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September 1 | Well a few days on and we’ve got a winner… presenting “The” Jason Walker ladies and gentlemen :) A warm thanks to those who dropped me notes with their suggestions on how to track him down!
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This portrait is of my great-grandfather, Ralph Bice. As a kid, to me he was an old man in flannel who lived in a trailer and offered us great-grandkids scotch mints when we came to visit… but learned as I grew up that he was the oldest hunter & trapper in Ontario, mayor of Kearney, received the Order of Canada in ‘85, and was a bit of a legend to those who know Algonquin Park. Nowadays if you go to visit Algonquin Park, you can find old photos of him here and there in the towns bordering The Park, or you can even visit Ralph Bice Lake.

Anyhoo, enough reminiscing, our family is having a hard time locating the artist, Jason Walker, to purchase more prints (or even the original)! I’m using my Googling expertise but am coming up with quite a few artists by the same name… so while I’m contacting them and searching thought I’d put the question out there to see if anyone has any ideas of how to go about finding a hard-to-find artis?

“Anyone who’s been to Algonquin Park will be disappointed when they get to Heaven.” – Ralph Bice

I’ve been having some fun lately doing some scribbling with my 18 month old daughter, Hera. I’ve been saving the stubs of all my coloured pencils for a few years now and thought they were the perfect size for her stubby little hands to colour with. Has been a challenge to keep her colouring on the paper and not on the floor, walls, toys and herself! It’s freeing drawing without the pressure of having to turn out something “good,” knowing whatever I draw is going to be scribbled over as Hera wants to participate and help me draw a star or ball or panda bear. Heh heh, she particularly likes it when I draw something with eyes… “Eyes! Eyes!” she says as she stabs them with her pencil! Anyway, it’s fun… can’t wait till summer when it’s warm enough to do some painting outside!

Wow… this is so cool, Bill Guffey travels via Googlemaps in search of scenes to paint. Love, love, love Guffey’s oil painting style, it’s refreshing seeing new-school technology embrace old-school painting mediums. This one is my favourite, Above Anguine Vineyards. Very cool. And here I thought I was being all techy using Googlemaps as reference for a map I’m drawing in the background of Spotty & Eddie’s latest adventures…

I’m a little over halfway through stitching together the scans of my watercolour illustrations for Riley’s Tooth, written by Diane Cantrell (Author of Good-bye, Baby Max). I’m really pleased with how the illustrations have turned out, especially since they are entirely in watercolour (a first for me as normally I switch to pencil crayon for the finer details.) Here’s a preview of three of the sixteen illustrations for Riley’s Tooth.

I had fun taking a look through Jason MacKay’s first online children’s book, Vicki Greendot Lives Here, a promo for Deloitte’s 150th Anniversary… the characters are just glowing with life, and I especially love colour palette used in the classroom scenes. I’m also a sucker for the the not-so-subtle message for kids to be good to the environment, from the book being only available online to the visual element in the illustrations and awareness mentioned in the story.

For those who are curious about the process of starting illustrations for a children’s book, thought I’d post a scan of the first pencil-to-paper (click image to see full size) on my latest project (Spotty & Eddie Visit Percé.) The first thing I do is print off the manuscript and mark with a pencil where I think the pages should be split up. Then I sketch thumbnails of the entire layout (cover to cover,) and start making simple notes on what should go on each page… this allows me to see if the story will fit the page count, and what ideas I need to combine into the same spread.

After thumbnailing, I go back to my InDesign layout, drop the manuscript in there with gray FPO (for placement only) image boxes where the illustrations will go, and write in little notes of what is to go on each page… I save this out as a PDF and send it to my authors/publishers for their feedback before I delve into proper sketches.

Poo Airplane by Bill Zeman
Art Direction : The Tiny Art Director
This is such a hilarious blog. The Tiny Art Director blog features artwork by Bill Zeman art directed by his four-year-old daughter. The above painting lovingly titled “Poo-Poo Airplane,” was inspired by the brief “Can you just paint one poo-poo in a frame? The poo-poo is an airplane.”

With her briefs concise, critiques destructive (literally), and final artwork (often) flat out rejected, the TAD is the embodiment of an art director from hell. At the same time, with comments like “Good. I want a treat.” you can’t help but fall in love with the TAD as you laugh out loud imagining how you would handle such criticism.

I was pleased to see that Bill had plans to self-publish a book of the TAD, but now has been picked up by Chronicle Books… will be available Spring 2010.

Our third-last day in Canada we popped into the Rideau Centre in Ottawa, and the work of Andrea Ross caught my eye from the window of Koyman Galleries. This enormous painting is just stunning in real life, I really love her application of paint… it’s a style I try to achieve with my landscapes which she pulls off effortlessly! The way Andrea has captured the the beautiful landscapes of Canada just pulls on my heart strings.

As an old-school artist, a valuable skill to have is knowing how to scan and stitch together your original paintings digitally. At the moment I’m stitching together the scans of the final artwork for Riley’s Tooth by Diane Cantrell.  Here’s how I’m going about it…

1. Scan your artwork in pieces :
• Place your artwork on the scanning bed starting in the upper left corner.
• Find a place on your scanner where you can visually align your artwork. I piece of masking tape down on either edge of the scanner to quickly align it.
• Tip : If your artwork is thin and warped, place a magazine on top of the artwork about the size of the scanning bed area as it will help press it down. Then stack on more weight.
• Tip : If your artwork is too large for the scanning bed, make sure it lays down flat and place something heavy on it to hold it in place. Sometimes removing the lid off the scanning bed and not using it can help maneuver for very large pieces.
• The more flat your artwork is, the more even the colours will turn out in the scan and you’ll reduce shadows. Scanning in pieces will inevitably create shadows on the edge of the scan, but the bigger the angle the larger the shadows are and more difficult to remove using Photoshop.
• Set the scanner to at least 300dpi and at least 100% in size (adjust to your needs.)
• Make sure your artwork is secure, and start the scan.
• When the scan is done, carefully lift your artwork and slide it over so that you can scan the next portion of your illustration, allowing 2-3 inches of the are you just scanned to be scanned again. This overlap will help you stitch together the illustrations in Photoshop (and trust me, it’s an awful feeling when you’ve scanned something very large to piece it together only to find a big chunk missing from not overlapping enough!) (Read on …)

This was my prize find at the antique shop in Kearney, Ontario… a first edition of Thornton Burgess‘ “The Burgess Animal Book For Children.” Published in November 1920, this book has been very well loved, waterstained, and is falling apart… but is full of beautiful full colour illustrations of North American Wildlife by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The way Burgess writes his stories is classic, with all the facts backed up by naturalists of the time. It’s lovely reading the old way of writing, and how Burgess educates children about nature and wildlife in a way that is simple but not dumbed down (like many nature books for children are today.) What surprised me when I read up on Mr. Burgess is that his stories inspired the Fables of the Green Forest, my favourite Japanese tv show as a kid in the 80’s.