Author Archive
Short Reports: Sashiko Yuen vs. The Story Sisters
Meg and Claire looked at each other. They could hear the clock over the stove, ticking. They could hear doves in the courtyard. They wanted this moment to last forever. The sunlight was orange. They had to remember that. Meg would make certain they did. She fetched a piece of paper and wrote down the word orange, then folded the paper in half. They could cut up pears and and write down all the colors of the light and listen to people laugh and smell the blooms on the chestnut tree and forget about the rest of the world. They wanted to stay in their grandmother’s apartment always, but instead they would have this memory of sitting in the kitchen, being happy.”
I chose to illustrate The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman. I love Alice Hoffman’s stories. They’re based in real life but the worlds she weaves are magical. She combines a lot of fantasy and drama elements. The imagery is so rich, dark, romantic, and poetic. While I’m reading her novels a lot of images take over my mind. It’s actually hard to read her books without constantly putting them down to sketch.
The scene I chose to illustrate is of the one of the Story sisters. There are three sisters: Elv is a rebel and the oldest, Meg is the middle child, and Claire is the most optimistic (and the youngest). I wanted to depict Meg in the scene where the sisters are in Paris. There’s a lot of tragedy in this book, but this moment was memorable. The one moment Meg was happy and hopeful. I took a bit of liberty in symbolizing this moment as a locket. A deep and personal treasure to remember and reflect upon this memory.
Sashiko Yuen just graduated with a BFA in Art + Design. In university she studied painting, illustration, bookmaking, and couldn’t stop reading graphic novels. She currently spends her days writing short stories and painting strange pictures. And you won’t stop her till she’s dead. She drinks lots of tea and smells old books while nobody is looking. You can find her work at http://wishcandy.net but she honestly updates her flickr more often: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishcandy/. And her shop is here: http://wishcandy.etsy.com (which she is always working to improve).
Short Reports: Michelle Kondrich vs. A Confederacy of Dunces
“When he had finished the first hot dog, Ignatius prepared and consumed another, contemplating other kindnesses that might postpone his having to go to work again. Fifteen minutes later, noticing that the supply of hot dogs in the little well was visibly diminishing, he decided in favor of abstinence for the moment. He began to push slowly down the street, calling again, “Hot dogs!” (more…)
Short Reports: Kris Mukai vs. The Letters.
“I often crouched down and watched with bated breath as a scrap of paper or a leaf writhed and changed its shape within the flames. The bonfire reminded me of when I had seen my father’s bones at the crematorium, and as the sight had not alarmed me, I began to think about his bones every time we burned the leaves, rerunning the memory over and over again in my mine until my father’s bones gradually became divorced from other memories and simply remained a close and familiar thought.”
My name is Kris Mukai and I’m an illustrator and comic artist living in Brooklyn, NY. You can view more of my work on my blog (http://hellokbear.blogspot.com) or my flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/krismukai/)
Short Reports: Vicki Nerino vs. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs
New week, which means we’ll try and share some Short Reports with you. This one comes from the inimitable Vicki Nerino, and it’s an excellent way to start this week off don’t you think?
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…So I went to the next neighbor’s house.
This neighbor was the First Little Pig’s brother.
He was a little smarter, but not much.
He had built his house of sticks.
I rang the bell on the stick house.
Nobody answered.
I called “Mr. Pig, Mr. Pig, are you in?”
He yelled back, “Go away wolf. You can’t come in. I’m shaving the hairs on my chinny chin chin.”
I had just grabbed the doorknob when I felt abother sneeze coming on.
I huffed. And I snuffed. And I tried to cover my mouth, but I sneezed a great sneeze…
I chose this scene because, well, who doesn’t want to draw a pig skin getting blown clean off its body? But really.. I have a bad habit of drawings things just sort of standing there, characters and objects and whatnot. I wanted to challenge myself by catching a dramatic scene in the middle of it’s climax, and I did just that, and boy oh boy, I’m pretty happy about it.
I was sort of dumb and didn’t take web format into consideration with this one and made it an extremely long landscape, but I feel like it really needed to be in order to capture the strong movement of the scene. With that, please feel free to click and enlarge, there’s a lot of fur and bone and pig bits to see!
This was my absolute favourite book as a kid. It was just the right amount of classic, a little bit of twisted, and super packed with sarcasm, so as anyone who knows me or my work just a little bit, you could imagine that I would have latched onto this book immediately. Actually, I had forgotten all about this book for years until I was moseying around at a book store and I saw it sitting on one of the display tables. I nearly pooped myself when I saw it again.
It was sort of tough choosing a book, because all of the ones I loved as a kid are all beautifully illustrated, and I sort of wanted to choose something that had a clean slate, something with next to nothing to pull from but the dialogue. Finally, after much consideration, I just said “EFF IT” and went with my absolute favourite book ever, which was illustrated by the stupendous Lane Smith. I think i did an okay job taking Lane’s influence, putting my own spin on it, and making it my own.
And I just like drawing pigs.
So there.
I grew up in Thunder Bay where I spent the first half of my life amongst trees and moose and bears and things, so I’ve seen my fair share of wildlife and poop. My dad used to wrestle me to the ground and fart on me and I would giggle. My uncle used to record Ren and Stimpy episodes onto a VHS tape, and whenever I would visit, he would sit me down in front of the TV and play that tape for hours on end. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I loved it.
All of these things might give you an idea as to why I am the way I am, and why I love drawing terrible, stinky, inappropriate, ugly, wrinkled things so much.
Short Reports: Sam Bradley vs. The Graveyard Book.
Unfortunately today Kali is unable to post her monthly piece, apologies! Still, there’s plenty of art to be had so let’s do another Short Report. This one comes from Sam Bradley, visiting a scene from Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.
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My illustration depicts a scene from Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I chose a scene from the second chapter, entitled “The New Friend”. Here we see Nobody Owens, our young protagonist, leading his new friend Scarlett Amber Perkins through the old graveyard he calls home, and into a mausoleum. The illustration itself is 8×11″, painted with watercolor on 140lb cold press paper, with photoshop touch-ups.
Short Reports: Marika McCoola vs. Matilda.
Hello! Israel’s informed me he’s a little behind on his newest piece for Where the Red Fern Grows, so today we’ll drop in with another Short Report, this time visiting another well-loved Roald Dahl book with Marika McCoola. Enjoy!
I love the dark quirkiness of Dahl’s stories. His characters are at once ridiculous and so detailed that they must actually exist. Last year I worked on a series of illustrations for Edward Lear’s limericks, which share a strange sensibility with Dahl’s work. I enjoyed working with Lear’s texts and found myself thinking about Dahl as I worked. Wanting to work with a longer piece than one of Dahl’s poems, and fondly remembering Matilda, I decided to pick it up again. The dark, very British humor and ridiculous events tend to make me grin with glee and I can’t help but love characters who are enamored of books….
Chapter 1: The Reader of Books
‘Did you know,’ Mrs Phelps said, ‘that public libraries like this allow you to borrow books and take them home?’‘I didn’t know that,’ Matilda said. ‘Could I do it?’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Phelps said. ‘When you have chosen the book you want, bring it to me so I can make a note of it and it’s yours for two weeks. You can take more than one if you wish.’
Chapter 2: The Ghost
‘I’m fed up with your reading anyway. Go and find yourself something useful to do.’ With frightening suddenness he [Mr Wormwood] now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket.Matilda froze in horror. The father kept going. There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn’t? How dare she?
‘That’s a library book! Matilda cried. ‘It doesn’t belong to me! I have to return it to Mrs. Phelps!’
There are many books in this world I do not agree with and hope no one ever reads, but the idea of directing violence toward a book is unthinkable, as it rends not just thoughts, but, in the case of fiction, entire worlds. Though we as readers already dislike Mr. Wormwood, this scene establishes Matilda’s father as a truly horrid man and enables us to laugh at him later when Matilda exacts her devious revenge.
Marika McCoola holds a BFA in illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently manages the children’s section of the Odyssey Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley (a magical place where authors and illustrators seem to grow on trees). She once hoped to limit her book collection but finds that every time she turns around the stacks have multiplied. Marika will begin her MFA in writing and illustrating for children at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in the fall. You can see more of Marika’s work on her website, www.marikamccoola.com, and her blog, http://mmccoola.blogspot.com, and read her book reviews on http://readingofquality.blogspot.com.
Short Reports: Rodrigo Avilés vs. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Sorry for the silence, folks! Here is a Short Report coming all the way from Chile– meet Rodrigo Avilés, and then scope out his lovely portfolio and blog. He has chosen the classic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew only their own language, handsome specimens with oily skins and intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed a panic of uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and the multi-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that José Arcadio Buendía must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all. In an instant they transformed the village. The inhabitants of Macondo found themselves lost in their own streets, confused by the crowded fair.
This scene is when José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of Macondo, tries to see his friend Melquiades the gypsy again. Gypsies had always visited Macondo and introduced the population to many wonders; this time José Arcadio and his sons discover the existence of Ice, considered by him as “the great invention of our time.”
I chose One Hundred Years of Solitude because it is a story that reflects the human condition very well, through the story of the village of Macondo and the genealogy of the Buendia family (through its miracles, obsessions, tragedies, adulteries and discoveries). The book has the essence of old oral narrative: unbelievable things are told as something mundane or real at the time, in an aesthetic known as “magic realism”. They are great characters, and the story can be interpreted as a metaphor of the South American history.
I’m Rodrigo Avilés, an illustrator and comic artist from the small city of Melipilla, Chile. I’ve worked coloring comics for various publications here in my country, but I also color some graphic novels for Image Comics. I want to start working on my own comics too! Aside from comics, I like editorial, children and fantasy illustration. For this illustration I did the drawing on paper, inked it on Manga Studio and colored in Photoshop. I usually experiment with styles and jump between traditional and digital media.
Advice from a Caterpillar.
Posted by: Meg Hunt
Book: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (purchase on Amazon)
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The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
Who are YOU? said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
So apologies for the out of order posting–this illustration directly precedes last month’s. I’m a little behind schedule but more Alice is always a good thing!
In tackling the scene with the caterpillar, it was very hard not to fall on established imagery for the Caterpillar. (Indeed, I drew a lot of sketches of caterpillars and it took quite a while to come up with its look. The first time I tried including it in the project , which you can sort of see at the lower left here, I made it a little too close in relation to the original Tenniel illustration. Not to mention the scene– Disney of course did a delightful thing with the smoke as letters imagery, and it was tempting to revisit that idea but I decided to nix it in the end. And of course every illustration with the Caterpillar illustrates Alice on her tiptoes peeking up at it, so maybe I’m being a little less traditional here. But I always find this scene kind of interesting, as Alice tries again to make sense of her surroundings and gets very flabbergasted in the process. Even well known rhymes tumble out wrong, perhaps from Wonderland or even perhaps from the smoke. The Caterpillar is a haughty, opinionated creature, and I liked the idea of Alice trying to keep her head afloat both in the conversation and quite literally in the plumes of smoke it spins about her.
But for all its annoyed tone, I don’t really find the Caterpillar to be mean; I don’t think it really cares all that much about her as an entity. In the beginning, it is not unlike the smoke from its hookah– slow, eloquent but a bit rude all the same. But of course where there’s smoke there’s fire, and Alice eventually sets the Caterpillar off by insulting their mutual height of merely three inches.
Next month we’ll be getting back into full color (don’t worry, there will be more illustrations in this palette soon too) and experiencing the after-effects of Alice’s nibbling upon the mushroom. Three inches no longer, but she still manages to ruffle a few feathers in the process! Thanks as always for spending time in Wonderland with us and do check back throughout the week for more scenes from our lovely contributors!
Short Reports: Corey Thompson vs. Egg Monsters from Mars
Last post this week is from Corey Thompson, be sure to check out his portfolio too. Monday starts the serialized contributions again, so keep your eyes peeled!
“The yellow blob throbbed. It made sick, wet sucking sounds.
It turned slowly. And I saw round black eyes on top of the lumpy yellow body.”
This scene takes place just after the egg monster from Mars hatches. It is morning time and Dana wakes up to find his egg hatching in his sock drawer.
I didn’t read much as a kid, but I owned a ton of Goosebumps books mainly because of the rad cover art by Tim Jacobus. Anyways when picking a book I narrowed it down to three books, and Goosebumps stood out the most. I picked Egg Monsters From Mars, because it was one of the first Goosebumps books I owned and one of the few I read.
I’m Corey Thompson, a freelance maker of things, anything from a one page zine to an identity for an apparel designer. Some clients include: Grenade, YouWorkForThem, HP, and LiveNow. I also post daily doodles on my personal site. Other things I dig: the Trail Blazers, warm weather, X-Files, and Stargate SG-1.
Short Reports: Gemma Correll v. Everything is Illuminated
Today’s Short Report comes all the way from Norwich UK and the lovely Gemma Correll! Please check out her portfolio and shop!
“I’m afraid of dogs,” he said. “i’ve had some pretty bad experiences with them”. I told this to grandfather, who was still half of himself in dream. “No one is afraid of dogs,” he said. “Grandfather informs me that no one is afraid of dogs.” The hero moved his shirt up to exhibit me the remains of a wound. “that’s from a dog bite” he said. “What?” “This thing.” “What thing?” “Here. It looks like two intersecting lines.” “I don’t see it.” “Here,” he said. “Where?” “Right here,” he said and I said “Oh yes,” although in truth I still could not witness a thing. “My mother is afraid of dogs.” So?” “So I’m afraid of dogs. I can’t help it.” I clutched the situation now. “Sammy Davis Junior Junior must roost in the front with us,” I told Grandfather. “Get in the fucking car,” he said, having misplaced all of the patience that he had while snoring. “The bitch and the jew will share the back seat. It is vast enough for both of them.”
This scene takes place near the beginning of the novel. The protagonist, Jonathan (aka “The Jew”, an American researching his family history), has just met his guides for his journey around the Ukraine: Alex (the narrator of this section, whose broken english is charming and funny), Alex’s narcoleptic and supposably blind grandfather (the driver) and Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Alex’s grandfather’s “Eye-seeing bitch” who has a penchant for “masticating” her tail and takes an immediate liking to Jonathan. All of the characters in this novel are, at turns funny, vulnerable, flawed and very human (with the exception, of course of Sammy Davis Jnr Jnr who is most definitely a dog)- the novel is at turns heartbreaking and hillarious, which is impressive- Jonathan Safran Foer manages to balance these characteristics cleverly and thought-provokingly- making this novel engrossing and as near to perfect as any book I have read.
