She Sure is {Urban Gardening}

A few months ago my mom visited NYC for 24 hours. When she left, there were fond memories of manicures and Middle Eastern food and three miniature elephants, left behind as a calling card of sorts. I laughed and wondered what on earth I'd ever do with this tiny cast of characters. On my way out the door this morning they caught my eye as they marched across my copy of Michael Chrichton's Travels. I realized we had all been called to this higher purpose. Like some 1920 hot femme-conservationist I transplanted them in my satchel for a jaunty trip to my Terrarium class at Smith Street's By Brooklyn. They are taking to their new environment like champs.

She Sure is {Sketchy} - A Return

A few months ago I had a creative crisis that resulted in the symbolic breaking of a 4b pencil over my knee. I declared myself the un-artist. It was done in an eff-this-crap kind of way.
Here's the thing -- the low down is this:
IT IS THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD UNTIL IT SUCKS

Two months ago it sucked. I was so OVER it. I stopped blogging, I stopped drawing. I still had to go to my totally artistic job-job. While there, in one of the more creative adventures of my life, (an irony not lost on my Pratt friends) I built a video game with an amazing team of people. Other than that I declared myself NONARTIST.

My dad (a fineartist) was rather supportive. However, he also managed to piss me off by laughing at me.
--"Sorry, kid - It's too late. You're an artist. It's OK to take a break"

"NO! I am not taking a BREAK! I am DONE! I say who... I say when..."
(When I am truly lost I retreat in to quoting Pretty Woman). 

Anyway. They were right. I was wrong. I'll blog more about this later. I'm actually a driven and dedicated artist who had a total meltdown. It might help my readers to know that that stuff happens even when you're not painting starry nights or sculpting vaginas -- and on that warm and fuzzy note...

Yesterday I went to the zoo. I innocently thought I'd maybe take a pen. Then I thought I might want to take some written notes or write a letter. I'd need some paper. Last Spring Ashley Robison organized my studio to absolute dream perfection, making paper oh-so-accessible. Fine. I thought I'd tip-toe in to that scary space I haven't been in since May. She'd mounted some hanging clipboards for me up against a wall. I reached in to the room. This way I didn't have to fully cross the threshold. I ripped a pre-papered clipboard down and scampered towards the Bronx with it.

It started innocently enough. There was this polar bear. He was a show off.


I sketched him without thinking about it.

Later, on the monorail, there were some deer.

So  this just happened:

Totally understandable. 

We happened upon this expansive bramble of peacocks.


I watched them for a long time. So long, I absently doodled them on the edge of my clipboard.
Nothing wrong there. Sometimes non-artists doodle! Whatever.

We packed up at the end of a looong day of Bronxing. I stepped on the 2 train.

Then we hit 129th street. I thought, maybe I should just look at those sketches...

By the time we hit Carroll Street, things had gotten out of hand. Apparently I'm an artist, and I'm back. Expect more blogging.

(Credit for All Photos Goes to April Alvarez, my kid sister who is more than actively shutterbugging her vacation in NYC).

She Sure is {Sketchy} You Drive Me Batty

 Life is exceptionally good these days, pinch me good. When Life is good, I draw birds.

This bird though. This bird made me mad. He was so not cool. However, he reminded me of a bat.

Then I drew a bat.

I liked that a lot better.

Then I drew some more bats.

 

With Surtex growing ever nearer (in the past this time of the year I typically feel as if I'm being chased by my personal version of  The Never Ending Story's Nothing). The end of March always finds me forcing my brain to think so production-y, so market-y, so trend-y.

In a cherished conference call last month, a client pushed Dr. Seuss out of the #1 most quotable things I auto-mantra to myself during 3am jam sessions. Here is what she said, "What I love best about these little guys, and actually everything you've shown us, is that your drawings are utterly disciplined but totally carefree.  I look at everything that you do and I think, "Let's march headlong in to recess".

So this April I am focusing on returning to what I love most about my work, and remembering that when it is good, I am trying -- when it is great, it just happens--that's when it feels like somersaults at the beach.

In summary, this post is about how birds become bats, and how Surtex is gonna rock this year.

She Sure is {Sketchy} Monday Afternoon Doodles

I take late meetings at job-job on Mondays and we talk about video games and sound effects and commercials from the 90s. Sometimes I doodle. Today was one of those days.

She Sure is {Sketchy} Swamp Thing

I think I love you....

Those may not be the words, but this week at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, they were exactly the sentiment.

Happy Friday!
Draw your hearts out this weekend, I'm going to ;)

She Sure is {Sketchy} Cute Little Nothings

I just had an hour long conference call about exploding intestines and imploding ventricles. So that was nice. Half way through my notes, these little fellows came to say "hello." 

They want to wish you Happy Valentine's Day.

She Sure is {Popular} Scribble me This

As a child, I was a wit. I could dance the hula. I had great hair. I was working on an ever expanding vocabulary. However, it was clear early on that my parents took their greatest reward in rolling me out for this one parlor trick. Draw a scribble. Give it to the girl. She'll make it sing.

 

I was sure my parent's friend's desire to see the girl who scribbled was just a fluke. However, apparently the interwebs and my family and friends all see my worth the same way.  My blog gets more than a quarter of its fame from society's apparent insatiable hunger for "Scribble Drawings". Google brings them  here. So today I scratch my head, and let Jon scribble away on this lined paper, where I build a popular menagerie of mingled line.

p.s. in keeping with today's Illustration Friday theme... I might be responsible for a clean million of the views on this video: http://youtu.be/8UVNT4wvIGY

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} - 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!

Hedgehog in the Snow

Hedgehogs!!!

Dog Dayz

I went to Seattle to visit Beth and Glen Molly. 

Like the rest of the Logans, she and I are pretty much kindred. We are kind but haters and energetic but happy to lounge. We like to put on a show. We both felt Flossy the cat was getting a bit too celebrated for day to day living these days. We dog people haz gotz to represent... 
These are all done on location and from life. 

 What can I say? Girl knows her angles.