The Arctic

OK. Confession.... This is a huge embarrassment on my part, but my entire life....for the past 27 years, I have been mispronouncing 'Arctic'. That's right kids. There's a town named 'shame on me' and right now I'm its chief inhabitant. I have also been misspelling it, which puts us in this 'Chicken or the Egg' conundrum. This week at job-job we learned that Arctic is spelled as such and not known as the 'Artic'. My drawing-girl roots are so hurt.
I was a bit shocked. I considered hiding this indiscretion but it's less shameful if I admit it and move on. Seriously, though...I thought this part of my life was over! In the sixth grade a fight with Lahela Lindsey took a turn for the worse when it came to light that she was in fact correct. 'Pretzel' is not pronounced with a 'n'. Sorry kid, there is no such thing as a 'prentzel'. That's the last time I can clearly recall such a blow. In my defense which one of us is now living an awesome life in the 'pretzel' capitol of the world?! HUH? Take that Hawaii! So who really won that one? I think it's clear. Uh...yeah. In breaking this logic, I have no intention of ever moving to the Arctic. As a compromise I am thinking of christening my studio. It doesn't seem right that our universe wouldn't have some place called the "Artic". Could you think of somewhere more fitting or more sketchy? I for one, cannot.

The Arctic is cold. OK. I'm sure you knew that already. But it's really cold. We're talking negative 40 degrees Celsius. That's like normal winter but times 40! Actually, I have no idea what negative 40 degrees feels like -- but it's really, really bad.

In the summer it is hardly ever dark.

In the winter it is hardly ever light.

Sami and Inuit's live pretty happily in the Arctic. Honestly, I don't know know for sure that they're happy. I imagine things can get kind of dull. Sami live in these really adorable little villages. Maybe they have dances? Food isn't easy to find there. So they fish. It's starting to look like I'd make a really bad Arctic girl... What with the cold and the no sun and the catching and then eating of fish. They fish with nets, so maybe I'd take to that with a better attitude than fishing with bait. Gew. Bait. Gross.I would probably make a better Arctic flower. They are low to the ground with very shallow roots. Plus they're very pretty. They grow long hair that is wild and unruly. They're prickly on the outside but incredibly fragile once you get past the outer layer that they develop for protection. It's like this movie just wrote me a dating profile.

My favorite part about designing and animating this movie was all the cool animals I got to research and draw. I'm going to show you some of them now. Check it:

My art director and I got into a fight about this whale. He kept complaining about how it looked. I'd redesign and then he'd complain some more. I got SOOOOOOOO frustrated. Finally I realized that he was upset with the way that this whale actually looks, not with the way I was designing. After a lot of back and forth I got the last word with, "Dude, take it up with God."We talk a lot about how we're ruining the environment and doing bad stuff for the earth. I animate ice caps melting and glaciers moving. It's actually pretty sad. At one point we have a momma polar bear and a baby polar bear on seperate flats of ice as they float away from one another. It's enough to draw a tear.
Do I feel guilty after this Arctic movie has sunk in? A little.... but then I slap myself and pull up a chair in my perfectly temperature controlled studio and look at my blog stats for today. Let's be honest. The Arctic is hardly even looking at my blog! Maybe I'll go back to calling it the "Artic," afterall.

Silent E!

This week at job-job, I've been finishing up some animation for our newest phonics movie. Here are some stills of the art I made for it. Illustrating the mule was my favorite part, the chore of making him walk, not so much. It was always thus.

No Place Like Home

This week at job-job I've been working on a new film for the kiddies. We're focusing on Homes. Unfortunately I have learned little this week. I was actually kind of up to speed on the available options out on the market. My editor accidentally misspelled this on my planner. Instead my schedule read 'Holmes'. I'm still nursing my disappointment at not making a flick focusing on mystery, intrigue, cocaine and a certain "dear fellow". However, there were some cozy drawings involved. Here's a sneak peek at my favorites.

Sometimes homes are made out of stone:

Sometimes homes are made out of straw.

Sometimes homes have only one room:

And some homes have lots of rooms:

Sometimes homes are on wheels:

Sometimes they are on stilts:

Sometimes they are on the water!

We also touched on communities. You know the drill, location, location, location.

Why I'm feeling Icky...

Last night, while the nation was distracted by the bailout plan, the Senate passed the Orphan Works Bill. I've been working at opposing this bill for six months now. It is oh so obvious that congress is trying to slip it in under the radar. This act will affect all artists, writers, choreographers, photographers etc. it is important that we act now to stop it becoming law. Over 70 creators organizations are opposed to this bill and working hard to stop its passage.
Please write your congress rep by clicking below. You'll find a simple form letter that will seriously only take two minutes to complete.
Please help!
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321
xo,
Amber

If you'd like to read more about it:
For more info: http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/

This is overview of how this bill will affect the art world: excerpts from:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/bills/?billid=11320236

**The Orphan Works Act defines an "orphan work" as any copyrighted
work whose author any infringer says he is unable to locate with what the infringer himself decides has been a "reasonably diligent search."In a radical departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use thework for any purpose, including commercial usage. In the case of visual art, the word "author" means "artist."

** This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use.
As acknowledged by the Register of Copyrights it is not designed to deal with the special situations of non profit museums, libraries and archives. It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work.

** The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder's ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement.

**The bill has a disproportionate impact on visual artists because it
is common for an artist's work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed by others for feckless or unscrupulous reasons. This is especially true of art published in the Internet Age.Coerced Registration

**The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives' work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art.

**The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information.

**These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans.

**There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.

**The artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries.

**Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive;therefore countless working artists would find countless existing works orphaned from the moment they create them.

**The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this nightmarish bureaucratic burden would result in his work automatically becoming an "orphan" and subject to legal infringement.

Get a GPS

My latest adventure in the world of children's educational artwork surrounds a certain problem.

"What is a map and how do you use one?"

I spent the last several weeks working on a small educational movie about maps. I for one love maps. In another life I may have chosen the route of a cartographer. I was over the moon excited when this assignment landed on my desk. Of course I was hoping that I would be creating maps outlining a path from here to the moon. Nevertheless, it was a gig that held my attention.
In the middle of illustrating the artwork for this job I was plucked out of NY rather suddenly and sent to Chicago on business. As a result, I had the sublime opportunity to visit the Maps exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum. There are very few things more fun than expensing away a day where you get the chance to study A.A.Milnes' Hundred Acre Wood, peruse Limberg's flight chart and learn about years of groundbreaking art with rock solid meaning. One of the reasons I grew up to be an animator is that I love work that connects art with science. Scientific Illustration leaves me enthralled. If you love control in chaos as much as I do you will love this exhibit at the Field Museum. If you get a chance to see the Maps in Chicago PUHLEESE go! If that particular field trip is out of the question hopefully, in its own humble way, this blog entry will help :)

We started out with the simple problem of a kid's birthday party. Remember the cutesy invites you used to get as a child? They usually came with a little map to the house so your mom didn't get lost on Kaneohe Drive tearing her hair out while you cried in the backseat In your best dress. Our writer pulled together an adorable script with a map of the neighborhood and a children's invite to 'Becca's Party.' Neither character knows how to get to Madison Park. Unfortunately neither knows how to read a map either. Usually that's how we get the learning kick started.

To introduce the concept of a map we ask the question,

"What is a map?"

Our answer is that a map is a tool that shows details about an area.

A map can show continents:

Or countries :
or states (these were all incredibly therapeutic to draw)
Or towns and cities

Maps can also show streets, roads and landmarks: Here's where we bring back the kiddie map. I LOVE the kiddie map. It was my favorite to draw. Deciding what every little landmark would look like in the key was a thrill. It was a little like developing Hanna Stamps! It takes a totally different mindset to decide what is representative and what will look best when it's boiled down to a tinsy one-inch square. When I was developing the Hanna Stamps! I really started to flex that muscle. Of course, as this map makes very clear, everything's cuter on a petite scale.

Our next question asked what type of maps exist.

The script totally blew my mind here. I never think of a globe as being a map, but guess what? . . .

It is!

These are the other types of maps I pulled together for the project.

We spend a good long time in this latest film talking about map keys and explaining how they work. This was the most time consuming of all of the work I did for this project. The problem with keys is that once you make them you actually have to follow them. Since we have such a young audience, kindergarten to third grade, I had to make sure they were fairly easy to read while presenting a somewhat accurate representation of what a real map looks like.

As an illustrator I'm used to making up stuff all the time. If i need a girl in a hot air balloon I draw one. I don't need to look at a picture because it will too greatly influence my creative process. However, with maps you can't pull stuff out of thin air. There weren't any maps that I could find that made creating a new map too easy. They couldn't be too complicated and they had to have keys. In the end I pieced together bits of information from all over to create new maps. They look pretty but they lack any form of true information. Everything is made up and for the most part it's all hypothetical. This bothers me when I go to bed at night, but in the daytime I agree with my colleagues that these maps were only SAMPLES of maps can look like. This way the World's children will grow up into fine map-reading adults.

To bring everything home we spent a lot of time discussing directions and how there are sometimes multiple ways to get to the same place. The witty banter that ensued was pretty great and totally sweet to animate.

The fun part was making little paths with arrows and circles to show how a compass rose works and knocking in the North, South, East, West thing into their heads. There was a nice bit where I got to animate the characters vowing to Never Eat Soggy Waffles which involved about a quart of maple syrup. I love my job.

Tune in in next month, where I'm gonna teach you about telling time to the hour! Woot.