Monday’s Frog is Fair of Face

A little, unpublished study of a reclining frog, acrylic and ink on paper

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.

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.

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.

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!

Fishing Pig (after George Caleb Bingham)

I love pigs and I love George Caleb Bingham, so I combined the two in this painting - which is still in-progress, though I confess I haven't touched it in a while. It's acrylic and ink on Strathmore Aquarius II paper (when it was still good, fine-grained, non-buckling paper - not the rougher, thinner, wrinklier paper it became, alas).

These Pigs Could Be Yours

It's time once again for the 19th Annual Children's Book Art Silent Auction. It'll be held Wednesday, May 29, 2013, 5.50-7.30pm during BookExpo America at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. Above is this year's contribution: my reworked/revamped family portrait, which I featured here a while back...

The Apothecary is now in paperback

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - with a whole bunch of my illustrations - is now out in paperback. It’s a pretty thing, I think, and it appeals to my magpie sensibilities.

Eagle-eyed readers (and even skylark-eyed, robin-eyed, and swallow-eyed ones) will notice that I tweaked the original jacket painting. Actually, it was more of a small-scale demolition job wherein I tore down the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, erected a new stretch of old-fashioned buildings and sprinkled some children on top of them. On second thought: maybe I just turned the bottle a bit so as to get a fresh vista, taking care not to jostle the bird in the process. At any rate, I like this version better.

And it’s nice to share some pictorial real estate with Garth Williams, whose drawing was adapted for that shiny sticker in the corner. Did I mention the book won (well, tied in the middle reader category) The E. B. White Read-Aloud Award from the American Booksellers Association?

So by all means go get a copy at...
Indiebound
Books-A-Million
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

New, Old Pig on the Block

Going to the ABFFE’s (Mostly) Silent Children’s Art Auction and Reception to Support Free Speech for Young People at BEA tonight? If so, you can bid on - and maybe even bring home with you - this little piggy.

He looks sort of familiar, eh? That’s because I took a color xerox of a painting I did a dozen years ago, mounted it on illustration board, then started to retouch and, I hope, improve on my earlier work. I had based the original on a photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, but thought the proportions needed adjusting to make him less human and more pig-like. I also fleshed out his surroundings, gave it all a warmer tone, and pretty much repainted the whole thing.

An Illustration from The Apothecary

This is one of my favorite illustrations from The Apothecary and one of the ideas that came to mind when I first read the manuscript.

But sometimes the most simple ideas are the most difficult to execute. I couldn’t get the sky or the waves “right” and kept painting over and over again, getting nothing but more unhappy.

When I was in almost tearful despair, my cat Buzz jumped on my scanner and sent it clattering to the floor, and so I decided to see if it still worked by scanning my frustrating picture. And then I started tinkering with the image in Photoshop and within a few minutes I finally got the “feeling” I’d been after since that first read. My Photoshop skills are pretty rough, though, so I spent the next few days copying in ink and paint what I’d done on the computer.

The Blue Horse Auction is Underway!

If you’d like to take this blue horse back to your stable, now’s your chance:

He’s up for auction and can be found on The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse Charity Auction website and on Ebay.

The auction ends Wednesday, October 26, 2011, at 9:01 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time) - which is just after midnight October 27th on the East Coast.

Bid early. Bid often. Support a worthy cause. Help a horse out.

A Blue Horse?

For better or horse worse, I’m becoming a specialist in painting forlorn animals in old clothes - as seen here, here, here, and here - and now here:

“Blue Horse in Black and White” by Ian Schoenherr (2011)

I painted this sad creature for a good cause, though:

The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse Charity Auction is a silent auction to benefit the NEA Foundation’s commitment to help improve arts education in schools across the nation. The initiative was inspired by Eric Carle’s picture book The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, which celebrates imagination and artistic freedom.

The directive was to create “a piece of original artwork featuring [my] interpretation of a horse in any color, size, shape or medium of [my] choosing, inspired from [my] reading of The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse” on an 8 x 8" canvas (on which the legend seen in the picture was printed, by the way; my lettering isn’t that good).

I guess I interpreted this directive broadly.

Anyway, this could be yours, once the online auction begins on or around October 17, 2011. The site www.BlueHorseAuction.com will be up and running once all the entries are received and photographed. I’ll post a reminder and more details as they come.

Irritable Fox and Annoyed Pig

An experiment for the sake of experimenting - in this case in ink and watercolor. (I wanted to see what could be done using a limited palette - specifically one recommended by Beatrix Potter - but I’ve since mislaid the list of colors.)

Study for The Apothecary

This is an experimental study I made last summer when I was trying to get a feel for the illustrations for The Apothecary.

It’s in ink and acrylic on watercolor paper and is much more “thinly” painted than the final art: try as I might, my light touch always gives way to impasto and opacity. Last night I got see see a roomful of illustrations at the ABC Children's Group at ABA Silent Auction to benefit the ABFFE Fund for Free Speech in Children’s Books - and I really marveled at the ease and confidence shown in so much of the work. How do they do it? One of these days, I’ll apply a flat tone of color and let it be - and not muck around in it.

(This piece was in the show, too - and the winning bid was $500!)

Physician, Take a Hike

Kind of creepy, eh? This showed up in The New York Times Book Review for May 12, 2002, and illustrated Natalie Angier’s review of Michael Gearin-Tosh’s memoir, Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny.

As Angier said, Gearin-Tosh, who had been diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer, took “his body, his health, his life into his own cautious, obstinate hands. Gearin-Tosh refused the chemotherapy - hence the subtitle of ‘Living Proof’: ‘A Medical Mutiny’ - and chose instead to put together a semipersonalized program of Chinese breathing exercises, acupuncture, coffee and castor oil enemas, megadoses of vitamins and a diet rich in raw vegetables and fresh juices and stripped of salt, sugar and cooked fat.”

So, in lieu of any better ideas, I drew a kind of “universe” of Gearin-Tosh’s alternative medical regimen: the human head functioning as a kind of a sun, with acupuncture needle-rays, orbited by vitamin-stars, garlic- and turnip-asteroids, apple- and orange-planets, carrot- and onion-comets, banana- and pea pod-moons, and ...an enema-bag space-station? Sounds like the worst bowl of Lucky Charms ever.

The Turtle on the Fence Post

A cropped version of this illustration appeared in The New York Times Book Review for March 24, 2002. I made it for William Kennedy’s review of Joe Klein’s book, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.

The Book Review gave out a particular photo of Bill Clinton to a number of artists, including Barry Blitt, Henrik Drescher, Peter Blegvad, Philip Burke, Robert Grossman, Thomas Fuchs - maybe others - and me. Each of us was supposed to re-imagine the picture and then our results would be ganged-up on the cover and, it was hoped, evoke what Kennedy described as “the duality, triality, quadrality of Bill Clinton's nature and outlook.”

But I (and maybe some of the others) misunderstood the directive. I think I should have shown Clinton’s whole head and shoulders instead of just a fragment of him. So I wound up making the above piece, but while it missed getting on the cover, it was used inside with the review itself.

My mixed-up medium was colored ink on scratchboard, glued to a scrap of Color-Aid paper.

See my other take on Bill Clinton, here.