was "still hot", a feeling of comfort and maternal security salved the sting and burn of all those other emotions. Emotions that a child, before reading a book like "Where the Wild Things Are" most likely would not have been called on to feel in the context of a children's story.

Now that I am writing and illustrating stories of my own, I would never dream of producing a work that reached the perfection of words and art that Maurice Sendak achieved with "Where the Wild Things Are". He used his singular talent for pictures and language to tell children a story that picture books until that time had not dared to tell. One that was honest about the feelings, both good and bad, associated with being a child. After all, these are the same feelings associated with being an adult – we've just learned to cope with them in one way..."and another".

As an artist, I thank Mr. Sendak for his incredible contribution to the picture book genre. He has offered me and other picture book artists a paragon to aspire to. As a person, I thank him for teaching me as a young child, and reminding me as an adult, that children, after all, are people. They are people who think and feel, dream and despair. The difference is that a child has less life experience with which to place those thoughts, feelings, dreams and despairs into context. Mr. Sendak was kind, wise and talented enough, with his wonderful book, to provide children and adults a little context. Thank you Mr. Sendak.

Josh

Mr. Robbins: Guerrilla Educator

This week is not only Children's Book Week, but also Teacher Appreciation Week. Don't you find it fitting that these two recognitions should coincide in the same week? Both children's literature and teachers have an undeniable impact on us on our road to becoming human beings. I know I am not alone when I say that I am fortunate enough to look back on my formative years and count the wonderful teachers I've had, and think about the positive influence they've had on my life. Although some may have been more influential than others, I am grateful for all of them. However, if I had to choose one special teacher that continues to shine in my memories, it would be my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Robbins.

What it is about sixth grade? It seems that a lot of people I talk to have amazing stories about their sixth grade teacher. Maybe it is that age of transition children of eleven or twelve occupy during that time. It is surely a time of awakening. We are dealing with new feelings, new ideas and new challenges. It seems, for me, that sixth grade was the exact time when the world of imagination was introduced to the world of intellect, and I could have had no better guide through that convergence than Mr. Robbins.

Mr. Robbins was one of those teachers that came of age in the sixties. He had a beard and played guitar. He led us in folky songs about Sugar Mountain, Kingston Town and leaving on Jet Planes. He would read aloud to us after lunch and used wonderful voices for the different characters. (He did a great Gurgi from the Lloyd Alexander fantasy Taran Wanderer series!) He was passionate about turning on young minds. He taught us about the world and opened our eyes to other cultures and political systems. He was as passionate about science and math as he was about language and the arts. He encouraged critical thinking as much as he cultivated creativity. He had a clear passion for ideas and a curiosity that was infectious.

Mr. Robbins was also a guerrilla educator who tricked us into learning. Not out of necessity, but out of sheer joy for teaching. Once he divided the classroom up into small seating groups and invented a currency called "Fatons" with which he rewarded individuals and groups for good behavior and class participation. He then allowed each group to use it's wealth to purchase up valued items in the classroom such as the sink, the Apple 2E, the pencil sharpener and charge tolls as we saw fit. The baldfaced capitalism-run-amok that ensued was enough to make any government regulator snap his pencil and go home. On another occasion, Mr. Robbins conspired with a particular student who had shown a history of butting heads with authority and staged a shouting match with him in front of the class which ended with the student running from the classroom in tears. The student quietly returned to his seat only seconds later for a writing assignment about the incident we all just witnessed. In the assignment we explored the power that perception has over memory. The list goes on. He was a mad scientist and his antics as an educator live on in my memories to this day.

In a world like ours where in some corners of it, a new thought, let alone books or schools, is as scarce as any other resource, we should be profoundly grateful for the education that has been offered to us. So, if you had a teacher like Mr. Robbins, or even if you have spent enough time in a school to know basic reading and arithmetic (don't ask me about my arithmetic!), say thank you!

Josh

(Mr. Robbins is the grown man on the far right.)

Casting Call

"What Am I Doing?" is a good name for a blog because it lends itself to the notion that those who would, for whatever reason, choose to follow a blog by a children's book illustrator (and sometimes writer) might very well possess an interest in what, exactly, that illustrator might be doing. "What Am I Doing" is also a good name for a blog, specifically by me, since it is a question I often pose to myself. It is a question that permeates my deepest meditations (usually while I'm mowing the lawn). "What Am I Doing" is a question usually associated (for the purposes of this blog) with what direction my artistic career is taking. It serves as a kind of systems check. Am I doing the kind of work that I should be? Am I choosing the jobs that forge the right path for me, professionally? Then the cruelest question: Am I doing the kind of work that I want to be doing? And if that question isn't cruel enough: Do I even know what kind of work I want to be doing? After countless passes over the grass behind the mower, I have finally trimmed out the answer: I want to make books, specifically, books written and illustrated by me!

Yes, I have worked on books. I have illustrated several (here) and even designed many (here & here). Being able to collaborate with a a great art director or editor with a great vision and a great story is...great! But what leaves me feeling just a little like my calling is being missed is that the stories and the characters involved are not from the eager roster of cast members constantly milling around in the back stage of my imagination. Since I was ten years old, I have been keeping company with a rather imaginary cadre of critters, people, towns, solar systems. After 30 years (28 if you are counting, and I am) the actors are getting restless!

Throughout my illustration career, amid and between deadlines, my thoughts have often wandered to that aforementioned troupe. I would think how delicious it would be to call them onto the stage to make their debut. Alas, deadline after deadline came and I was never able to find the time to make that casting call. After a couple years of breakneck illustration projects I felt exhausted and burned out. I decided that the work I wanted to be doing was work that would be of personal importance and value to me as an artist and a storyteller. After a long period of recovery and regeneration, I have put myself to the task full-throttle. I revived and revised stories that had been sitting in dusty corners of my office and set to work to bring them to visual and literary realization.

My first project is a story that began forming years ago when I was still a college student. It has the working title "The Hike" and it is a rhyming jaunt through the outdoors. The adventure begins when three children leave their front gate to encounter cascading falls, marching beetles & burping frogs. It truly has been a thrill to be in the director's seat and I am very excited about this project coming to life, one drawing at a time. Perhaps half of the fun comes from sharing the progress with you! And you can follow me along the creative path on facebook and twitter.

Now you know what I am doing! I look forward to answering that very question again and again in the future as new opportunities and projects come my way. I hope you'll join me.

Josh