McSweeney’s Season!

S. S. Taylor and I are proud to announce that The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon is hitting stores this week! This is my first time illustrating a novel and I am OH-SO-EXCITED about this fantastic book. What a wonderful team to work with, and I can’t thank Sarah Stewart Taylor enough for bringing me on board!

To get your copy you can order The Expeditioners from McSweeney’s McMullens, from Indiebound, from Amazon, from Barnes and Noble, or from your favorite local bookstore. For more information about signings and appearances coming up in Vermont and New York, please check out my brand new Facebook Page for events or head over to S. S. Taylor’s blog at www.sstaylorbooks.com.


I have one more announcement to make: after much consideration the time has come for me to transition away from Caterpillar Publishing and continue my blog at the domain http://www.katherineroy.com . The content here will stay up for now, but all news about my work and coming book projects will be posted over at my gorgeous new site. Please follow me there, join my email list, and add me to your RSS feed as I get it up and running!

Thank you so much for reading my blog, whether this is your first post or your 100th. Your enthusiasm and support means the world, and I can hardly wait to share with you what’s ahead. See you at the new site!

Tomorrow I am flying out to San Francisco, California to accompany TOPP‘s (Tagging of Pacific Predators) white shark tagging team while they do their work at the Farallon Islands. No, I will not be cage diving, and feeding and petting the wild life is not advised, but I plan to sketch and photograph as much as possible and to interview as many people in the Farallon community as I can. Not to mention, of course, see my first white shark!

While this research trip isn’t mandatory for my book to see print, I’m absolutely certain that this first-hand experience will enrich the content of the project. It’s clear that the final pages are where I have the most rewriting to do, and being out on the water with Farallon scientists will fill out my understanding of these beautiful creatures and their fragile ecosystem.

I’m incredibly grateful to the Farallon community for the welcome enthusiasm and support of my book project! More to come soon! Follow me now on Twitter or Instagram at @KRoyStudio.

As with any illustration project for me the cover began with concept sketches scribbled in a notebook. It needed to feature both the four main characters and a beautiful southwestern environment, so I started with a two different directions: one in a montage movie poster style and the other focused on a story moment at a waterfall:

After much deliberation with a trusted few we all agreed it would be best to combine the two ideas into one. One 30-second sketch later (see the lower right-hand corner of the black and white sketch above) I had the framework for the final drawing. Combined with editor Brian McMullen’s gorgeously designed logo font it suddenly felt like a real cover!

From there I did a simple sketch for the wrap-around outer cover:


And then digitally drew on top of it to finalize the design:


This last image is very close to what the (front) cover will look like once the subtitle and credits are in place. The book is available for pre-order now from your favorite local bookstore or from Amazon.com. Nine weeks left to release! Whoo-eee!

I feel sort of terrible about this, in the way a parent might feel admitting that they have a favorite child. But it’s right there in front of me and rather undeniable: the Mayans are just way cooler than the other three. If JetBlue offered a special on 4-day, 3-night ancient American getaways you can bet that I’d sign up for Copan (with the optional day trip to Uxmal). Sorry Cuzco and Tenochtítlan, your lack of writing system and brevity is against you. And Cahokia, we don’t even know your real name. Lie about your age, but your name… really?

But if you don’t agree with my instincts, let me point out a few things I’ve learned about the Maya that might just change your mind:

1) For one thing there’s the gorgeous writing and hieroglyphics to consider: Maya script is made up of both logograms (words) and syllabic glyphs (syllables that make sounds, like a consonant and vowel sound together) called a logosyllabic system, a little similar to Japanese. This means that there are over 800 different Maya glyphs which overlap and fit together in different combinations and can be artistically stylized very differently between one scribe and the next. The glyphs are so complicated that the language’s full code wasn’t cracked until the 1980′s, the culmination of centuries of work from archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, art historians, epigraphers, and linguists from around the world. The Mayans were wicked smaht!!

Maya stucco glyphs on display in Palenque, Mexico.

2) Then there’s the Mesoamerican habit of human sacrifice: the Maya weren’t quite as bloodthirsty as the other three seem to have been. (Yes, it’s true, the Maya did make some regular human sacrifices, but heads up, Judeo-Christians of European descent: the Crusades, Witch Trials, and the Inquisition aren’t exactly high points for us either.) The daily Aztec ritual of killing of a war prisoner really grosses me out (cut out his heart, lop off his head, throw him down the stairs, repeat) and so far as we know the Maya didn’t regularly sacrifice children (like the Inca did) or groups of women (like the Cahokians did). Not killing off prisoners and children might mean that the Maya were better neighbors to surrounding tribes, too.

No Mayan ceremony would be complete without feather headdresses and some self-sacrifice (bloodletting).

3) Finally we have their stunning sense of architecture, art and style. Grand civic planning, echoing temples, and stone stela sculptures of great leaders are all standard features of Mayan cities, and in combination with their painted vases, jade jewelry, and ceremonial dress with more feathers than a drag queen at Pride, I suspect they had a deep-running love of order and natural beauty. There is this elegance to everything that is Mayan, a Rome-ness that I can’t help but connect to. And, like the Romans, the Mayans fell from grace, fading away into the jungle after exhausting their land and other resources.

Reconstruction drawing of Copan by Tatiana Proskouriakoff.

They Maya didn’t have their act together in lots of ways, and I’m sure that my preferences have been partly shaped by our culture’s fascination with them (second to our Egypt obsession, of course). But of the four cultures they firmly stand as my favorite. I hope to get to work on another book about them soon!

My rough study of a Mayan king receiving an offering from a servant.

But after months of research there’s one thing I now know for sure: above all else it seems the Inca were big fans of rocks. Big rocks, round rocks, square rocks, little sissy rocks… pretty much any kind of rock. They dragged rocks over great distances to build their homes, they hauled rocks up steep mountains to build castles and temples, they carved rocks to match the silhouettes of mountains of celestial significance, and they did all of it–all of it!!– without iron tools, draught animals, the wheel, mortar, or a written language. Their rock building techniques are still something of a mystery to modern day archaeologists.

Inca Walls at Sacsayhuaman near Cusco, Peru

NOVA even put out a short documentary in 1997 called The Secrets of Lost Empires (Disc 3) that explores efforts to replicate Inca building methods by leading researchers in the field. According to the film, how did the ancient Inca carved 15 ton boulders? With a great deal of patience, human labor… and more rocks.

Inca 1: How are we going to carve this giant rock? All we’ve got is wood, bone, and rock.

Inca 2: Hey! I know! Let’s use this other rock!

The Inca were clearly doing something right; the walls that survived the Spanish conquistadors have withstood dozens of earthquakes in the last 500 years (while the colonial buildings on top of them have repeatedly collapsed. Ha! Take that, Spanish conquistadors!) Archaeologists have an idea of Cusco’s original layout, but, like the present-day city of Alexandria, there’s very little to show for its original splendor.

Inca walls still standing in modern Cusco, built without mortar or the use of iron tools.

Now part of my job as the illustrator for BURIED is to do a spread that depicts ancient Cusco. And for someone who needs to draw a recreation of the original city, a simple archaeological map of scattered foundation lines isn’t all that much to go on. I thought that perhaps I might track down an ink sketch or two from an artistic conquistador’s journal, but the only source image of the city on record is this painting by a Spanish monk, completed after the earthquake of 1650 about 100 years after Pizarro conquered the Inca. In other words, this doesn’t look much like Cusco as the Inca knew it.

Earthquake Painting in Cusco's Cathedral, Peru, from 1650.

The only other illustration leads available to me were the existing foundations of the Temple of the Sun at the Coriancha. Plated in with hundreds of sheets of gold and home to Inca kings and priests, the Coriancha sat at the heart of Cusco and was of course Pizarro’s first place of pillage. Today the foundations of the Coriancha still stand and bear the weight of the Church of Santo Domingo, and (luckily for me!) is the site of ongoing restoration inside the walls of the Church. Between tourist photos online and an archaeologist’s recreated drawing, I could begin to conceive of what this small part Cusco might have originally looked like.

Coriancha, the Temple of the Sun. The original foundation is the dark gray stone beneath the modern church.

Recreated drawing of Coriancha from the book ANCIENT CUZCO: HEARTLAND OF THE INCA by Brian S. Bauer

First I used the photos and the drawing above to make a quick clay model to draw from for my roughs (it’s terribly useful to turn a model in space, and it’s also a welcome break from sketching!) The drawings themselves were easy, but I was quickly frustrated by how un “city-like” the Coriancha appeared. The small handful of steeply sloped buildings felt terribly underwhelming compared to the vast expanse of Copan or Tenochtitlan. (In the case of Copan, the city was abadoned to the jungle, and in the case of Tenochtitlan there was indeed an artistic conquistador on the scene. No such luck with Cusco.)

Clay Model of the Temple of the Sun.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

In the end I chose to shift the angle of the drawing, focusing on the view of the Coriancha from below. A little wisp of smoke and some sun breaking through the clouds in the final drawing will help increase the drama of the scene, and I’m much happier with the city spanning the full width of the page spread. And look at all of that beautiful Inca rock that I get to draw for the book!

Final Sketch of the Coriancha.

Coming soon: more on the Maya! Stay tuned!

Toad found near the bike path taken to the beach on Cape Cod. I haven't held such a small creature in quite a long time.

Gray seal colony of several hundred individuals. The pups practiced their swimming as the adults napped.

Sandy dunes on the Cape. I wouldn't mind owning a summer home here, not one little bit.

The Domino Sugar plant on the East River bank across from Manhattan, taken from a river cruise ferry. I love the fonts and the mood of the building.

A trash boat leaving Manhattan, also taken from the ferry. Catching glimpses of the trash subway trains at night has piqued my curiosity about where it all goes.

A very quick sketch of an african elephant in the Museum of Natural History. These animals are just so gorgeous!

A baby elephant learning to walk immediately after birth. Check out YouTube for some incredible videos.

I look forward to whatever it is that August holds. In the meantime back to my work on CITIES!

For as long as there has been religion priests have used these kinds of special effects and hocus pocus to validate their tribute demands from their people. This application of astronomy and architecture doesn’t prove or disprove anything about the existence of god, of course, but what amazes me is just how similar the ideas are across all cultures around the world. Wrong or right, religion of any kind does make us feel part of a bigger picture, and if we link ourselves to things beyond our control then we have relief from and less responsibility for our own destiny. I know nothing has really changed—the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. lines up with the sunrise, too (implying a great deal about the religion of capitalism, no?)—but it seems like maybe once upon a time someone out there would have had different ideas.

Or maybe they just had that guy killed?

Study for the Mayan game of Pok-ta-Pok which celebrated the celestial movements of the gods and ended with sacrificing either the winner or the loser.

Study for the Aztec New Fire Ceremony wherein priests kindle a fire in the chest of a sacrificial victim and passed torch by torch to every household in the city.

On a completely different note, a little update on SHARK: I’ve finally purchased plane tickets to fly out and do some first-hand research this fall! Thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of several scientists and Farallon experts in the Bay Area, I will be spending several days on the water in early October to witness great white shark tagging and get a water tour around the islands. My foul-weather gear is ready, and Dramamine is at the top of my packing list; fingers-crossed that the sharks put in an appearance while I’m there!

The Aztec and Incan empires fell at the hands of Cortez and Pizarro, respectively, so before I left my apartment I looked through my roughs of page spreads that demand drawings of Spanish conquistadors to see what I needed. The museum’s European political paintings and various on-location works by the Impressionists were especially helpful in giving me ideas for poses, composition, and general stylistic approach. I’m not sure quite how this book will hang together yet–right now I’m trying to take each section at a time–but going to the Met gave me a much fuller sense of what is possible. I hope to pay many more visits over the rest of the summer.

Also I completely forgot to post this last month but I did this moose sketch while at the Museum of Natural History, too. I love the pose within this scene! So much emotion between the two animals. They’re fierce and majestic, fragile but strong… can’t wait to get back there again soon, too. I love living in New York!!

From the towering reproduction stelae (above) to the tiny figurines, the museum’s collection of Mayan figures wear a dizzying alphabet of marks and lines to describe their clothing, hair, and ornamentation. While this stylized short-hand doesn’t quite compute for modern viewers, it’s a terrific jumping off point for an illustrator. With my walnut ink washes and black line work I focused trying to draw “from the inside” of the figures, looking for gesture and anatomy within the different clay portraits:

My giant Moleskin gave me ample room to play, and I’m already looking forward to my return. In the meantime I may take a trip down to China Town to draw in the markets, the closest stand-in for village life that I can think of in New York City (but I’m open to suggestions!) In other news today I signed the gigantic beast that is my contract for SHARK. I’m a real author!! Huzzah for Macmillan!

In the midst of all this I decided to take Saturday off to travel out to Montauk, Long Island with art teacher Jeff Fisher’s weekly location drawing class to sketch at the 26th Annual Star Island Shark Tournament. Like the late 19th-century French idea of drawing “en plein air,” location drawing forces an artist to solve content, composition, and color problems in the moment and directly from life. Class began in a nearby shipyard to warm up with fishing boats and pilings before heading to Star Island to claim front row spots around the judging area and settle in for an intense afternoon.

With over $500,000 in prize money at stake there were many dozen teams competing to catch the biggest sharks, and the crowd of families and tourists grew as boat after boat arrived to deliver the fish to the judges. Each shark was hoisted up, weighed, and photographed, then cut down, measured for length, and gutted. The carcass was then either cut up for use at a nearby research lab or trimmed into steaks for the team that caught it. The heads, tails, fins, and guts were tossed into the front of a construction loader for easy trips to the dumpster.

While watching dozens of sharks drop stomachs and lose heads isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, the fast pace of the tournament was quite the drawing challenge and gave me some on-the-ground context for our cultural obsession with these predators. Great white sharks are no longer hunted for tournaments, much to the disappointment of every small child present. Their endangered status keeps fisherman catching blues, makos, and threshers instead. Hammerheads are qualified too, though none were caught at this event.

It takes enormous endurance to draw all day in the midst of crowds and heat, but for me this guerrilla approach keeps me in shape for better and better work done in the studio. This trip was also the first time out with my new 11″ x 16″ Moleskin sketchbook; I loved having so much breathing room to collage and try out ideas (but next time I’ll be sure to put more sunscreen on my arms!). Keep an eye out for its filling pages throughout the summer on this blog. In the meantime, a few photos from the tournament:

So far, the most eclectic box of stuff packed contains: 2 candles, a Christmas tree holder, a hair dryer with diffuser, an umbrella, a metal wire basket, hand sanitizer, spray fixative, gorilla glue, a vinyl repair kit, and a set of wind-up penguin salt and pepper shakers. Make of that what you will!

Average waking time: 6:45am

Average getting-up time: 8:00am

Number of cups of coffee consumed: 10

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 6

Number of times I left the apartment: 3

Number of hours spent drawing: 60

Number of moving boxes packed: 0

Average number of daily emails sent: 7.3

Average bed time: midnight

Audiobooks completed: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Authur Conan Doyle.

Which, oddly enough, directly relates to THE EXPEDITIONERS, because while reading the manuscript I found that Sarah Stewart Taylor had given me just that assignment: to draw giant vultures attacking the four main characters as they travel downstream on a river. If only I’d made the assignment that much more complicated for my students!

I poked through the files of my brain trying to remember our in-class discussions. Diagonals create tension. Sharp shapes are perceived as threatening. I can use the oars and wings to tilt the movement of the composition. I went through countless versions of this drawing, trying not to completely disappoint myself after having forced my students to attempt the same problem. I also imposed upon my husband at least twice to pose as a terrified teenager. It turns out he’s quite good at imagining fictitious birds attacking him while sitting on a storage bench in a 10th floor New York apartment.

I finally came up with a solution I liked to use as the foundation for the final line art for the drawing. As for drawing the actual attacking birds, the turkey vulture proved to be the most helpful reference. Vultures are mostly scavenging birds, and turkey vultures have evolved bald heads and huge, unseparated nostrils as adaptions to stay clean and stay breathing while diving head first into the bloated bellies of dead animals. Turkey vultures also have a six foot wingspan (!!), not quite as large as these birds but certainly a good place to start. I’m quite relieved that facing-off with a vulture is not part of my foreseeable future!

Average waking time: 6:40am

Average getting-up time: 8:10am

Number of cups of coffee consumed: 12

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 6

Number of times I left the apartment: 5

Number of hours spent drawing: 51.75

Amount of Motrin IB taken: 600mg

Average number of daily emails sent: 8.25

Average bed time: 11:45pm

iTunes song played the most number of times in a row: Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones

Statistics for the week of Sunday, May 13th to Saturday May 19th:

Average waking time: 7:05am

Average getting-up time: 8:18am

Number of cups of coffee consumed: 12

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 9

Number of times I left the apartment: 4

Number of hours spent drawing: 48

Number of New York City landmarks visited with out-of-town family: 9

Average number of daily emails sent: 3.4

Average bed time: 11:45pm

Audiobooks completed: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

Slugs are categorized as gastropod molluscs, closely related to snails and distant cousins to squids and octopi. The phylum of mollusc is the largest marine phylum, making up 23% of all of the ocean’s critters, and the most bizarre body plans belong to the slugs of the sea.

All slugs are hermaphroditic, which means that they are both male and female, and land slugs breath through a pneumostome, a single respiratory hole on the (almost always) right hand side of their head. I wish I’d grown up with slugs like these around; the brown slugs of the Silicon Valley suburbs just aren’t quite as cool!

The physical illustration process for almost any book begins with the “roughs,” an initial set of rough sketches that go along with the text. For myself I like to get through this stage as fast as I humanly can, because a blank piece of paper (or a blank screen) is one of my biggest fears, a world where every mark can become an instant, ugly scar. Without a break-neck pace I’ll endlessly revise and revisit drawings, resulting in zero progress and crushing self-doubt. It almost doesn’t matter what I draw or how bad it is in the first pass; the point is to get something completely done so that I have a place from which to start editing. In my first pass at the 36 to 40 rough scenes of interior art, how many times did I draw three West children pointing at maps? At least three (yuck!) but from there each scene could only improve. I’m happy to say that by now all of the “map pointing” has hit the cutting room floor.

One of the things that keeps me moving during the Roughs is an even more terrifying shape than a blank white rectangle: a black diagonal line keeping time on The Chart:

This metronome for progress is one of the most useful illustration tools I own. Back in February, when I learned that I would be illustrating Sarah Stewart Taylor’s THE EXPEDITIONERS, I also learned that I’ve only have 12-14 weeks to do the book from start to finish. The drawing experience would be a marathon, with some sprinting and high-jumping thrown in for good measure, and I needed a gun to get me sprinting from the start. The Chart was directly inspired by the ever-talented Alec Longstreth (Basewood), a former teacher from The Center for Cartoon Studies, who uses this tool to track progress on his own work. With an aggressive goal of reaching 40 interior drawings (vertical axis) in the time span of 8 days (horizontal axis), there was absolutely no time to be afraid of the blank page. The rest of my to-do list may have failed, but this angry line kept me on track at a pace of five rough digital drawings a day.

Of course, not everything drawn in the Roughs stage is bad, and sometimes I even hit on something terrific. A stellar composition! A character design that rings true in future drafts! Or even a concept can be relocated to work better earlier or later in the manuscript. The Roughs give me a foundation on which to build the book, and each successive pass gives the structure more definition.

In THE EXPEDITIONERS, one of my favorite drawing moments is when the eldest brother, Zander, discovers a new species of slug. Here’s the full sequence of drawings, from concept sketches to digital rough (above) to the final rough draft before it goes to final art. This reflects about four weeks of worth of change. Note that after the digital rough draft, I abandoned the idea of having the characters posing with the slug in favor of showing the slug alone, as if from the character’s point of view. The result is, I feel, a much stronger and more interesting compositon:

 [DIGITAL ROUGH GOES HERE]

I’d like to thank Art Nouveau, the Viennese Secessionists, Japanese postcards, and everyone who’s ever posted photos of cool slugs. More roughs and sketches from other scenes coming soon!

Average waking time: 6:25am

Average getting-up time: 7:45am

Number of cups of coffee consumed: 7

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 5

Number of times I left the apartment: 7

Number of hours spent drawing: 48.5

Amount of chocolate consumed: yes

Average number of daily emails sent: 12.5

Average bed time: 11:30pm

Most unprofessional phrase used in a professional email: “I am a stressed muffin.”

But in art, in books, when working on a manuscript in life, this transition into Act 2 really does happen (which is why it works in stories at all). And for me the moment looks just like this: a tiny box divided in half full of scribbles that represent a page spread:

To anyone else this might look like the very beginning. After all, my sketchbook is empty, and I’ve made countless trips to the kitchen to avoid doing actual work. But usually months have already passed since the initial project discussions and I’ve been turning over the problems in my head for some time. I’ve met or spoken with the editor or art director at least once or twice, and I’ve done my reading, I’m doing research, and I am beginning to fall in love with the material and the context. Perhaps I’ve even started to doodle some characters. Anything (but not everything!) is in the realm of possibility, and I’m trying not to let my fear of certain failure keep me balled up on the couch.

Now there’s nothing left to do but to “start.” More and more I am learning to recognize (and have faith in) the threshold of Act 2. There is a beat, a breath, a pause… and the world goes absolutely silent. I peer into the abyss ahead, knowing that in six months or one year I’ll have completed the project, even though from where I stand I can’t see how it will happen. I pick up a pen and I take a leap of faith. It will all work out (or it won’t) but there’s not going back to Act 1!

Here’s how our publisher describes THE EXPEDITIONERS online: “Explorer of the Realm Alexander West has disappeared and is presumed dead under mysterious circumstances while on an expedition … But not before smuggling half of a strange map to his three intrepid children — Kit, the brain, M. K., the tinkerer, and Zander the brave. Why are so many people trying to steal the half-map? What powerful secrets does it hold? (And where is the other half?) It’s up to Alexander’s children — call them The Expeditioners — to get to the bottom of these questions, and fast. Success could mean fame and wild riches. Failure could be … Well, let’s just say failure is not an option!”

Sarah and I first met at The Center for Cartoon Studies where she teaches writing classes to first and second-year students. While Sarah is a terrific teacher, and her graphic novel on Amelia Earheart is one of my favorites, I never dreamed that I’d soon be at work on her first book project written for children. THE TREASURE OF DROWNED MAN’S CANYON will be out this November from McSweeney’s McMullens, which means that it will be my first book with a major publisher to hit the shelves of a book store. There is still a vast amount of work to do between now and the final art for both the interior and the cover, but it begins with notes and sketches filling the margins of the 308-page manuscript as my studio wall rapidly fills up with roughs:

With the thirty-six black and white illustrations we’ll need for the book, I’m doing by best to try and both 1) capture each scene and 2) maintain an even pace. In the end it will be a bit of a balancing act, as there are 50+ chapters of 2-10 pages each, but thanks to a terrific 2-day brainstorm with Sarah in my New York apartment and many, many hours of work put in at my drawing table, I think we’ve hit on a good direction from which to take the roughs. The next step is to fully work through all thirty-six drawings to get a clearer sense of what’s working… and what’s not.

The loudest “THANK YOU!” ever shouted is soaring over hills towards the state of Vermont. Sarah, thank you so much for wanting to work on this series with me, it’s been a privilege and an honor to be on your team and build this visual world. I’m already such a huge fan and can hardly wait to read the rest of the books to come!

Last, but not at all least, a programming note is needed for this simultaneous explosion of good news: EXPEDITIONERS, CITIES, and SHARK all at once would not have been possible without my Amazing Agent, who has maintained order in my drawing universe for the last four months straight. Stephen, I think I owe YOU a burger feast. Or, in the very least, a bacon pancake shake. : )

Did she say llamas??

YES!

With cheers of excitement and at least one bottle of wine, I am delighted to announce my SECOND book deal with Macmillan as the illustrator of BURIED BENEATH US by author/wicked-smart professor/Danny DeVito look-alike Anthony Aveni! From where cities come from and how cities grow, to daily life and the function of religion, this terrific and compelling non-fiction picture book focuses on life in four ancient American cities: the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, the Incan city of Cuzco, the Mayan city of Copan, and the mound city of Cahokia on the Mississippi.

The book will about 96 pages long and filled with dozens of my black-and-white illustrations, which will both help explain the information and reach a wider audience. The final art is due September 1st, and will be published with Roaring Brook sometime in 2013. A huge thanks and shout out to Deirdre Langeland, my soon-to-be editor for this fabulous book! Huzzah, let’s do it! Ready or not, llamas, here I come!

Over the spring and coming summer I will be up to my ears in research and graphite, which is the BEST kind of way to spend any season. In anticipation of this book I’ve already paid a brief visit to both the Met and the Museum of Natural History here in New York City to do a little preliminary visual research and refamiliarize myself with ancient American art. How I love the simple elegance and design of Incan fabrics, Aztec sculptures, and Mayan vases! Here’s a glimpse of some quick doodles from one of my (oh-so) high-tech sketchbooks. More drawing are sure to come this way soon:

In the meantime I have ONE MORE AWESOME BOOK that I’m already waist deep in the midst of illustrating. That triumphant announcement will be made this Friday; stay tuned for more news from my studio and mountains of roughs, sketches, and process work to come. Whew, what a busy year I have ahead of me!

BUT NO! I will take my birthday last week just the way it went: a beautiful day in New York City, a lunch spent dining at the Society of Illustrators, an email in the early evening bearing the news that Macmillan Publishing had made an offer on my first solo picture book (AHHH!!!), followed by a delicious dinner with my favorite person on earth.

Rough Draft Cover for SHARK

My shark book, tentatively titled SHARK: THE GREAT WHITES OF THE FARALLON ISLANDS, follows a day in the life of a young white shark at the Farallons just off the coast of San Francisco. Ancient, gorgeous, and endlessly cool, these apex predators return to hunt elephant seals every fall using some of the most amazing (and lethal!) adaptations on earth. The story goes way beyond teeth and dorsal fins to explore shark hunting methods and the way the ecosystem of the Farallon Islands works, and just how badly this species needs our compassion and protection.

In diving into the book I have absolutely fallen in love with great white sharks, and I am so excited to share what I have learned with readers of all ages. As of right now the pub date is completely up in the air, but may possibly be sometime in late 2013. In the meantime I am a busy kid. More on what I’m currently working on to be posted soon!

Publishing world, I am calling on the Shark Phone: non-fiction picture books, here I come! 

Calling on the Shark Phone

This one-shot edition will feature gags, strips, and a few full-page features drawn by both NCS and CCS faculty, students, and alumni. The copies will be given away for free at the upcoming spring conventions, as well as in the lobby of CCS during gallery hours. Stop in to pick up your copy later this month!

A huge and hearty THANK YOU is due for all of the warm wishes (and great news!!) that came my way yesterday. This is sure to be the best year yet.

Digital and pencil rough draft for the final image of the hunt.

First, to make a final drawing I have to know what it is I want to draw. That sounds easy but it really isn’t; as any writer knows, arriving at a working rough draft is by far the most challenging part of a book. But at least for this spread I already knew that I needed a scene of a white shark hunting a seal. I scanned in a small drawing and played with value and color in my computer, and came up with a composition I was fairly happy with. And so the question surfaced: how do I want to complete this drawing? The only way to find out would be to fail again and again and again until I got something that felt right. I started where I usually start: pencil line as a separate layer from the color.

SWNDGWS #1: Too much detail.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #1

But right away I knew this wouldn’t work. See all that detail in this first pencil drawing? Yikes. Talk about flattening out the space behind the shark! Though it’s true that the reefs are home to millions of creatures, I saw right away that by putting so much detail in the background I had eliminated depth. So for something completely different… I did it all over again almost exactly the same.

SWNDGWS #2: Too much detail with cute animal friends.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #2

So much for not learning from my first attempt. And this time, what are all of those cute little animal friends doing in a reef where a shark is hunting a seal? If I wanted a spooky mood this approach achieved exactly the opposite. I also noticed that the shark’s tail was wrong: on a white shark the upper caudal lobe is larger, not the lower lobe. Of course the tail looks all sorts of sizes while a shark is swimming, but the detail and flatness of the drawing seemed to eliminate all movement. Still clinging to hope, I grasped at color to save me, which leads us to #3…

SWNDGWS #3: Too much detail with cute animal friends and digital color.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #3

Well at least I fixed the upper caudal lobe thanks to the warp tool in Photoshop. Here the value and contrast are doing their job, but I felt that the details were blocking a sense of movement, and the digital color quickly felt much too sober. I abandoned the digital color (which, if you remember, still wasn’t the main problem!) in favor of watercolor to see if that worked any better.

SWNDGWS #4: Too much detail with cute animal friends and watercolor.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #4

After printing out the line art on two pieces of watercolor paper I loaded up a brush and began filling in colors. The non-digital color instantly felt better, but my fundamental problem from SWNDGWS #1 was still unresolved. It occurred to me that perhaps the pencil plus watercolor approach was all wrong, so I pulled out some pastels and drew directly on the watercolor paper, covering up the #4 attempt as I went. I didn’t get very far.

SWNDGWS #5: Too much detail with cute animal friends and pastel.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #5

Having never worked as a story board artist for Pixar, I knew right away that this just wasn’t going to work. In my hands pastels are stubborn, angry things that decide to break and crumble and play with all the wrong colors. With mild desperation and not a little panic, I started over with charcoal, which brings us up to #6…

SWNDGWS #6: Charcoal.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #6

Look! Look! I finally dropped the detail! At last I was on to something, though I quickly saw that charcoal would be nearly as difficult to control as the pastel. The values were working, but the smudge factor was dicey. What if I tried the same idea but in pencil shading instead?

SWNDGWS #7: Pencil Shading.

Seven Ways Not to Draw a Great White Shark #7

For the most part I was very pleased with how this drawing turned out. There’s just a tiny bit of charcoal in the blacks and the rest is entirely with 2B and 4B woodless pencil. But as I worked I slowly realized that I would not be able to consistently sustain this approach, for two reasons: 1) for any above water scenes this approach would feel much too dark, and 2) this would put me right back in the chair of using digital color. Frustrated with (at this point) several days of failed attempts, I pulled out a scrap of paper and did an angry two minute drawing of a seal swimming. And… POOF! Something that worked:

OWDS (One Way to Draw a Seal) #1: Pencil and watercolor.

One Way to Draw a Seal

Simple, full of motion, and with natural hand-drawn color. Through all those other attempts of trying to figure out how to draw the scene, all I had to do was to just draw the way I usually draw (hey! what a concept!). Stay tuned for the final art sample. Happy March everyone!

We are already looking forward to the next time around; a quick shout out to our students (thank you!) for being so terrific! A month long drawing project begins here tomorrow. Back at you soon, and back to the drawing board for now…