If you’ve ever been curious how a book is made—not written or illustrated, but physically put together—this feature from the New York Times does a great job of explaining the whole process. I learned a lot!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/19/books/how-a-book-is-made.html
Don’t know how I missed this one before, but Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a really fun and inspiring blog about all things books, including a wealth of terrific illustrator interviews. Check it out!
Mrs. Pruneface! Diet Smith! Pearshape! Vitamin Flintheart! They’re all here.
Chester Gould was a maniac illustrator. What an imagination.
Big Think has a terrific video interview with the legendary Jules Feiffer, author, political cartoonist, and children’s book illustrator.
In the children’s book world, Feiffer is probably best known for his work on Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. Earlier in my career I got a job illustrating a version of Tollbooth for a textbook series, and working in Feiffer’s shadow was an impossible mission. Not only didn’t I have his talent, but I also didn’t know his secret of drawing with a pointed stick he got from the butcher. (Not that it would have helped.)
In his eighties now, Feiffer is still going strong, and it sounds like he and Juster have a new book out this fall. I’ll be the first in line to pick it up.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with these two cool online drawing tools that have been wasting far too much of my time. Flame wins in terms of bells and whistles, but I think Harmony is still my favorite. There’s something about the way that it automatically sketches in the corners and darkens the lines that’s fascinating. I’d love to do a whole book in this style.
Last week, while on the road, I had the chance to drop by and visit my friends Tedd and Carol Arnold. Tedd, of course, is the author of about a zillion books including the Green Wilma and award-winning Fly Guy series.
Tedd has a new exhibit of his work at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY, and he graciously gave me a sneak peak of the show last week. It’s phenomenal. If you find yourself anywhere in the neighborhood of New York’s Southern Tier in the next month or so, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a master class in illustration.
(As a bonus, the Arnot is also running a great show on fairy tale illustration upstairs. Two for one!)
Drawn! has a nice write-up about Ronald Searle turning 90. Searle has always been one of my favorite illustrators ever since I saw his work in a collection of Tom Lehrer songs years ago. Searle has a way with his line that’s truly magnificent, and it’s heartening to see he’s still going strong.
Searle is among a proud tradition of illustrators who continued to work well into their tenth decade including Al Hirschfeld (99) and William Steig (95). These guys are my heroes.
Be sure to check out the video…
I have a tendency to make every project more complicated than it needs to be. I think that’s why these re-imagined cover designs for classic science fiction books are so appealing. Each one was created by hand on a single sheet of white paper, then photographed. No fancy computer tricks, expensive software, or any of that jazz. These are stunning.
Let’s say you’re writing a comic, and you want to indicate that your character is out of breath and speaking French from the other side of a closed door. How do you do it?
Nate Piekos knows. Although most of us never give it a second thought, comics have an elaborate, established visual language for speech balloons and their contents. Nate understands this language, and he’s put together a terrific guide to all the variations. It’s a great read, even if you have no interest in ever making a comic for yourself. I guarantee you’ll be surprised at how many of the conventions you already recognize and understand fluently.
Artist Lou Romano has a wonderful post on the work that went into designing the characters and settings for Pixar’s new film, UP. It’s fascinating to see the amount of preparation that goes into a production like this, from conceptual art to sculptures of the key characters. Really inspirational, and well worth a look, even if you haven’t seen the movie.
The Book Cover Archive is a compendium of the best of cover design, organized in some really useful ways. It’s the work of designers Ben Pierratt and Eric Jacobsen, and they’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the project. Not only can you search by authors, illustrators, and publishers, but also by designers, who are often the unsung heroes of a book’s success. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you people don’t judge a book by it’s cover.)
Once upon a time, every illustrator worth his or her salt kept a morgue file. The term comes from newspapers (who in turn swiped it from the coroner’s office) and it refers to the collection of files of reference material and back issues usually stored in the basement.
An illustration morgue file is an accumulation of images, often clipped from magazines and old books, that illustrators used for reference when they needed to know how to draw something. Morgue files were often accumulated over the course of a career, and they were messy and difficult to organize.
Nowadays, there’s little need to keep a traditional morgue file; the internet provides a much larger inventory than any individual collector could hope to amass. Listed below are some of the places I might go if I needed to draw, say, a horned lizard riding an old fashioned bicycle:
James Gurney is the author/illustrator of the Dinotopia series. He draws and paints like a son of a gun. His rough sketches make my finished pieces look like dog barf. Plus, I met him at a book signing last year and he’s really nice. His blog is a phenomenal reference for all things illustrated. You should probably be reading it right now instead of this.
Irene Galo, an art director at Tor Books, has posted a good, common sense primer on putting together a portfolio. It covers tips on content, knowing your audience, your competition, and even minding your manners. Excellent advice, and a definite bookmark for all illustrators.
Recently, I was talking to my illustration students about what it was like back in the dark ages, before Photoshop and Illustrator ruled our world. One of my students asked how they managed to do the all the stuff they did before they had computers. I could think of no better example than this video, a making-of featurette on the “new” HBO TV intro from 1983.