The finished painting.  That's me, basically, as the Fedup delivery man in the foreground.

This is, once again, from my new book Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, written by Mac Barnett, available next month.

If They'd Gotten Two Whales There Would've Been Free Shipping.

A sketch from Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem by Mac Barnett, available next month.

Nick Cave

Every now and then I try my hand at caricature, usually just while sketching in front of the television. I don't have any particular gift for it, and I really admire those who do it well.

Tonight I was watching some Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds videos with my wife, and suddenly got the urge:

These don't usually work out this well on the first try. Then again, Cave's face is a bit easier than most. I might as well be bragging at having drawn Groucho Marx.

Here's the finished painting of that sketch I showed last week from my next picture book, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, written by Mac Barnett.  You'll notice this image has a much wider composition–between the sketch dummy stage and the final painted stage the book got lengthened and rearranged somewhat, and this illustration needed to turn into a two-page spread.

For the illustrators out there, this was painted in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos tablet.

Another Billy Twitters Preview

Preliminary sketch from Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, by Mac Barnett, in stores this June.  I'll show the finished painting soon.

Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem

Previously, I've shared a little bit of my forthcoming picture book, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem (written by Mac Barnett).  In the coming weeks I'm going to be showing a lot more, starting with this post.  First off, the cover again, this time with type in place:

Regular readers of this blog, and people who have seen me speak, already know that I like to use as much reference as possible for my illustrations, from photographs to...models:

Turns out it's really difficult to find good pictures of blue whales.  I guess they're to big to photograph.  There are a lot of good illustrations of them out there, and those were helpful, but what really helped me on this book was a nine-inch-long plastic blue whale toy.  I think you'll understand why when you see more illustrations from the book.

And, as I often do, I sculpted a little model of the titular character, Billy.  He's made out of Sculpey and painted with acrylics.

More soon.

SMEKDAY NOW IN PAPERBACK

The day you probably haven't been especially waiting for has now arrived: The True Meaning of Smekday is now available in paperback. 

AND!  

It contains a two-page, NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN story in the back.  Now it can be told.  The tale of how J.Lo revealed his alien identity to the world.

I don't want to say too much more about it at this point, except that it contains the following image:

That's all for now.

Slander! Slander and Lies!

I was recently made aware of this video made by three Gorg, who claim that I misrepresent their alien society in my book The True Meaning of Smekday.
Friends and neighbors, I call them as I see them. But watch the video and decide for yourself.



Give it up for students Jordan, Atia, Shafin, and Giovanni, and to librarian Kevin. It doesn't get any better than this.

Walkpstalk! Walkpstalk!

The Z-kids over at Bookie Woogie just reviewed my book, Pssst!, and I couldn't be happier. And they drew pictures! Go check it out here.

Te gusta la comida, ¿no?

I've just learned that my book Frankenstein Takes the Cake has finally come out in a spanish-language edition–my first book to be reprinted in any language other than english. You can check out the catalog listing for Frankenstein se Hace un Sándwich at the Océano website. And for those who can't read spanish, I've had my laptop's language widget translate the catalog entry:

Frankenstein is hungry but no of its neighbors wants to share with him the food and to only they throw rotten foods him. What they ignore is that what for some is stinking sweepings, for others is a delight. The ghost of the Opera is sorry the fact that it cannot compose nothing because it has stuck a song. The creature of the Black Lagoon does not pay attention to the advice to her mother and room to swim too much soon after eating, reason why she sinks in the water for always. Conde Drácula walks for all sides with a spinach obstructed in his eyeteeth because nobody dares to warn to him…

Hey! Go Read My Interview.

The blog The Miss Rumphius Effect today features an interview with me about my poetry writing process, such as it is. Please go have a look HERE.

Hey! Go Read My Poem.

There's a brand new poem of mine you've never seen before at the GottaBook blog today, part of the Thirty Poets / Thirty Days event. If you have a moment, check it out and let them know what you think.

CAS-A-COTTS

Many schools hold their own mock Caldecott competitions in which each student, or each class, or the school as a whole chooses their favorite picture book of the previous year. I've been the recipient of a few in the past, but rarely any as great as these:

Jaron, Mamie, and Troy of Central Avenue School in Madison, New Jersey, drew and sent me these CAS-a-cott medals for my book, Frankenstein Takes the Cake.  Click the image to see them larger.

Thanks, guys!

Idiot Box Show is up

The Idiot Box show has opened at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, featuring my Small Wonder painting, shown at right, as well as dozens of other works of art inspired by television nostalgia.  You can see all the work in the show by clicking this sentence.  Not this sentence, the last sentence.  No, its...it's probably a different color–look for that.  Here, let me do it, you're screwing it up.

Unused Sketch #3

When I posted Unused Sketch #1 a while back I mentioned that it was from a tricky picture book project that ended up generating a lot of material we didn't use. Believe it or not, this sketch is also in that category:

I've been calling it "Alexander Hamilton Makes a Federal Deposit."

Show at Redcap's Corner

Do you like pictures that look like this? Would you like to see them up close, in person? Do you live in the Philadelphia area?
This Saturday, the 4th, at 6pm, I have a show of fantasy art opening at Redcap's Corner in West Philly. At least a dozen of my paintings will be on the walls, for sale to the economically stimulated or simply available for closer scrutiny to the curious. For that matter I will also be there and available for closer scrutiny. I'll have to remember to shave.

Recap's Corner–4040 Locust Street, Philadelphia. See you there!

Thirty Poets/Thirty Days, and more.

April Fool's Day kicks off the completely-real-and-not-a-joke National Poetry Month, and fans of poetry for kids have two daily ways to celebrate.

First, on the blog GottaBook, we have Thirty Poets/Thirty Days.  Each day of April a renowned children's poet will present a completely new, never-before-seen poem.  the event is kicked off today by none other than Jack Prelutsky.  Other poets include Jon Scieszka, Nikki Grimes, Jane Yolen, Douglas Florian, and Linda Sue Park.  And me at some point, though I won't know when my poem is scheduled to appear until shortly before it does.

And over at The Miss Rumphius Effect we have Poetry Makers, a month's worth of conversations with kid's poets about what they do.  It starts today with an interview with Kenn Nesbitt.  There'll be an interview with me some time next week–I'll link to it when it happens.

Unused Sketch #2

Here's another batch of sketches that have thus far gone unused. That may change at some point.

A while back I was going to work up a bunch of spot illustrations of Abraham SuperLincoln and see if a particular magazine wanted to run them as space-filler. I sketched up quite a few more than I'm showing here, but these were the ones that made the cut. Then about a half-dozen more pressing matters got in the way and I dropped them.

I think they're mostly self-explanatory. I'll only note that yes, that is a bad drawing of Lincoln punching out Hitler in the top left. And in the bottom left he's preparing to hurl a Nazi at, ostensibly, more Nazis.

I just noticed I didn't draw him wearing his mask in any of these. That's weird.

Unused Sketch #1

I recently completed a picture book that ended up requiring a lot of sketches and ideas that were never used. This picture of a bus stop is one of them. The rabbit has an iPod.

Ada Lovelace Day

Haven't posted anything in a while. And my regular morning webcrawl tells me that today is Ada Lovelace Day–as Cory Doctorow put it, "the day that bloggers all over the world post about women in science as part of a global day of awareness and appreciation for the (often underreported) role that women play in the sciences." I love women in science (or at least one particular woman in science), and I'm a huge fan of awareness, so I'm blogging about my wife, Marie.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, she's an astrophysicist.  That's her, second from the left, in a photo by Gaelen Marsden, who I realize may not appreciate me stealing his content like this.  Let me know, Gaelen.  Anyway, Marie is here depicted in Antarctica in 2006, where she and her team built a telescope and launched it on a balloon to the edge of space to search the infrared spectrum for signs of star formation in the early universe.  She was there for two months.  Why yes, as a matter of fact she is cooler than your wife.  That's nice of you to mention it. 

V. I. C. I. 5

I think it's actually finished now. I have only to package it up somehow and get it off to LA for the Idiot Box show in April.

Home to Tucson

I'm going home to Tucson this weekend for the first annual Tucson Festival of Books, to be held on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Arizona. I'll be giving presentations on Saturday and Sunday, the 14th and 15th. Check out the link above for details, but here's my schedule:

Saturday, March 14th:

MINTY-FRESH FIRE-BREATHING CHARACTERS (a panel with David Christiana and Chris Newberg)
10 am, Education Building, room 353

Signing
11am-12pm in the authors signing area

Reading
1pm in the Teen Authors Lounge, wherever that is.

Sunday, March 15th:

FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO TRUE MEANINGS
10am, Target Stage on the East Mall

Signing
11am-12pm

Hope to see you there!

Git Gob

Regular readers will know that I don't make a habit of reposting other people's videos and work and other random things I find on the web. I just assume that's not why you come here, and anyway that's what Boing Boing is for, right?

But this really is possibly the best one-minute short I've ever seen.

Git Gob, by Phillip Eddolls.

Babushka

Max surveyed the lab with flagging interest. The police had been through with their brushes and combs, and any clue to the whereabouts of the missing chemist was no doubt bagged and tagged and sitting on the shelf of some dark evidence room. But amidst the dull microscopes and flasks and hot plates his eyes were drawn to a garish Russian nesting doll, smiling coquettishly from inside a Pyrex beaker.

Max lifted it out, twisted the little babushka at her equator to reveal the smaller but otherwise identical doll inside. Max’s mother always had a thing for nesting dolls. Max liked them himself–who didn’t? They posed an unanswerable question, a tickle in the brain. A complete doll demanded that you excavate all her little daughters and granddaughters. These little women, once disassembled, demanded to be put back together again, and so on. You were never finished. And the smallest doll– the size of a lean peanut, its painted face like punctuation–was always to Max a frustrating delight. Small enough, certainly, yet he always wished it could hatch still smaller generations. A woman like a grain of rice. Then another like a hangnail. Then a single peasant molecule, its atoms waiting to be split into the purely theoretical.

And so he noted with pleasure when the seventh largest of the chemist’s nesting dolls could itself be cracked to reveal an eighth the size of a newborn’s toe. And even the eighth–impossible!–had a little seam at the waist. And so did the next little grain of a doll inside. He tried to twist this one open, lost his hold, and spent the next three minutes hunting for it on the linoleum floor.

Finally he had it again, pinched tightly at both ends between his cramping fingers. He prized it apart, and the white speck inside dropped to the workbench and began immediately to flex and uncurl. It was a strip of paper, barely wider than an eyelash, yet unmistakably scribbled with tiny script. Max squinted at it for while before recalling that he was seated next to a microscope.

It took a while to coax the strip into place, still longer to figure out the microscope’s workings, but then he was reading it, a message that at a magnification of fifty appeared pockmarked and rough, but still legible:

look behind you.

Frowning, Max turned to see the chemist, and her gun, and the little babushka it fired.

V. I. C. I. 4

Another progress shot of the painting I'm working on.  Almost done.