Vacationing With Tweety and Sylvester

I did this illustration for an article about vacationing with pets. A concept I've never had the luxury to explore, but, hey, there are people whose pets have more disposable income than I do.

Kids & Science

I did this a week ago for Children's Advocate, a magazine published out of Berkeley, but art directed by my old friend Patrick JB Flynn out of Madison, Wisconsin. (Isn't web commerce marvelous?) It was a fun project, especially since I'd just converted some of our old family videos to DVD and we'd been watching our kids toddling around at this young age. (They are now taller than their parents.) The tilted overhead perspective is something I used to do more often. I think I probably learned it by studying Steven Guarnaccia's illustrations years ago, who probably learned it from Japanese prints. I learned from the same sources that narrowing my palette made the composition more coherent, and that gray and black made the other colors brighter.

Sometimes I Feel Like A Hamburger

I did this illustration about ten years ago for the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday Magazine, for an article about eating habits. I probably went out and had a bar hamburger, just for research purposes. It's interesting for me to look at how much my line varies from image to image. Sometimes it's careful and controlled, almost quiet, other times (like here) the outline darts in quick parabolas. The arms are rubber and the physique is joyously oddball. This is not a careful drawing but it isn't sloppy; I like to say it's offhand. Like something drawn by Bemelmans. It was Bemelmans who gave me permission to quit worrying about all the live figure drawing I never got around to.

Visualizing Words, Chapter 1

Illustration is harder than it looks. None of the effort is supposed to appear on the paper. And a lot of my work time is spent with my eyes closed or looking into space, trying to visualize a metaphor. This drawing is one of a series I did for WWWord, the new online magazine for word people: editors, writers, poets, teachers, readers, grammarians, crossword puzzlers, scrabble players.

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