Dreaming in Color

I've spent the past few days absorbing the local hues and shot these images in our town and at at a friend's ranch just outside the city with an eye on color. I've always believed that color and texture is the most direct route to the emotions of the viewer. I find that even my dreams are more vivid in San Miguel de Allende. Dream color is symbolic of the emotional state that we conjure in our mind's eye. Sometimes it's great to trade your paintbrush for a camera.

Evolution of the National Book Festival Poster

"The book's role in passing knowledge from person to person, from generation to generation, 
is unique and irreplaceable."   -Librarian of Congress James Billington.

What a thrill to work on the poster for the 2012 Library of Congress National Book Festival to be held on September 22-23 on the National Mall in Washington D.C. This extraordinary event will feature more than 100 renowned authors, poets and illustrators and is free and open to the public. Festival-goers can get books signed and kids can have their photos taken with storybook characters as part of special activities created just for them. An estimated 200,000 people attended in 2011 and the festival this year includes Pulitzer Prize winning author Philip Roth and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa who won the 2010 Nobel Prize among others.
I first explored the concept of reading to your pets in this illustration from 
Book Fiesta written by Pat Mora.  

Book Fiesta! We read to our pets.

Drawing of Class Guinea Pig Shakespeare
by 9 year old Santiago

I vividly remember reading to my dogs, cats, lizards and hamsters as a child. My young son Santiago reads regularly to his class guinea pig Shakespeare, who by the way is a big fan of Roald Dahl. This concept resonated with National Book Festival organizers giving me the incredible opportunity to re-invent this theme for their poster.

Raw Gestural Sketch

Previous posters had always featured the headline at the top. I wanted to change things up by creating a border of animals mesmerized by three young readers that encircled the text. To get started I made the gestural sketch above to set the mood and guide my storytelling. I wanted the three children to be the focal point so when refining the sketch below I added directional clues with the animals pointing their eyes and bodies at the central headline and kids.

Refined Sketch

In this phase I define the characters slowly and carefully, sketching and developing the personalities into each animal. This results in a wise turtle [he has already lived 100 years after all] and a curious tiger [stretching his neck for a peek at that book]. I draw each one separately on sheets of tracing paper and move them into position, enlarging or condensing them, tearing off bits of tissue, re-positioning and overlapping them till my intuition gives me the green light. I then re-draw the finished sketch, transfer it to the board and tape it up in my studio. After hand selecting, cutting and sanding the board till the grain is just right I transfer the sketch and mask out all the characters in preparation for the background. The next step involves covering the entire composition with tape and carefully cutting out each creature with an xacto knife.

Cutting shapes with an xacto knife.

Distinctive shapes are ready for color. 

Shape and texture is central to my work. Books are about reality and fantasy and I choose to stir up a  concoction of both. Because I view my subjects as design elements I have the freedom to push scale all over the composition. I know kids are not hung up on realism so why should I be? I can make a gigantic, almost pre-historic dragonfly. Who cares if a tiny creature is the same height as a dinosaur as that just heightens the fun. It's more important that I include a spiky texture in that spot so along comes a pointy hedgehog. I'm focused on the shapes and getting them to fit the space. Then along comes the big color decision.

Applying background colors to the wood surface

The background dictates all the other colors. I wanted to use blue/green daylight hues to contrast the warm characters. Lighter colors at the base  bring attention to the kids while the top of the composition is cooler and darker to add a touch of wonder near the inquisitive monkeys. Developing the colors for each character involves looking back at what I've already done and complementing colors across the composition. I don't hesitate to make a textured purple elephant if that brings vitality to the storytelling.

Color palette taking shape

The border comes alive

Working my way around the composition I want the colors to talk to each other.  I stay focused on the shapes and keep telling myself to think like a kid. Listening to that inner child reminds you that it is important to play. That's why I add lots of surprises, details and textures hoping children will identify with one of or two of the playful creatures. Here's the finished artwork given to the design team at the Library of Congress with a temporary headline for position.

Pictured below is the final poster for the 2012 National Book Festival. To see a more detailed step by step of the poster evolution please visit the Library of Congress blog at this link.

The magic of Calder and Children

Alexander Calder embodied a spirit of play. 

He invented the whimsical mobile and created a fantastic traveling circus from cork, wire, buttons, scraps of fabric, wood and paper. He breathed life into his work with boundless imagination.

He packed his clever circus in 5 amazing suitcases and traveled back and forth between Paris and New York delighting audiences young and old. When he was a child his artistic parents encouraged him to experiment with shapes and motion. As art and music is being cut from public schools I'm passionate about encouraging young minds to stretch their artistic muscles like Sandy did.

I teamed up with the incredible fourth graders at the San Diego Cooperative Charter School and art teacher Allison Bell. We created mobiles to evoke the spirit of Sandy Calder and students crafted original animals to re-create his circus from found materials. Together with their teachers they read inspiring books; Sandy's Circus by Tanya Lee Stone with great illustrations by Boris Kulikov and The Calder Game written by Blue Balliett, pictures by Brett Helquist. Along with the art making each child researched books and websites like the wonderful Whitney for Kids and wrote personal essays that were put on display all about Alexander. Thanks to parent volunteers who in a few short hours stepped in to help me put together the project for Art Night.

Sandy's Circus and The Calder Game

I worked in my studio last week to assemble an art salon worthy of their creations. Visiting local thrift shops I recycled large white sheets into canvas for Calder inspired graphics. These were used to transform their classroom into a gallery that resembled a circus tent. Using cardboard and paint I created fantastic animals including a leaping red bull and seal that juggled beach balls. 

Juggling seal made from painted cardboard

I remember taking my son to the National Gallery of Art and we were fascinated by the shapes and shadows of Calder's mobiles and sheet metal animals. I cut circus forms out of painted cardboard and hot-glued them to sturdy plastic straws so kids could play with shape and scale.

Playing with shape and scale in the shadow theatre

Paintings on white sheets pay tribute to Calder's wire sculptures

Getting lost in a forest of whimsical mobiles created by children.
Vintage travel stickers were pasted on old suitcases
in the background paying tribute to the traveling circus.

A fantastical flea circus performed in the Calder Salon on Art Night. Children approached me in wide-eyed wonder to see the beauty of their own sculptures and marvel at their classroom changed in just one afternoon by the magic of art. 

Bird's Eye View

This morning over coffee I watched a couple of sparrows splashing around in the fountain. Each year many birds return to build nests in the creeping ivy that thickly covers the wall of our back patio in downtown San Diego. Mankind's fascination with birds is the stuff of legends and in Greek mythology the sparrow was attributed to the goddess Aphrodite.

Like my parents before me, I tell my son that the voices of birds are a sign that Spring is approaching and remind us of hope and renewal of life.

Im excited to be working with Environment for the Americas as this year's International Migratory Bird Day artist. My passion for birds goes way back to my childhood and I remember listening to a nightingale who always helped me fall asleep. Because they are connected to the sky many cultures believe birds link heaven and earth. The song of the nightingale is considered a positive omen by poets, writers and artists around the world.

Birds appear often in many of the illustrations I create for children's books. This painting from My Name is Celia features a soaring red bird that evokes the spirit of Celia Cruz's incomparable music.

For Our California I hoped to capture the magic as swallow scouts, messengers of the air arrive at the old stone church. Even though this chapel is the most ornate of any of the missions it's humble destiny is linked by nature to housing the mud nests of birds

cherished by St. Francis.

A boy with blue-black hair scatters berries from his basket on the back of a bright bluebird in this scene from !Yum, Mmmm Que Rico!

The migration of birds is nothing short of magic. These navigators use the sun, the stars, the earth's magnetic field and visual landmarks to travel thousands of miles to the same spot each year. In this painting for the Delaware Book Festival a bird guides the reader true North.

I have used birds in my work to symbolize positive thinking, hope and inspiration.

In this mural the bird represents the energy and spirit of community.

Birds can express the hidden nature of spirituality and beauty.

I made this painting to celebrate the renaissance of visual and performing artists in Tijuana who overcome adversity with the power of their creativity.

An interior figure appears inside a bird for this Latino Film Festival poster to represent the freedom of a filmmaker's imagination.

The flight of a bird reminds us of the essence of freedom and liberation.

So here's a personal bird story. There was a wonderful, large tree in downtown San Diego and each Spring the voices of hundreds of birds could be heard hidden in it's thick foilage. When that magnificent tree was cut down to make way for a high-rise all the birds returning to that spot to nest were confused with no where to go. We then had the idea to build an urban bird park in the heart of the city and talked about this dream with some of our friends.

We connected to Jerry Selby who worked with Centre City Development Corporation and convinced him to give us a small plot of land that no one else wanted to build the park. Our good friends Amy and MaeLin Levine with Joel Sotelo at Visual Asylum coined the name Tweet Street and designed impressive environmental graphics to sell the city on the idea.

Working with the American Institute of Graphic Arts, San Diego chapter we put out the call for artfully, designed nesting boxes that really worked. In 2007, two strips of overgrown land near the Interstate-5 freeway perched high on Cortez Hill were transformed into an urban oasis of colorful birdhouses. This once undesirable piece of earth is now a whimsical landing strip for birds. There are also plenty of families and kids who stop by just to hear the birds sing and find out more about them.

Here's the nesting box I designed that was installed in the urban bird park.

If you ever get to San Diego there are many fantastic, functional birdhouses worth checking out.