Caterpillar Publishing

Busily working away in my studio this week as my white shark book dummy begins to take shape. One poor northern elephant seal continues to be a hot lunch:

Today’s task is to wade further into the middle and continue to explore words and drawings that will engage kids in learning these beautiful apex predators. I want to share the awe and fascination (and obsession, as the weeks go by!) I feel when reading about their color vision, their rotating teeth, or their rete mirabile, the “wonderful net” heat-exchange method of maintaining warm-bloodedness. It is SUCH fun research to do. More sketches to come soon!

This weekend I had the fantastic privilege of attending a figure drawing session with a full-term mother as the model. Such a wonderful and rare opportunity! If you’re unfamiliar as to why, the venn diagram of overlap between women who will model for art classes and women who are 5-9 months pregnant (and thus most draughtsmanly) is very small indeed. In the many years since I started at RISD I believe this is my first chance. If you’re pregnant and willing to pose, please consider doing your local art community an enormous service!

Here are three studies in conte, red crayon, ink, and gouache. I wish I’d had a lot more time and a lot more practice before the session, but it was a terrific day nonetheless. A huge thank you and congratulations to our soon-to-be mom!

Check out this terrific TED talk by Barbara Block; an amazing look at how tagging technology can save our ocean’s predators.

I’m up to more white shark research, and my new favorite thing is weaners. No, it’s not what you’re thinking—”weaners” is the highly scientific term that the marine biology community has assigned to freshly WEANED (get it?) northern elephant seals, and boy are they cute!

Named for the schnoz on the adult bulls, elephant seals are the second largest seals in the world (the honor going to the even more enormous Southern Elephant seal). Full-grown northern elephant seal males can reach up to 4,500 pounds and over 13′ in length, while the females are much smaller at (only) 1,500 pounds and about 10′ in length. Known to be the favored prey of the great white shark, the elephant seals of the Farallon Islands get special attention from scientists. Each season the seals are tagged, counted, and monitored to help keep track of their health and population.

The dark elephant seal pups are born in December/January and weigh in at about 75-80 pounds at birth. But they don’t stay small long; pups gain 8-10 pounds a day from over the course of 28 days, reaching up to a whooping 250+ pounds from nursing alone! For the next two months they’re “weaners,” left behind in the rookeries while their mothers mate with one or more of the dominant bulls and then return ocean to eat for the first time since giving birth.

Alone on shore, the weaners spend their time playing, sleeping, and practicing their swimming skills in puddles. By February/March their hunger drives them to the sea, where they will teach themselves to hunt and dive off shore for the next six months.

In the fall the pups will be referred to as “yearlings,” but sadly at least 50% don’t live to see their first birthday. The ocean is a dangerous place to be an infant, and even hauling out of the ocean is fraught with peril. White sharks patrol the shores of northern California from September to November, waiting for exactly the opportunity a returning yearling represents: a naive and tasty 300+ pound mammal with a body mass made up of almost 50% fat. Every living thing must to eat, and white sharks are no exception. But for now the pups are beside their mothers, fattening up in safety—just a few more weeks until their inner weaner is unveiled!

Huge thanks to a biologist named Jane who keeps a fabulous blog about Farallon Island elephant seal happenings; all of these photos were taken by her during the 2011 and 2012 breeding season. For more about elephant seals from the Marine Mammal Center, click here.

The San Franciso Bay area is home to many things. Alcatraz. The 49ers. Clam chowder. And Ron Elliott, a retired commercial diver who has spent hundreds of hours swimming (cage-free!) among the largest predatory fish on earth. He didn’t do it for kicks, and he certainly wasn’t hankering to be a hot lunch; he just figured that more sharks meant less competition for the tasy urchins he sold to sushi markets. I had heard that these days Ron was taking underwater footage of the white sharks for his grandchildren, and if I wanted to beautifully and accurately capture these animals in my drawings, Ron would be the man to see for a first-hand look.

Ron Elliot filming underwater with sea lions in the background.

While home for Christmas, Tim and I had the great honor of paying a visit to Ron and his wife Carol at their home in Point Reyes. After introductions I shared a little more about my shark research and drawing interests, and then Ron led us into his office, complete with double monitors and professional film-editing software, where he turns the best segments into fabulous footage. Not only did Ron show us breath-taking close-ups of white sharks at the Farallon Islands, he pulled up clip after clip of the SAME sharks, taken in different years, who are seasonal neighbors in these waters. From propeller scars and sea lion wounds, their individual swimming styles and hunting habits were quickly apparent, and it was great fun to identify each shark and discuss their personalities with Ron.

Ron's in-house video editing station.

Ron shows me his favorite clips of sharks.

In twenty years of diving, Ron has never been bitten by a shark (though he has had a few close calls, including having to use his urchin basket to fend off a mouth full of 300 teeth). But with the camera in front of him—which looks like a giant eye—the white sharks are just as wary of him as he is of them. Good thing; the camera alone is a handful at 28 pounds, loaded with weights to be negative in the water and thus keep the image more steady.

Tim holding Ron's 28-pound camera.

Ron he also showed us dozens of clips of decorator crabs, jelly fish, sea stars, coral reefs, gray whales, fish, and groups of sea-lions. Every video was breathtaking—amazingly clear and colorful, and absolutely packed with activity.

Stills from Ron Elliott's footage, used in the documentary "Sanctuary of the Sea."

After a wonderful dinner we all watched the 18-minute 2010 documentary that NOAA made about Ron, called “Sanctuary in the Sea: A Gulf of the Farallones Experience,” before Tim and I headed home. It is beautifully done and a tasteful reminder of the conservation work ahead to protect this fragile bay for future generations.

Between Ron’s conversation and lush footage, I now have more than enough reference to work with as I go forward with my shark project. An enormous THANK YOU to Ron and Carol Elliott! I look forward to seeing them both again soon!

With great excitement (and not just a little singing from the new Muppet movie) I am delighted to announce that I am teaming up with ever-talented Stephen Barr of Writer’s House as my new literary agent! Thanks to an introduction through mutual friends, agents Sorche Fairbank and Ken Wright, my tentative search for representation catapulted forward within moments of our first meeting. Stephen is sincere, transparent, friendly, ambitious, collaborative, and amazingly enthusiastic about my work, and I can’t imagine a better team for kicking-ass and taking names as we dive in and work on awesome books together! I am completely honored to both accept his offer of representation and to join the incredible Writer’s House client list. Expect to hear enormous praise for him in the weeks and months (and years) ahead. A toast! To the beginning of a beautiful friendship! Cheers, Stephen!

Nathaniel Walker, curator of the exhibition Building Expectation at the Bell Gallery at Brown University, just sent me this review of the show last night as seen in the November/December 2011 issue of Art New England. Thank you, Steve Starger! To learn more about View of Industria, click here or here. The gallery of roughs and project development is here.

When I was a deck hand and educator on the schooner Adventuress, the quickest way to get grown-ups interested in a marine-wildlife talk was to talk about sex. Mussel sex, crab sex, anemone sex, it didn’t matter; the adults would drop all conversation and scurry over to the tank to listen. Barnacle sex was an especially big crowd-pleaser– not only do barnacles reproduce sexually, they are hermaphroditic and are thus all endowed with the largest penis-to-body-size ratio on the planet. As we used to say on the boat, “that’s an inch and a half to be proud of.”

So it makes sense to me to begin my first post about great white sharks (or simply ‘white sharks,’ as scientists call them) by talking about how they have sex. I’m into sharks these days as I chase a story idea, and over the last few weeks I’ve come across stunning facts and footage of these incredible, gorgeous, and terrifying predators. My top five white shark sex facts? Here we go!:

The Toothy Grin of a Great White Shark

1) White sharks reproduce sexually. Male sharks have two external organs called ‘claspers’ that are used to deliver sperm into the female shark during reproduction. During mating, the clasper unfurls and “opens like an umbrella” to secure delivery until the male is finished.

2) White sharks seem to be rather rough lovers. The females often have deep scars around their head and gills, probably from courtship and mating. The skin on a female’s back is much thicker than a male’s–probably to withstand this abuse–and the females grow to be larger than males (an adaptation known as sexual dimorphism).

A few sketches from location drawing around New York City. People lost or waiting are among some of the best to catch.

Last week, cartoonist/librarian Jen Vaughn invited me to contribute to the Schulz Library blog with an alumni interview. Thanks so much Jen! Here’s a little excerpt on the undergraduate class I’m teaching, or read the entire interview here!
 
What have you been up to since you graduated from CCS and moved?
 
Katherine Roy: I am teaching a new class at the Art Institute of Boston (AIB) called “Form, Content & Context,” which is basically a cross between 2D Design and Visual Thinking for undergraduate freshman in the Foundation Studies department. Each week or so we’ve done a project exploring a new element of design, including shape, line, texture, and value, soon moving on to color. My 10 students have completely different levels of artistic and concept development experience, so it’s been a challenge for me to learn how to frame the parameters for each assignment in a way that gives them a focal point, while also encouraging play. I feel like my job is really to teach how to SEE, and in return I get to revisit the way I see and make and explore through art. It’s my first time teaching at this level, after lots of experience with kids and adults, but so far it’s been incredibly rewarding.

Which assignment turned out to be your favorite?

KR: So far the texture assignment has been, I think, most successful, which is funny because it was the one I felt most uncertain about. I started off by stealing an idea from one of my drawing teachers, Jeff Fisher, who sometimes has his students wrap a commercial-sized trash can with a long piece of paper, and then the students move AROUND the model, drawing AROUND the trash can, keeping it oriented to the model while circling the room. The result is a distorted but very dynamic drawing that forces you to think about connections in space, and editing while you draw.

Students working on barrel drawing.

To translate this into a design assignment, I started by setting up a large still life in the center of the room, and had the students do two drawings on the trash cans, using paint and charcoal, as they circled the still life. From there they had to choose the one that was working the best, and then collage textures back into it (rubbings, drawn textures, etc) and incorporate value to create a completed piece. I was very pleased with some of the final pieces— you never know how students will respond to something so unconventional, but the unfamiliarity forces students to try thinking in a new way, which is exactly what (I think) Foundation Studies should be about.

Student work by Sophie Lizano