Macalester Today

My alumni magazine did an article about the publication of Ike's Incredible Ink. I got to chat with fellow Mac alumn Elizabeth Tannen and show her my crazy studio. And now you can see my crazy studio! Guys listen, I SWEAR I cleaned my studio before the photographer (the very kind Evan Sung) arrived. He made me mess it up again. He also reminded me that I probably didn't want to be photographed in house slippers, so, he's pretty great. In exchange, I drew him a monster.

I also got to draw illustrations for the cover and an interior article about campus legends. I heard about half of them while I was on campus; I never even questioned the story that there were tunnels built beneath the school so that you could get to classes in the dead of the Minnesota winter. More legends here.

This American Life

The radio show This American Life celebrated their 500th episode on July 12th with a favorite moments episode, and by commissioning nine illustrations from different artists. I really think This American Life is awesome; maybe sometimes it makes me cry on the the subway, maybe sometimes Adele makes me cry on the subway, WHATEVER you've done it too. I know you have. So I was really excited (but didn't cry) when I was asked to make an illustration for their 500th episode. A big thanks to Seth Lind for the project and for art directing me to, basically, "make it weirder."

Here are some initial sketches (click to enlarge):

And the work in progress:

And a bonus! Here is a hi res jpg of the brayer texture I used. Any digital artists out there are welcome to borrow it.

Chickens

Fellow SCAD grad Sam Bryer asked several artists who work in many different media to submit work for her thesis piece. On the surface, it's a book about chickens. Underneath, it's a book about crossovers between fine art and applied arts. You can preview and order the full book here. Thanks for asking me to participate, Sam!

If you're in Savannah, stop by Sam's thesis show tomorrow at the Non-Fiction Gallery at 1522 Bull Street. You have to see her anthropomorphic chairs in person. They're incredible.

Here's the piece I submitted about chickens' excellent color vision.

And here...

New York Times Weekend Arts

This past Friday I had the very great pleasure of working with Richard Aloisio at the New York Times to make the cover of the Weekend Arts section. Here is an awesome photo taken with my telephoto professional camera, the iPhone.

The assignment was for a summer book review. Richard gave me a general direction (summer, the joy of reading, beach reads) and let me totter off. I started with many many very rough sketches. I drew a lot of cliche ideas. As the night wore on, I drew some bizarre ideas. Here are some sketches that I hope fell somewhere in the middle.

The idea I liked best was to use bright, summer colors in semi-translucent paper droplets to represent the different summer books, and a person in a field of these book-droplets who gets to pick their favorite one. Luckily that was the one that was picked! I was thinking about a collage from an earlier project. Here are two more finished sketches that came next:

 Richard suggested I add a sun and a beach to add a bit of context and make the scene more summery. He also had the idea to use pages from the actual books that were being reviewed. Here is a bit of process work. I think I saved it at this point because this was when I thought, these damn paper droplet thingy-s are tiny and this is taking forever arrrrrrg oh god I better save this file. Now you know my secret art-making process!

Mail!

A wonderful package arrived in the mail today: the Converse Yearbook from McSweeney's!  It has fold outs and a poster wrapped around the cover and a hilarious musical script about aliens and basketball.  I'm so excited that my work got to be part of such a gorgeous book.

Last September I sent them these four ideas to accompany an article about the NBA from a woman's perspective. (Click images to view larger.) The first is from a line from the article in which the author says her dad always claimed that if he played a pro one-on-one, whoever got the ball first would win.  The second is a woman stealing basketball out of the boy's club--not such a great concept but I loved her sneaky face.  The third was about how the author felt that women were "left out of the conversation" by men, but found other ways to approach basketball.  The fourth was a tongue-in-cheek version of how women see basketball.

 

The lovely Dave Eggers picked the speech bubble sketch, so I came back with the rough below, and eventually the finished piece at the top of this post.

 

This is just a terrible quality photo of a really lovely book.  Major congratulations to my friend, Eliana Stein, who designed a huge part of it.

Atlanta Magazine

Here is my process for Atlanta Magazine for an article about how kids who get time to play during the day do better in their academic work. THAT'S why I like kickball on the weekend. Now I know.

I started with the sketch below. But the little dude was just too weird for editorial work, I guess, because the art director asked if it was a frog. HA!

So I ended up with this guy. It is inked by hand and colored in Photoshop.

What's Up? Annapolis

It happened again! This week is, and last was, so, so insane. I liked the ideas for the sketches I submitted to What's Up? Annapolis in Publications, but I had hoped to spend more time gussying them up.

The first is for an article that they described as questioning if there is a gender gap in math ability, and the second article shows that kids who have later school day start times are more successful in school. Good morning, zombie. We were given short descriptions of the articles rather than full text, so we really had a ton of room to play. They picked 12 illustrations from our class. Here is the one I got to take to final.

Bay State Parent

It's the second year of grad school, and that means it's time for the Publications class. In this class, a magazine sends a request for an illustration--often for a particular article--to our professor, and everyone in the class submits a sketch to the magazine. The magazine then chooses which illustration they will use in the magazine and then that person takes their sketch to finish, and their illustration is printed.

On the first day of class everyone sat down, ready to receive our syllabi and run, only to find out he had received a last minute request from a Bay State Parent magazine and needed our sketches submitted that day.

I frantically kicked out a couple of ideas and submitted two sketches. I don't know how, but they ended up picking it, so I got to take it to finish and it will be in their next issue! Above is the sketch and below is the finished illustration.

A Modern Reader

One day this summer, I met M. Rebekah Otto at Cafe Mustache in Chicago. Bekah needed an illustration to accompany her monthly Rumpus column "A Modern Reader," and had gotten my name from our mutual friend Eliana Stein (a killer graphic designer, p.s.). She was in Chicago from San Francisco to see family, and we decided to meet in person to talk about ideas for the drawing.

She walked in the door and immediately told me this hilarious story about, in her first day back in town, running into her kindergarten teacher in a grocery store and I thought, I like this girl. It turns out Bekah is also an Editorial Aide at Atlas Obscura, a regular contributor to The Believer, and a savant regarding quirky San Francisco facts and where to find the best biscuit and chicken sandwiches (Bakesale Betty). Check out her fantastic writing at any one of those three amazing publications.

Here is the final work for her column, a little character navigating a sea of words. It should be up in a couple weeks!

826CHI & The Boring Store: Scrabble for Cheaters

826CHI's annual fundraiser, Scrabble for Cheaters, is here again! The idea is that you and your Scrabble partner raise money, and then, in the Scrabble tournament, can use that money to buy cheats. So the more money you raise, the more you can cheat, and the better your chances of winning!

$25: THE SWAP: Trade out a letter
$50: THE NON-CON: buy a vowel
$100: THE BLANK: Flip a letter over and make it blank
$150: THE AUGMENT: Add 10 points to any letter to increase its value
$200: THE ALSORANS: Add Q, Z, or X to any word
$250: THE KOSHKA: play a word in any non-English language
$300: THE CONFER: Consult the dictionary for one turn
$400: THE SPURN: Reject an opponent's word for no reason
$500: THE WEBSTER: Invent a word (must have definition)

The tournament is October 23, at noon. If you live in Chicago, you should play! Registration has opened. The even sounds really fun and 826CHI is an incredible non-profit that provides after-school and summer tutoring in all subjects for kids K-12, and hosts an enormous number of creative writing workshops, events, and field trips.

Check out the poster I made for them here, or on their website.