The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This story about a gorilla, two elephants and a stray dog living as caged sideshow animals in a shopping mall is sweet and touching. Told from the point of view of Ivan, the gorilla, it is a compassionate look at the world as seen through the eyes of a caged animal. Ivan has always been an easy going gorilla, seemingly content to watch TV and finger paint. He doesn't seem to mind that he's a money-making display for gawking shoppers. But when a baby elephant is added as a new attraction to the Exit 8 Big Top Mall, and a tragic event occurs, Ivan begins to see the world in a new way. He no longer sees his home as a domain, but as a cage. Through his finger paintings, Ivan manages to make a change for the better for all of the animals at the Big Top Mall.

This book would be an excellent way to introduce a child to the meaning of compassion. It's also a wonderful tribute to the power of art. The book is told in short, almost poetic segments and would make a great read-aloud. It is 300 pages long, but the type is large and there is a lot of blank space between the lines of text. In other words, it's a fast read. As an illustrator, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the wonderful illustrations by Patricia Castelao that beautifully capture the poignancy of the story.

I've always had ambivalent feelings about zoos, mostly because I hate to see animals in cages, but the world has changed and fortunately so have most zoos. With habitat loss a major concern for many wild animals, zoos are in the forefront in trying to save many of the world's endangered animals. And although zoos still aren't the ideal home for a wild animal, they sure beat the conditions that Ivan and Ruby have endured living in a shopping mall.

Applegate was inspired by a real gorilla named Ivan who spent 27 years on display in a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington. Due to the efforts of animal rights activists, Ivan was finally sent to live in a zoo in Atlanta, where, for the first time in his life, he was able to interact with other gorillas. Ivan was still alive when this book was released earlier this year, but sadly he died on August 21st, 2012. He had been in declining health for a number of years and died while under anesthesia administered to him during a routine physical exam.

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Illustration Friday - Breakfast (Work in Progress)

I've been a little under the weather this week and haven't felt like sitting at my computer for very long, so I'm posting this week's Illustration Friday challenge ('Breakfast') as a work in progress. If you're interested in seeing the final piece, bookmark my blog and check back in a few days, hopefully it will be completed by your next visit.

The version you see here is shown displayed with both the color palette that I'm using, and the layer with my sketch on it, turned on.

For many families, breakfast time is a rather rushed time of day. Thinking about that, led me to think about creating a somewhat chaotic scene, but since I had also recently been studying some of the Little Golden Book art of J.P. Miller, Feodor Rojankovsy and Mary Blair, I also got excited about doing the scene in the style of a vintage Little Golden Book. I toyed with the idea of mixing children and various animals, but then, after looking at some pictures of Orangutans on the internet, I decided to create a scene of an Orangutan family breakfast. Orangutans have great facial expressions and their babies are some of the cutest babies in the entire animal kingdom, so they were a perfect choice.

Before starting, I made two sketches in my sketchbook, one in ink and one in pencil.  There were things I liked about each sketch, so I ended up combing elements from both of them.

From these two rough sketches I created a more refined, finished sketch. You can see that as I started painting, I began making some changes.  For one, I decided against doing the floor in perspective. Perspective has never been one of my strong points and I didn't want to get hung up on trying to make it look right, so I decided to "flatten" out the floor. I felt this also gave me the leeway to take some license with the shape of the fallen over chair and the lines making up the window in the background. One of the most recent changes I made was to have the Orangutan who is half hiding under the table, reach up, trying to sneak another piece of toast.

In this last graphic, you can see what the image looks like with the sketch layer and color palette layers turned off.  This is pretty much where the image stands at the moment. With the exception of the stove and the rest of the cabinets, the colors are pretty much all blocked in, now I just have to start adding some detailing and shading. Hopefully, I'll have it finished in the next day or so.

Vintage Coloring Books Part 1

I have to admit that I have a fascination with old coloring books. I had a lot of them as a child and even though I remember spending lots of time coloring in them, I also remember that it was an activity that I frequently grew bored with. I would often start a picture and then want to move on to another activity. I preferred drawing my own pictures to coloring someone else's. Maybe that is why so many of the coloring books that I saved from my childhood, have pictures in them that are only partially colored or not colored at all. I think our mom, like a lot of moms, probably gave us coloring books because it was a quiet activity that would keep us out of trouble for a little while.

Regardless of what I just said, I still have a fondness for old coloring books. Part of it is a fascination with the imagery. I like the bold, heavy-line, comic book style of drawing that is a hallmark of these inexpensive publications. Sometimes some amazing graphics can be found in these books. I'm also fascinated by what sort of subjects were chosen to be included.

One of my favorite coloring book covers belongs to the "Jack the Giant Killer" coloring book that came out in 1963.  If only the inside drawings were equal to the humorous cover image. Unfortunately what is inside is quite uninteresting.  In fact, this book contains what I think must be the most boring coloring book image ever published - an image of a rope noose.  A child was supposed to find that an interesting subject to color?  There is so much going on in the caption below the picture - Jack escaping from prison, Jack making the noose, couldn't they have illustrated one of those scenes instead?  It just seems lazy on the part of the artist to show only a piece of rope. You can see by the image on the right, that it remains blank, attesting to the fact that I had no interest in coloring a noose. Very little of this book is devoted to the exploits of Jack the Giant Killer.  Instead, there are stories about Samson (I never knew he was considered a giant), Hercules, Atlas, David and Goliath and Paul Bunyan.  In the hands of a more imaginative artist, this could have been a really fun book, but unfortunately all of the images are simple and dull.

A book that is much more imaginative is one that is called "Color Everything Book."  There is no copyright date on this book, but judging from the illustrations, I imagine it is from the late 1950's or early 60's.  The cover image on this one is quite funny.  A little boy with his paint brushes in hand, has taken to heart the message in the book's title - he is coloring everything, including the cow and the pig who look at him angrily after he has painted them with dots and stripes.  The images on the inside are done in an entirely different style, they have a rather mid-century modern look to them and they are quite wonderful. They depict children taking part in various activities, usually with an animal companion at their side.  One thing that is very unusual about this book, something I've never seen in another coloring book is the inclusion of a small image in the lower right corner of all of the right hand pages that acts as a flip book.  It is a sequence of images of a bunny riding a unicycle that comes to animated life when you flip through the pages rapidly. It's just another example of this book's creativity and imagination.

The last third of the book contains a section called "Simple Objects to Color," with drawings done in a more traditional style.  It makes me wonder if the artist of the first two-thirds of the book ran out of time or ideas.  To me, this last section of the book looks like filler that might have been left over material from an entirely different, possibly even older coloring book.  Some of the images are rather bizarre.  Is that worm-like thing with the round body segments and female head (see image at right), some sort of a child's rattle?  And is there a reason that it's paired with an antique telephone? 

 

One of the oldest coloring books that I've had since I was a child, is sadly in very poor shape. It's a coloring book devoted to the singer Patti Page.  I would love to know what the cover of this book looked like but unfortunately it's missing and some of the pages have been ripped out. Judging from the condition of the book and the way the images have been colored, it must have been one of my first coloring books.

A few of the coloring books that I have in my collection I purchased as an adult at garage sales.  You can usually find them at very little cost.  This one, titled "First Color Book," I found for 75 cents.  The images in it are fairly uninteresting, but the thing that is interesting about this 1969 publication is that it is in mint, unused condition.  Not a single image has been colored.  As I said though, the images are rather dull as you can see from this drawing of two dogs.  It's obvious that only one dog was drawn and then flipped around to create the second dog.  That's just plain lazy if you ask me.

Another coloring book purchased at a yard sale was this one titled "Big Painting and Coloring Book."  Dating from 1934 it is also the oldest coloring book in my collection.  It's a great hodgepodge of a book filled with funny animals, scenes from fairy tales, a how to draw section, a section of Native American patterns and even botanical information.

The Art of Animaton, Eyvind Earle and childhood dreams

My dreams of being an artist can be traced back to my early childhood. As a somewhat sickly child, who seemed to be constantly sniffling or wheezing, I was often made to stay indoors or to come in before my cavorting in our backyard triggered an asthma attack.  My mom, whose dreams of being a commercial artist, I've written about in earlier posts, always encouraged me to draw. If I wasn't drawing, I was probably partaking in one of my other favorite activities - coloring in my coloring books (hmmm, that gives me an idea for another blog post).

When I was very young I knew I liked to draw, and as I got older, feeling incapable of following in my father's scientific footsteps, I began to feel that when I grew up, maybe I could be some sort of an artist. I think at some point, probably due to my mother's influence, I felt that maybe I would be a commercial artist and work in the world of advertising (now, after watching 'Mad Men, I'm glad I didn't pursue that path). But then probably around the time I was 13 or 14, I decided I wanted to be an animator and to work for Disney. I can trace my love for Disney films back to when I was 5 years old, the year that "Sleeping Beauty" was released. At that age, I didn't get to see it in the theater, I would have to wait until its rerelease during my high school years to do that, but I do remember seeing the advertisements for it on TV. I also remember all of the merchandise that was put out for the movie - a board game (which I received for Xmas as a child and which I still have), paper dolls (which I still have remnants of), storybooks (which I also have) and many other things. The thing that I remember most vividly about the advertisements though was the image of the handsome Prince. I think my first child-hood crush was on the Prince. But I'm digressing.

Being shy, I felt that being an animator would be the perfect career for me.  My image of an animator was someone who was allowed to sit alone all day at their drawing table, just drawing.  I had no idea at that time that an animator also needed to be something of an actor, a collaborator and maybe even a bit of a pitchman who had to sell his story ideas to the producer.  So, for many years I harbored my dream of working for Disney in my imagined world of what I thought of as the hermit-animator.

My idea of what an animator did and what the job consisted of began to change  after I bought a book called "The Art of Animation," by Bob Thomas. As I recall, I bought this book with my own money, off of a sale table at a Pickwick Bookstore.  My copy of this book (which has been revised over the years) has a copyright date of 1958 but I think I probably purchased it around 1967 or 68.  I remember how excited I was to find this book because it was written the year before "Sleeping Beauty" was released and the book used that film as a way of showing how an animated film was created.

It had sections on character design and development (I was especially fascinated to learn that the design for Princess Aurora was modeled after a young Audrey Hepburn, see sketches above left), storyboarding, background painting, layout, coloring, cel inking and painting, sound, in other words, just about everything that went into the creation of an animated motion picture.

One of my favorite sections was devoted to the artist Eyvind Earle who designed the backgrounds and the medieval look of the film.  Because of the stylized way in which he painted trees, the section devoted to him was titled: "Prelude: the man who likes square trees."  Earle explains his tree stylization in this paragraph, "I like trees to be square. This carries out the primitive technique, which is the style of the picture. You see, all primitive painting is done in horizontal and vertical lines. Only when you intellectualize do you get into diagonals and curves. . . The trees are squared, and everything else carries out the horizontal pattern. . . The hedges, the rocks, the lines of the horizon - all are horizontal.  The primitive style never tilts things." He later goes on to describe his many influences on creating the look of the film, Albrecht Durer to Botticelli, Persian to Japanese art all informed his artistic choices in creating the films distinctive look.  I think I may have also been fascinated by Earle's personal background - from the time he was about 18 years old, he had tried applying for jobs with Disney, being turned away each time. It wasn't until after he had given up and moved to New York for eleven years where he worked in commercial art, and then returned, that he was hired by Disney as a background painter.

My love for animated films never dimmed. In high school, in collaboration with a close friend, I made several animated films as extra credit projects. I guess it was after graduating from high school and facing the realities of competition and assertiveness that were needed to succeed, that I began to feel my dream fading.  After being turned down by Cal Arts (a school that had connections with Disney, and where attendance almost guaranteed you a job with them after graduation) and after unsuccessfully trying for a year and a half to get into USC's cinema production school, I began to ask myself, "did I really want to get a job somewhere where I would be required to sit at a table for hours on end drawing minute variations of someone else's character over and over again?" At least that's the way I rationalized my decision to no longer pursue my dream of being an animator. But I didn't give up entirely. During this time I did stay enrolled at USC and took classes in their cinema department with an undeclared major. Some of my fondest memories of my year and a half there were the hours I spent in an animation class taught by Bernie Gruver, a man who worked for Bill Melendez studios, the studio that created all of the "Peanuts" television specials.

A few years later, after entering graduate school (Otis/Parsons in L.A.), I continued to make films on my own, even getting two of my films accepted into Filmex the huge international film festival that existed in Los Angeles for many years. It was after graduating with my MFA that the harsh realities of making a living began to sink in. I tried in vain to get jobs at a few small animation studios, but ended up instead working for a company that produced computer generated business graphics for slide presentations. It wasn't what I had dreamed of, but it did provide me an opportunity to learn computer graphics (this was way back in 1982 when it was still in its infancy). It was good job experience which eventually led to an opportunity to work in Oslo, Norway for 4 months, but it never did lead to any jobs in animation, which was probably more a result of my own lack of assertiveness and drive than from any lack of experience.

I'm still fascinated by the art of animation and still love watching animated films. Now, at age 55 I guess my dreams really haven't changed that much. I still want to be able to sit and draw in isolation for a living. I still want a chance to be able to tell stories with my drawings. I sometimes get dismayed by all of the young talent out there, all of the kids graduating from art schools with impressive portfolios under their belts, but I've realized that it doesn't do one any good to compare oneself to others. Every talent is unique, you can only do the best that you can do. So, I'll keep plugging away, putting myself out there, and hope that one day, I'll get a book published.

I still have my copy of "The Art of Animation," it's one of my most cherished books. I still love looking at this book, it's filled with some wonderful images and every time I open it, I remember my childhood fantasies, not only of dancing with a handsome Prince, but of being an artist.

Spooky - Finished

Well, I finally put the finishing touches on the piece that I have been posting as a work in progress over this past week.  I don't really have a title for it, but the file is named "Spooky" on my computer, so far now, I guess "Spooky" will have to do.

If you've been following the progress of this piece, you may notice that the finished product contains lots more detail - a little mouse on the top shelf of the bookcase, a statue of a cat on one of the lower shelves, some packing material in the box with the statue, more spiderwebs, a wallpaper pattern and finally, some writing on the pieces of paper on the desk.  What probably took me the longest to complete in this image were the spines on all of the books, that and their shading.  It seemed like I was working on those things for ages.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, now I'm just trying to think if I can come up with a story to go with it.

My Weekend in New York at the SCBWI Conference

On Sunday night I returned from my first big New York City conference.  It was put on by the SCBWI, which stands for Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.  Over a decade ago, in my previous life as a Washingtonian living north of Seattle, I had attended a few of their west coast regional conferences, but this conference was bigger, better and lots more fun than any of those had been.  First of all there were some really top-notch speakers, superstars of the Children's Book world - Paul Zelinsky, Jacqueline Woodson (who gave a wonderful talk), Kevin Hawkes (who led a fun workshop), Jim Benton who gave a very funny and entertaining presentation, and last but not least, the legendary Jane Yolen who ended the conference with an enlivening talk that had every writer and illustrator in the room excited about getting back to work. 

During her speech, Ms. Yolen gave the audience her own personal 20 rules for writing, many of which can also be applied to illustrators.  The first two were fairly elementary - get rid of the exclamation point and go easy on the adverbs.  Some of her other rules included: have fun writing, have fun illustrating; some magic formulas - BIC (Butt in Chair), HOP (Heart on Page) and PNF (Passion Not Fashion);  in writing, it's not the opening line itself that is so important but what the opening line portends for the rest of the story, the DNA for the book is carried in the opening line; exercise the writing muscle, exercise the illustration muscle by working EVERY day at your craft; be open to revisions: if you are asked to revise something and you go into those revisions with anger, you won't learn much from the process; don't ignore the landscape/setting of your work, be precise with your details, make your reader feel as if you've been there; read what you've written aloud (this is especially helpful if you're writing a picture book);  if you feel blocked, get up and do something else for a while - go for a walk, eat a cookie, read a magazine, watch TV, if none of those things work, then go on to another project for a while; and finally, a rule that I found most helpful - realize that there are projects you will never complete.  A few projects will turn bad, go septic along the way.  When this happens, put them away, don't look at them for awhile, but keep them, in the future you might be able to transform them into something else.

While at the conference, I bought a lot of books, way too many, but who could resist when there was no sales tax charged, plus one received a discount for paying with cash?   With the authors there to give me inspiration each day, it made me feel like I should show my gratitude by purchasing the results of their hard work.  Maybe this was a resurfacing of Catholic guilt ("how can you not buy something from these people who have worked so hard for you?"), but, on the other hand, I didn't buy anything that I didn't really like.  Here are a few of the things that I bought: "Show Way" a beautiful picture book by Jacqueline Woodson which is a generational story dealing with slavery and freedom quilts and the belief that there is always a road to a better place.  This book deservedly won a Caldecott Honor award.  "Library Lion," a sweet, funny and old-fashioned (in a good, nostalgic kind of way) picture book by Michele Knudsen and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, a book that pays tribute to the joy of reading and in particular the importance of libraries.  Of all of the books I've seen by Kevin Hawkes, I think this one contains my favorite of his illustrations.  I also bought Paul Zelinsky's beautiful version of "Rumplestiltskin," which won him a Caldecott honor award.  Mr. Zelinsky gave a wonderful opening talk that was not only laced with humor but gave us a glimpse at some of his working methods.  I also bought an amazing book by Peter Sis titled "The Wall," about his early life in Czechoslovakia, growing up behind the iron curtain.  This was another book that won a Caldecott honor award.  Last but not least, I bought two books on writing - "You Can Write Children's Books," by Tracey E. Dils and "Illustrating Children's Picture Books," by Steven Withrow and Lesley Breen Withrow.   From these last two titles, I'm hoping I'll gain some valuable insight and tips.

The conference was a great experience.  And even though my portfolio didn't win a prize, I was proud of the work I brought along with me and for the first time in a long while, I felt like a grown-up and a professional who, with some hard work, might actually end up having a career yet.