April Showers

When it rains, it pours, as the old adage goes, and this April's showers have doused me with plenty of activity which is sure to bring May flowers!

First of all, on April 6th, I attended the SCBWI Northern/Central California Spring Conference. Here I had the wonderful opportunity to hear from authors, editors, agents, art directors and illustrators from the publishing business. I attended workshops with Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers' amazing art director Laurent Linn and incredible picture book illustrator/author, John Hendrix. John talked about the importance of illustrating to one's strengths and shared with us the grueling saga of publishing his picture book "John Brown: His Fight for Freedom", a book which he described as "unpublishable". John was also kind enough to spend a few minutes with me to review my portfolio and give me some pointers on where my work was strong and where it could be stronger. Laurent's workshop spoke to the character's role in storytelling. We were asked to bring in a series of character design sketches and Laurent reviewed each illustrator's work and with his comments helped explain how "what's on the outside of a character can describe what is on the inside." My character design for The Mad Hatter is below!

April also finds me preparing for my book signing this Thursday, April 18th at Beatnik Books in Roseville! I will be signing copies of my latest book, "Moose n' Me" written by Kenny Loggins. I will be there from 6 to 8pm and to all the local readers, please stop by and say hello! I will be giving away bookmarks and even copies of Moose n' Me! I really look forward to seeing some friendly faces and hopefully making some new friends this Thursday!

Between all of that madness, I also continue work on a series of illustrations I will eventually be selling as prints. The series is based on the four seasons, and features a character I have come to call Guy Fox. All four illustrations have been sketched and I will be coloring the final pieces in the coming weeks. Seen below are all four sketches in seasonal order, beginning with Autumn. I'll be sure to share my progress with you and you'll certainly be the first to know when they are available for purchase!

Needless to say, my April showers have been of the refreshing and sustaining kind. I look forward to reporting on all of the new growth to sprout in May! Until then, thank you for reading!

Josh

Taking it Outside!

Hi folks. Just a quick blog post to share a little with you about what has been happening! First of all, I have finished the work for a picture book proposal titled "Take it Outside". "Take it Outside" begins when our hero boy wakes early on a summer morning with a hankering for the clean open air and asks us, "Who's ever heard of the 'Great Indoors'?" What follows is a rhyming rollick through field, wood and stream in which a trio of siblings meets adventure on the open path. They'll find curious animal tracks on the stream banks and watch beetles march a parade on an old rotted log.

I am currently querying literary agents and hoping to find a happy home for the book! In the meantime, enjoy a couple samples of the work...

While "Take it Outside" is looking for representation, I plan to shift gears a little and produce a series of illustrations for sale as prints. I'll be opening an online store when the time comes and you can be sure you'll be the first to hear about it! Until then, thank you for reading!

Josh

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