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.

Mexico Rocks

This is some new fun stuff from my latest project at my job-job. I really love the way this film turned out. Below are some of my favorite frame grabs from the whole movie. This one took forever, but it sure was fun. These aren't sketchy in the least, but it's been a long time since I've been able to get anything up, mainly because my life is consumed by freelance as of late, a nice and warm feeling :)

I'm slightly suspicious of this particular assignment, could it be that once again I'm being judged for my non-mexican-i-ness? I think perhaps it could! Why did I recieve this project over the other people in my department? Perhaps is it because they want me to connect to my roots? You will be happy to know that I learned a ton of stuff about Mexico this time around. For instance, do you know that Mexico is under the United States?! Get out! I'm actually joking about that one. However, I was disgusted by the responses I got when polling a group of third graders this past week. I kind of felt that we didn't need this shot above and that it would be more than ok to cut it. I mean, who doesn't know where Mexico is, right? My boss argued the fact that most kids DO not know where America is in the grand scheme of things, let alone where Mexico is in relation to the nation. I called her bluff and asked a posse of third graders on their way to a field trip on my morning commute. Out of the twenty-eight kids I polled on the subway platform only six knew that Mexico was beneath the United States, four of those kids were actually FROM Mexico. The most popular answers were "In Africa" and the winning, "In Spain." Needless to say, the shot stayed put. Sick, sick, sick. . .

Below we have a close up so that we can explain the compass rose to the kids and get them to start thinking about direction. This is our first movie where we really start to explain the concept of a map.

Do you know that Mexico has thirty-one states? I did not. I REALLY did not, not jokingly did not. I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't even know that Mexico had states, I was under the loose impression that Mexico was made up of territories, herein lies one of the many gaps in the knowledge of my cultural heritage. . . .

Mexico is also made up of many different types of land mass, namely mountains, deserts, rainforests and beaches. Hum. . . yeah didn't know that either. It was my belief that Mexico was manly dirt, dirt and hot water. This stems from the root of most of my Mexican knowledge, oddly enough passed down from my mother, the gringo, and centering on the movie "The Three Amigos."

Yes, there are also Mexican volcanos. Unfortunately, (or fortunately for Mexico's sake) they are not the dramatic, fiery and spectacular volcanos like those you would find in Hawaii. I was very enthusiastic about including the volcanos as I read about them in the script. I did a complete storybord illustrating the dramatic scene with hot fiery lava and red blood firework like explosions. I was berated for my lack of Mexican knowledge and then forced to research them, upon which I found something akin to the illustration below. Now I am fully knowledgable of volcanos, dormant and otherwise in Mexico.

Below you'll find some shots of Tenochitilan, the ancient Aztec civilization that existed where modern day Mexico City now rests. Aha! Something I know about! I wasn't aware of the actual name of the city but I knew all about it, thanks to one crazy summer in middle school where my mom took it upon herself to continue our education by building her own little Aztec city in our livingroom. We learned all about Aztecs that summer, about their forms of government, their bartering system, their war rituals and their beliefs. Go mom! We even earned beans that summer in lieu of an allowence which, come to think of it, might have been the real reason for the Aztec summer school. . . .

Most people know me know about my sun worshipping tendancies. They know that my company logo on my website is actually the scientific shorthand for the sun and that I wear a gold sun around my neck more often than not. My obsession is part of what made my rendition of an ancient Aztec sun dial so fun, that and the fact that Aztecs knew how to make one wicked set of scuptures. This is my favorite thing I've ever had to do for my job and I've included a few close-ups. I like the women facing eachother best, but my coworkers like the monsters around the center.

We talk all about turquoise, which made for some fun research and a bit of retail therapy (oops.)

This illustrates a basketball-like Aztec sport with a horizontal ring and the same relative rules as soccer, except if you lost you were sacrificed in a bath of blood. We left that last fact out for the kiddies.

These final illustrations are all about Dios De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. My coworker did the background for a different project about migration and I stole it to put my dancing dead skeletons on. It's beautiful isn't it? The dancing skeletons were a blast to animate. My next movie is about Reading Maps in honor of National Geography day, so it looks like the memory of this fantastically fun movie that actually taught me a bit about my origins will have to last me a while. National Geography Day, sheesh, how many national days do we need?! Boo.

Map it Out

Anna and John lived right next to each other when they were children in American. The client wanted to show that they had each come from far away, Anna from Italy and John from China. No one had dealt with the "monkey issue." I finally convinced them that in a children's book you couldn't just introduce a monkey and then get rid of him without explanation. . . I decided to have him saying goodbye from China. Then it only seemed natural to add Anna's mom and sister waving goodbye from Italy. Before you knew it the map was covered with little details. My favorite is the puffin with a mouthful of fish.