Holy Cats.

This 14-year-old Japanese kid Konan (named for Arthur Conan Doyle!) took it upon himself to translate the entirety of Brixton Brothers #1: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity.  Apparently he's well into translating the second book, too.  He did it all for an annual event called Rōsaku-ten, or "Painstaking Words Exhibition."  He won an award!

More Brixton Brother Art

This one was tricky. The original sketch for it looked terrible, 'cause I hadn't any photo reference for it. If I can find it I'll post it later. The photo reference is fun in and of itself–me in a fluffy bathrobe lying prone of a chaise in the backyard.



Anyway, the question of why Steve Brixton is in a bathrobe atop a moving train is best answered by reading the book, WHICH IS AVAILABLE NOW.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand (2 comments), here's my first attempt at a sketch, with no reference at all. I think this got approved, but I'd always promised to fix the dodgy drawing after shooting some photo reference.



Lacking a train and a 12-year-old boy, I put on my wife's robe (it actually has "Dr. Rex" stitched on the front–very hot) and lounged on a chaise.

New Brixton Bros. Releases Tomorrow

October 4th is the official release date for Mac Barnett's Brixton Brothers #3: It Happened on a Train. So here's another look at one of my interior illustrations–a masked goon and potential car thief.

The sketch:



And the finished illustration:

This just in: My Artwork is Still Fine.

From the Kirkus review of IT HAPPENED ON A TRAIN:

Kid gumshoe Steve Brixton (who actually doesn’t have a brother, he just picked the name because it mirrors his beloved Bailey Brothers detective stories) has, at the ripe old age of 12, retired from the detecting game. He became disenchanted upon discovering, during his last adventure (Ghostwriter Secret, 2010), that the author of those inspiring books was actually a criminal mastermind. So Steve’s given up his agency, and now his best chum Dana is spending entirely too much time with Other Dana, his girlfriend. Little does Steve know that signing up for the Model U.N. with Dana and Other Dana will place him on a train rocketing toward detecting destiny! When meeting a mysterious young lady onboard gets Steve invited into the mysterious last car on the Sunset Coastliner, Steve and Dana (but not Other Dana) find themselves invited to protect Mr. Vanderdraak’s new, vintage motor car from serial car thieves! Can Steve solve the case? More importantly, can he go more than five minutes without getting trapped somewhere? Barnett’s sly and often silly Hardy Boy parody chugs along with plenty of laughs and enough honest-to-gosh mystery to please any lover of boy detective fiction. Rex’s black-and-white pencils (which also parody the Hardy tales) are still a fine match for the goofiness.

Here's one of those "pencils" which continues to be perfectly adequate:



This is actually, of course, a pretty nice review from a notoriously demanding publication. Happiness just isn't as much fun to blog about.

It Continued to Happen on a Train

Yesterday I shared some of the sketches and steps–the station-stops, if you will–needed to arrive at Successful Book Cover Terminal. Previously I mentioned that we'd gotten to a pretty good place with the sketches, but certain people were uncomfortable with A) showing a knife on the cover and B) showing a boy in a towel on the cover.



So the knife became a lead pipe (which, if also rejected, would have been replaced with a candlestick or some business), and then I made the towel a robe:



Which everyone liked, but now they were disturbed by the placement of Steve's hand.



There, now. We have arrived at Successful Book Cover Terminal. All passengers must exit.

It Happened on a Train

I don't make a habit of illustrating books I haven't read. But it's happened a few times, typically in cases where the cover was needed before the book itself was actually written. The forthcoming Brixton Brothers #3: It Happened on a Train was such a book. Mac Barnett was getting a late start writing it–he had the mystery mapped out but not a lot in the way of action set-pieces, so he and I talked on the phone about what could conceivably go on the cover.

Of course there had to be a foot chase on top of the moving train at some point. But this alone wouldn't convey the slightly off-center atmosphere that all the BB books have, and which I like the covers to reflect. I asked Mac if it would be possible for main character Steve Brixton to be wearing a bath towel. If memory serves, I was sort of kidding.

"Actually," said Mac, "I think I could make that work."



I think you should read the book, so I'm only going to say that it makes perfect sense in context. But the above cover sketch isn't very good. I struggled early on with how to show both the train and the action in an engaging way. I could pull back and show more of the train, but then the action would suffer for lack of tension. I could close in on the action, but then everyone might look like they're fighting atop a Tuff Shed.



Ooh, better. But at this point Mac let me know that there could only be just the one masked goon.



And that he needed to be left-handed.



And this image-flopping killed two birds, actually, since the train needed to be shown traveling south down the California coast. So now everything was perfect, except that the publisher decided that they couldn't show a knife on the cover, and also that Steve in a bath towel was stirring up some...confusing feelings.

TOMORROW: The finished cover.

Event and other Stuff

I'm going to be appearing at the Barnes & Noble at 5130 E Broadway in Tucson on October 23rd at 2pm. I will sign books (preferably mine), possibly do a reading, and accurately guess people's weights to within three pounds. Hope to see you there. Hope to see anyone there, really.

I thought I'd also share another cover illustration I don't think I posted before, since I've been talking about the Brixton Brothers books a bit lately. Previously I posted this, the cover of the first BB book. Steve is about to be apprehended by a cadre of mysterious and commando-like librarians.



When the time came for the paperback edition a new cover was requested, so I devised something a lot simpler and I think a little less stiff than the original:



You'll have to read the book if you want to understand why Steve is dressed like a sailor.

Brixton Brothers #2!

Just ocurred to me that Brixton Brothers #2: The Ghostwriter Secret is out in stores! It's written by Mac Barnett (what isn't?) and illustrated by me, just like the first book was. So today I thought I'd share the cover.

Here's the tight sketch, with digital color.



Man, look at that! Those are bullets streaming through the water! From a gun! Originally I thought it would be funny to show the gun as though the bad guy was crouching on the pool deck with his hand in the water, shooting at Steve and Dana. But you can't show a gun on the cover of a kids' book. So hence just the bullets.
Of course we considered the idea that the bullets were too intense, and might inspire kids to get shot at whilst tied up in a pool, so we tried another version where the bad guy is down in the pool, just screaming at Steve and Dana. Really going off on them. But then we ran it by the national buyer from B. Dalton and he was like, "Wow, that guy's really angry," so I painted a new cover where he isn't so much screaming at the kids as giving them sort of a stern talking-to, and afterward we tried one where he's just taking them for hot wings, but then we were all like, "Whoah! What happened to the conflict?" So we went back to the bullets, and I think we made the right choice.

Here's the final, painted cover, with type. Photoshop and Wacom.

Shortlisted for an Edgar!

Just learned today that Mac Barnett's The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity (Brixton Brothers #1, which I had the honor of illustrating), has been shortisted for an Edgar Award in the juvenile category. Here are some of my previous posts about the book. So anyway, it's an excuse to post more images from this excellent book.

Here's my sketch for a tense scene in which Steve Brixton is hiding in his local library from a unit of special ops-types bent on his capture:

I actually took this sketch, blurred it, posterized it into a flat gray, and used that graytone in the final:

Finally, apropos of nothing, here's a cartoon I drew in high school. My old friend Grant just rediscovered this and emailed it to me. It may be obvious that I was working through sort of a Monty Python stage in my life at this point.

Hooray!

I browbeat someone into donating 25 dollars! Thanks, Dad!
So here's another interior illustration from Brixton Brothers #1: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity.

Yes! Steve thought. I look more like a sailor than anyone in this place!

The Ends

Just saw Gogol Bordello for the second time last night. Is there any better live act? They're like human muppets. It's like Animal left Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem to front his own band.

Anyway.

Previously I shared some art and sketches from The Brixton Brothers #1: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mac Barnett. Illustrated by me. One of my favorite things about the bound book, however, is the endpapers. Click to enlarge.



It's my intention that each successive Brixton Brothers book with have a new endpaper vignette.

The Mystery of the Unfinished Cover

Thought I'd share some of the preliminary sketches I completed for The Brixton Brothers: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, which is officially published today!

Even though Amazon has been shipping it for weeks.



As you can possibly see, we were toying around with another figure here–a female librarian either commanding the commandos or trying to fell Steve Brixton with a dart gun. I thought it was getting too busy and pushed to remove her. Hope I made the right decision.

The Brixton Brother(s)

On this tour Mac and I have started talking about Mac's forthcoming mystery novel, which I illustrated: The Brixton Brothers #1: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity. I'll be posting some art from the interiors in the coming weeks, as the book is officially released on October 6.

But yesterday we got word of a great review posted by Betsy Bird at her School Library Journal blog, Fuse#8. She really gets how funny and amazing Mac's novel is, and she posts a cavalcade of videos and supporting links, too. You know, the sort of thing I'd do myself if I weren't so lazy.

Anyway, here's the novel's cover, sans type. Painted in Photoshop on a Wacom, natch. Click to make big.