Survelliance

Lately, in full game-design mode at job-job, I find myself people watching in earnest. This is my morning commute on the F. 

She Sure is {Sketching Again}

Once upon a few weeks ago day, when it was just getting nice outside, the artist and the bosom friend, who is also known as "the running writer",  ambled down one Atlantic Avenue in one Brooklyn neighborhood. They passed a little shop, just a tiny shop - and upon consulting with one another entered its doors. They wandered thru the wares. They sifted thru the stores, and then - it happened! The artist stumbled upon an object of magic!

Then a lot of things happened. Maybe the artist realized she'd forgotten her purse at a nail salon a few blocks away, and maybe the shop keeper was skeptical about the particular mysticism of a particular object, and maybe there was a seagull that chased the poor girl down her block while she carried the object aloft- but at any rate, soon the magical object sat upon the artist's studio table. After the artist had begun to recover from a cold and been to new jersey back and forth, and had a really intense dance class, and took a really long two day workshop at General Assembly and worked like a happy little coal miner at her fancy game designer job-job, the time came to test the power of the new-found object. It had its moment, and the artist pronounced it good. 

All is right in the world. We're back at the drawing table. 

She Sure is {Thrilled}: The First Day of Spring

In which I sketch out of doors without a coat.

 

She Sure is {Sketchy} - Splish Splash

I stood there in the snow, the sand at my back and grinned. 

I take a huge stock in Birthday month. Birthday month is nothing to scoff at. On the last day of that birthday year that I get to spend as the age I am, I sketch like a madwoman and with real intent, my goal to freeze that day in time with a pencil. 

This year, I had to decide, what was I to do with this precious window of time?? It needed to be perfect. So of course in the dead of winter, I boarded the F train and made my way down to Coney Island, USA.  In the solitude and quiet of winter this part of Brooklyn is a spiritual experience of sorts.  

Friends offered to slough the day off of their job-job with me, but I declined. I wanted to commune in the best way I know how, just me, at the aquarium with my sketchbook.

This perfectly perfect day gave me 3 wishes that I have never had filled
in ways each wish was so wonderful that I didn't even know I had it until its criteria had been met.

#1) See an otter bang open a shell. I know we see this on National Geographic DVDs that we all watch religiously....anybody? anybody?  There's no way we get to see this stuff in real life. I was standing there, sketching this guy when a gigantic shell floated down from the aquarium feeding gods above. His delight when he caught it with his little paws was that of a boy on Christmas morning. He immediately went to work slamming it against the glass between me the two of us. He'd turn in spirals and then bang it against the nearest rock before stuffing it in his cheeks to gnaw at it. I was so overcome I barely had time to whip out my pastels. I got a few great gestures in. These two were my fave.

#2) See Sea Horses that are happy and not stoic and creepy in that 'pet store' way. I love sea horses, but somehow they always look so sad. The seahorses at the aquarium were CRAZY. When they are properly cared for sea horses are animated, they're silly, they're goofy centers of attention.

I had a long talk with a marine biologist while I was there, she was in charge of counting babies and making sure everybody got fed. How lucky to be there for feeding time! "Hey, I'm a children's book illustrator, what really important things do you know about sea horses from working here?"

-- "Oh they're the best thing in the ocean but they're dumb as hell."
The quotable biologist hipster (who I am currently designing a tattoo for) let me know that if I was doing a book on seahorses, they needed to look stupid, but lovable. I tried my best.

#3) Change an opinion I've had since childhood. I'm just going to say it. I've never been a fan of seals. Shocking, right? I've been called out on this before, so I'm used to the persecution that comes with abstaining from public mass hysteria for this particular water beast. 

Out in the cold for so long, I forgot all about the time. No one was really at the aquarium on a snowing 18 degree day, soooo no one came to kick me out.  I found myself there way past closing time. See? I told you, this was a perfect day. I was cornered in a segment that houses seals and not much else. When I least expected it, that's where I fell in love. This particular seal takes the prize for the most human behavior I've ever seen in an animal. It was a birthday miracle come true.

Wet and scruffy around the ears, he looked like a teenager dead set on growing his hair out. It stuck out in strange directions all over his head. I could imagine him running pomade through it while his mother scoffed at his vanity. He was perched on a rock overlooking the water.

When I was in the sixth grade we went on a family vacation to Las Vegas. It was there that my kid brother was formally introduced to two things, swimming pools without closing times, and the indomitable all-you-can-eat-buffet. Two days in and about 10 hours behind his normal sleeping schedule, full of everything he could eat in one setting I thrilled to realize he was falling asleep in his heaping bowl of ice cream. Having been allowed a place where there were no limits, he had become a lost boy. He snored into his strawberry with sprinkles, and to this day, I remind him of it when we are on a great vacation or when he's doing something as simple as splitting an ice cream sandwich.

So there he was. This seal was my kid brother, three sheets to the wind with a tummy full of rocky road. He was the kid in class who is trying with all his might to stay awake. I laughed and laughed all alone in the snow and the cold sketching to my hearts delight until I couldn't feel my fingers.

You know how you're next to the guy on the train who is drifting off against his will? That's this guy. He'd doze off, snout closer and closer to his chest until SNAP! He'd jerk his head up. "I'm awake! I'm awake, guys!" At one magical moment he fell SMACK! in to the water. The panic in his face when he jumped up and looked around was the same as a five year old who falls out of bed. "What just happened!?!?!" He calmed down, curled up in a fetal position in with his flippers interlocked, too exhausted to get up out of the water where he went right back in to his "stay awake! stay awake!" routine. Every once in a while he'd raise one arm high in to the air, the better to scratch his nose with.

It was the biggest delight in all my aquarium years, and  you know that's saying a lot. Happy weekend! I'm off to fantasize with people like me at this year's annual Society of Children's book Writers and Illustrators.
This month just keeps on giving! I told you birthday month was serious.

She Sure is {Sketchy} - Not Dragons, Dinos

It's almost 3AM, which always seems like the best time for my concept sketches to get me out of bed.

She Sure is {Sketchy} - Lana Jane and the Dragons

In October I embraced my birthright and returned to the shores of Oahu for the best vacation of any one's life. Seriously, Jasmin couldn't have been happier riding Aladdin's carpet.... um.. that sentence is more awkward than I intended... than I was towel lounging on North Shore sand.

One of the sweet parts of this vacation was of course the fact that we stayed at a house any bedazzled nail flaunting reality star with a poof on her head would have cut you to bunk at.  Another sweet thing was I was formally introduced to Miss Lana Jane. Notice the artful bend of that wrist.

This kid always touches paper like she's got two turn tables and a microphone. Naturally, I loved her from the start.  During my ten days of "no work no work no work" I was slowly tricked in to a relationship with one of the most meticulous art directors of my life.

On this, the first day of Dragons, and of course, as this year's wax throwing has foretold, definitely not the last day of Dragons, I give you our collective works of fiction, as dictated to me by an ever tanner toe-headed task master in size three shoes.

As I draw Lana perches on the nearest higher plane. "Hmm, Jack is goofy, Amber, his face should be silly."  "Oh and he likes to read, but his eyes get tired because he likes the dark too. He's going to need glasses"

 "Here Amber, draw him like this! Pay attention to the spikes, k? That's his name, so they're important."

Lana would tear out of the house and then return five minutes later.
"Oh, Amber, Spike is going to need some flip flops, because it's really hot outside. My feet got burned."

Lana was in charge of connecting the feathers on Dazzle's wings, she's an angel, and drawing the eggs that each Dragon came from. Dazzle's beginning isn't speckled as much as striped.

I woke up one morning to the wind breezing across the palms, the sun glinting on the sea and this particular drawing with x' on the 'wing-ears'. I easily picture Lana knees up, my sketches in hand going over them with the attention of the Devil who wore Prada.

As the days progressed we'd do a sketch and she'd start giving me character traits to keep in mind. Lana hand drew each of these scales in shorthand on Hawk's shiny black hide.

I've saved my favorite for last. This was one of the sketches we did on the last full day in paradise. I rationed sketches as it became clear that if I did not we were going to have trouble in... well you get the picture. I'd done this one and then let Lana know I'd color these and make them more artsy in New York. I opened my suitcase when I got home to Brooklyn to find this right on top.
"Smokey is not part of the family." Important, details -- That is the mark of a true director.

Happy Chinese New Year....

Wish for Dragons, and sit tight!

She Sure is {Sketchy} - The Daily Scribble

My earliest memory of scribble drawing was on a NYC sidewalk with a jumbo stick of pink chalk. The crack in the concrete wanted to be a nurse eating a hot dog. Needless to say this drew a crowd of all ages. I was maybe three. I've used Scribble drawings to jump-start my creative ideas ever since. Here's the first of 2012

I swear at this point in the drawing I heard Ralph Fiennes whisper 'Kill the spare' in my ear.

That's a wrap.

Happy New Year!

Zooriffic

I played hooky on Tuesday (best decision of my life)and headed to the Bronx with my imported EuroFamBam for a full day of sketching, shutterbugging, hiliarity and searching for the park's bathrooms.

There were touching stories of mothers who do that annoying thing to show that they love you, you know, where they use their spit to smudge dirt off your face?  There were friends who overstep their boundaries. It was great. A microcosm of what makes the world go round.

We covered mad ground and we rode the monorail. I, for the second time in my life, laid eyes upon the red panda, so yes, it was perfect. Oh and I drew some stuff too.

 

pig nosed turtle. yep. nailed it. 

That's our day at the zoo.