The Book of Boy is Here!

I loved, loved, loved reading and illustrating this book from start to finish - and it comes out today! Get a copy from your independent, local bookstore. Or from Ye Olde Amazon Shoppe.

Sunny Boots

A commissioned portrait of a sunny cat named Boots (acrylic and ink on a 6 x 4-inch masonite panel, with hand-painted wood frame).

Serious Boots

A commissioned portrait of a serious cat named Boots (acrylic and ink on a 6 x 4-inch masonite panel, with hand-painted wood frame).

Coquille Doodles

A Puggy Piggy Bank

Last spring, the folks at Parnassus Books of Nashville, Tennessee, asked over 100 writers, illustrators, and celebrities to decorate plain, white, ceramic piggy banks for an auction to help Stephanie Appell, the store’s manager of books for young readers, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

After getting my piggy bank, I experimented with pencil and paint, but my pencil smudged and my paint peeled off.

Then I found that the bank’s surface was very nice for carving, so I scraped away my false starts and began to sand and scratch and ink-in some features.

Before long, the pig had turned into a pug - I think because it reminded me of Toches (a.k.a. Tuckus, Tookus, etc.), a fat and funny, snuffling and snorting little dog that had belonged to my friend Madeleine, who I lost to breast cancer last year.

When I liked the way my piggy puggy bank looked, I burnished him with butcher’s wax (which will protect him from getting grubby, but which also gives him a warmer, Toches-like tone), and I sent him back to Nashville.

He and many of his new friends, both ceramic and Parnassian - and even another pug! - were featured on Nashville’s WSMV-TV News. Take a look!

Here’s a link to the whole auction.

And here’s a link to my guy’s page. Why not bid - and bid! and bid! and bid! - for him, or for one or more of his companions? The auction starts today and ends Friday, September 30, 2016!

I think he likes you.

Did I Find Two “Lost” Sherlock Holmes Poems?

“The Recrudescence of Sherlock Holmes” by a pretentious 17-year-old named Ian Schoenherr

Did I just find two “lost” Sherlock Holmes poems? I don't know. Maybe...

I should say that I’m going through yet another Sherlockian phase right now, so while painting the illustrations for Maile Meloy’s next novel (out this fall!), I listen to audiobooks of the Canon, and in between brush strokes I browse books and blogs about Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yesterday, I finally looked up one of the earliest - if not the earliest - parodies of the great detective, “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes”, which was published anonymously in The Speaker for November 28, 1891. Its author turned out to be Conan Doyle’s soon-to-be friend, J. M. Barrie, who later created Peter Pan (another early obsession of mine).

Inspired by this - and also by the recent ruckus over “The Book o’ the Brig” - I started poking around for other early, possibly “lost” Sherlock Holmes parodies or pastiches. Soon, I found this poem:

And then I found another:

These two poems appeared in an obscure little book called Volume of Various Verse by Charles Joseph Colton (1868-1916), published in New Orleans by the Press of Searcy & Pfaff in 1899. Evidently, this may not have been their first time in print; as Henry Rightor states in the book’s introduction:

The name of Charles J. Colton, subscribed to verses in various newspapers of this country, notably in the New Orleans Times-Democrat of Mr. Page M. Baker, has, for a number of years, attracted the widest attention and furnished to a great body of readers the most genuine enjoyment. That these verses have struck the popular chord is attested by the extent to which they have been reproduced. Bridget, bringing in the early breakfast, has been equally careful to bring in the morning paper, and, like as not, the first thing turned to was the head of the “All Sorts” column wherein most of the shorter verses have appeared, and where the searcher might be sure to find some whimsical fancy dancing to the lilting measure our poet knows so well.

But I’ll leave it to someone else to track down which particular issues of the New Orleans Times-Democrat (or some other newspaper) may or may not have featured these works.

Google as I might, I haven’t been able to find any mention of Colton’s contributions to the subgenre of Sherlockian-parodies-in-verse. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough or in the right places, so I hope someone will let me know if they’ve seen these before.

Now, here are transcriptions for your convenience:

ANOTHER FROM SHERLOCK HOMES
by Charles Joseph Colton

The famous vidocq, Sherlock Homes, and I, stood at the bar;
I complimented him upon his great success thus far,
Whereat the sleuth assured me, though in accents of some pride,
That ’twas simply observation and deduction, well applied.
“For instance,” he went on, “this crowd coming in the door
Are a lot of gentlemen whom I have never seen before;
Yet I’ll merely note the drinks they take, and to me will stand confessed
Their respective walks and callings.” I watched eagerly the test.

“Beer,” said the first man - whispered Holmes: “An undertaker, sure.”
The second asked for “port” - said S.: “A sailor, simple, pure.”
“Punch,” called the third - said Sherlock: "He a pugilist must be.”
“Gin,” cried the next - and Holmes declared: “A cotton planter he.”
“And he” the sleuth went on, about the last one of the group.
“Must be a daily paper scribe” - the youth had called: “A scoop.”
And when I made the inquiry, to Sherlock’s great delight,
I found that he in every single instance had been right.


SHERLOCK HOLMES’ LATEST TRIUMPH
by Charles Joseph Colton

An unknown had suicided: to find what he’d been
In life, the noted Sherlock Holmes, of course, had been called in;
The great detective searched the clothes upon the defunct man,
And in a confident tone his conclusions thus began:

“That this man lived in Providence is patent to my eye;
Men keep mementoes of their homes, and here’s a flask of R.I.
And late in Philadelphia he sojourned; that’s a fact
That’s patent; in his pocket is a last year’s almanac.

“Deceased was a book agent; note his canvas shoes;
A hunter, too; his pantaloons of duck doth that disclose;
And fisherman; his underwear of net proves that to me - ”
And all around were thunderstruck at such sagacity.

Follow the Waffles

I drew these tiny, semi-faceless critters on scratchboard, while experimenting for The Twistrose Key.

Monday’s Frog is Fair of Face

A little, unpublished study of a reclining frog, acrylic and ink on paper

Elixirium

Why, it’s The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - now published in German by Coppenrath and given the perhaps more intriguing title Elixirium. Viel Spaß beim Lesen! (or something like that)

Blog Frogs, Now in Living Color

Everything old is new again, including these frogs, some of whom have shown up on these pages before. But now they’ve been burnished a bit and tinted green.

Tudor Tuxedo and Tabby Cats

Here are my two cats, Buzz (the tuxedo) and Pistachio (the tabby), eschewing their usual nakedness for Tudoresque garb. I painted them this winter.

The Twistrose Key’s Winter Jacket

Looking through an old notebook, I see that I made my first sketches for the jacket of Tone Almhjell’s The Twistrose Key on February 4, 2012 - a good 20 months before the novel was published. At first, the jacket was to be winter-themed, with a snowy landscape surrounded by a border printed in blue, silver, and black, and evocative of late 19th Century publishers’ bindings.

Part of what excited me about the blue and silver border was that it harkened back to the packaging of a childhood favorite: Drake’s Yodels, which used to come individually - and magically - wrapped in blue and silver foil. (Years and years ago I dug this wrapper fragment out from under the backseat of my parents’ 1965 Dodge Dart and I’ve saved it as a precious relic ever since.)

Anyway, I started sketching, incorporating as many chilly elements as possible, and playing around with hand-lettered type.

Eventually, I introduced a “key” motif into my sketches - but either I’d misread the manuscript or didn’t yet have an accurate description of the twistrose key itself. According to the text:

It was large, as large as the length of [Lin’s] hand, and blackened, as if someone had tried to burn it. Its head was fashioned as a petal, and the stem was that of a rose, with three tiny, but sharp thorns. Across the petal, there was a name engraved: “Twistrose”.

Next, I placed snowflakes within the (erroneous) bows of the keys - and animals (a fox, a vole, an owl, and a wolf) began to emerge in the four corners.

After filling up many scribbly pages with blue and black ballpoint pen, I did a tighter pencil rendition of the jacket. As you can see, I abandoned the key motif entirely - and went with a lock motif instead (but that didn’t last very long, either).

A variant color version followed - now with display type provided by designer Kristin Smith at Puffin, who spearheaded the project. I think, too, I had more descriptions from the manuscript to guide me by then.

Not long after all this, however, the snow-laden plan melted away to something more silhouetted and starry and less “season specific.”

Later still, the silver foil was replaced with gold, the mountains grew back, “The Wanderer” (the Northern-lights-looking smudge in the sky) went away, and so on. But maybe I can recycle my wintry ideas and pay homage to Yodels on the cover of some future book.

Lost Jackets: The Peculiar

The jacket shown here was, in essence, an “audition” for Stefan Bachmann’s The Peculiar (Greenwillow Books, 2012). The publishers weren’t sure what approach would best suit the debut novel, so they asked a few illustrators to execute a bunch of different ideas.

If I remember rightly, for one of my three sketches I was asked to go in a deliberately Apothecary-like direction, i.e. moody, atmospheric, and featuring a bird (in this case a mechanical brass sparrow, instead of an American Robin) and the London skyline (Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, not the Tower of London and Tower Bridge).

I always liked the result, but it may have been too dark for their purposes, and ultimately they went with something more lighthearted.

Revisiting Illustrations

I used to think that it was a sin to rework an illustration after it had been published. But there’s plenty of historical precedence for post-publication alterations: Howard Pyle, for example, did a lot of picture-tweaking for a variety of reasons (some of which I discussed here and here).

Then again, Pyle - and plenty of other authors, too - sometimes made major revisions to his stories in between serial and book publication - changing plot lines, cutting characters and scenes, etc. - and didn’t, to my knowledge, catch any flak for his actions.

So, I wondered, if a book is out of print with no real chance of being revived, why not revisit its illustrations in hopes of breathing new life into them? I decided to do a little experiment...

The picture shown here started out as my illustration for the now long-gone Jonkonnu by Amy Littlesugar, which deals with an incident in the life of Winslow Homer - and for which I tried to emulate Homer’s style as best I could with limited skills. I didn’t rework the picture with real ink and paint, however: I just digitally altered a low-resolution scan of a proof (hence the not-great quality).

I’m still not brave or foolhardy enough to start messing with my original drawings and paintings, but it could be only a matter of time.

JFK

I painted this full-length, yet only six-inch-high portrait of President Kennedy for Jean Karl’s America Alive. (Pardon the coffee stains and general grubbiness.)

Lost Jackets: Wonder Light

Sometimes I can’t say goodbye to sketches that get superseded by other ideas. Here’s such an example, made for the jacket of Wonder Light by R. R. Russell. The final, published jacket looks nothing like this early composition, but I'm still fond of it, even though it doesn’t really capture the mood - and mist - of the novel. It looks more like a cover for “Wild West”-themed sheet music or “Leathercraft for Kids” from the 1950s. Maybe one day I can find a more appropriate home for this kind of approach.

The Twistrose Key is out today!

The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell - which features a few dozen illustrations by me - is in stores today. Pick up a copy from...

IndieBound
Barnes and Noble
Amazon

NYC for NYU

I did this booklet cover for New York University a while back. It’s, as usual, in ink and acrylic on paper and I was deliberately trying to mimic a pictorial style that I recalled from childhood: maybe the artwork on boxes for German-made tin toys...? Something like that.

Characters from a Lost Novel

I confess: the “lost novel” was never lost at all because it was never there in the first place. This page of character studies was more or less a doodle: just me trying out a combination of ink and acrylic paint on a piece of bristol board with no real plan in mind.

The Apprentices Make(s) the Cover

The Apprentices was recently featured on the cover of Ingram Children’s Advance which was sent out to booksellers all over the country. Nice!