last year in a library in Alaska I read a folk tale in a random book on a random shelf & have been thinking about it since & today i wrote the librarian w/ no book title or author & in 2 hrs i had a scan of the story & cover in my inbox - librarians should be running everything.
fun fact: this page is mostly red because i couldn't figure out how to draw him here. I didn't want to draw angry eyes cause he just didn't look like himself & it was too scary, but the wide eyes on their own didn't do it. it was a lucky break that the hat was already blood red.
instagram has kind of turned into a game where you try & like the photo that initially shows up before the app refreshes & the non-linear timeline swallows it forever
Ah Eric Carle. Nobody ever managed such a strong combination of bright life & dignity in the work. The books still feel like clear-eyed statements of design & deep love for the form. All I ever wanted to make was a cover as good as these. RIP.
Here is the cover for "The Skull". It's a 115 pages, told in five parts, and it's about a girl named Otilla who runs away from home and finds a house in the woods with a skull living in it. It comes out July 2023 from
@Candlewick
and I am pretty excited about it 💀
one thing I forgot in The Brave Little Toaster is when they taunt the air conditioner into having a heart attack & dying & then his body is just in the background afterward & nobody talks about it
as a quick PS to that last stop-motion post, this is why it's so much damn fun. This is the whole set, and then the image we got. the moon is just foil stuck on the back and the water sparkles are little sequins. Joe made the boat in like...20 minutes.
s/o to the kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons or Terminator or anything but this book was just left around the house like it was no big deal
found an old portfolio from about 10 years ago! I had forgotten about some things in it. Here are some "try-out" pieces for Fantastic Mr. Fox - didn't get the gig but man I wanted to work on that thing
someone should do a book explaining to kids that for a long time we had phones in our houses that would ring & there was no way to tell who was calling & if you didn't pick it up you might never find out & if you were outside you wouldn't even know it ever happened
did a test the other day for an idea about books where you'd only get one color plus black. picture books can feel heavy & serious & i'm trying to see if there are prompts to get me to make dumb ones instead. i haven't actually written any of these but nobody steal them anyway ok
don't have a new thing but this is a test I did for a future book project. I was/am kind of a wimp about scary movies but scary picture books were always my favorite - really hoping to make one someday. Happy Halloween you guys!
one fun thing about school visits is when you answer kids questions & you pick a kid by describing their shirt & then they look down at their shirt as if they are also seeing it for the first time
Go Dog Go! told me that parties were going to be like this & i think it's why i never liked actual parties when i got old enough to go to them cause this still looks like the perfect speed of party
the "should billionaires exist" thing is tricky cause I dont think I can imagine a billion dollars. I think when I *think* I'm imagining a billion dollars I'm probably imagining like maybe 25 million and thats where my imagination stops & even then like where are you buying pants
got Winnie the Pooh for the boys & I'd forgotten about this amazing joke where Piglet's house has this sign in front & he thinks it's because his grandfather who built it was named Trespassers William
re-watched the disney Robin Hood the other night & it's kind of a quiet miracle of a movie, pacing-wise. it's so great and lazy, many scenes of just talking, almost no action. It takes really sensitive acting to pull that off.
"are these the brightest lightbulbs available?"
"Yes sir"
"Bright enough to hurt your eyes when you turn them on?"
"A little"
"I should mention, they are going in hotel room bathrooms"
"Ah, why didn't you say so" *opens secret door to room in the back of lightbulb store*
trying to decide whether the three-panel whale is funny or better or just greedy. He looks more normal in two panels, but note the spout in the middle one?
one thing about the last while is that any personal work had to be made with two toddlers climbing on me so they had to be simple & forgiving & low-tech, but I like the stuff that came out of that (for the wood stuff they only get cut sometimes & never TOO deep)
cover for the next book! I had to write a thing describing it. "A book of five short connected stories about two characters in which they don't go anywhere or do almost anything, but also it involves a meteor, time travel, aliens, jealousy, betrayal, and death."
i feel like tech guys watch "2001" the same way you hear that stock broker dudes love "the wolf of wall street" & it's like guys you have to watch the ends of these movies
when "This It Not My Hat" won the Caldecott, Tomie dePaola, who I'd only met once briefly, sent me a long handwritten letter of congratulations/welcome & talked about the book & it was almost more crazy than winning the damn thing. I'll miss waving at him sheepishly across rooms.
one thing to try if the baby is screaming in the car is to blast Sandstorm by Darude. Either the baby is so confused that he quiets down or the continued screaming just feels like he's that guy in the club who would scream during Sandstorm by Darude
always nice when a scientist in 1888 studying twilights decides to pick up some colored wax from the ground or something & make drawings that are better than anything you'll ever do ( )
the opening to Kiki's Delivery Service is unreal. In like 5 minutes they establish that witches casually exist & they leave home at a certain age, a tearjerker scene saying goodbye to her dad, her personality as a confident goof, in the air & on her way & THEN the title comes up
a few months ago Joe Schmidt & me got some time to work on some ideas I'd been wanting to try out. The animals were made by Victor Dubrovsky & the sets were mostly sticks we got in Griffith Park.
making things for kids shows you they’re comfy with abstraction bc they’re used to not totally understanding & then you grow out of it in your 20s when you think everything is explainable & then later you grow back into abstraction when you realize youll never understand anything
solidarity today with all the illustrators who have to go through the "oh I can't wait to see YOUR pumpkin cause you can draw" & you let them down so much cause pumpkin carving is different
sometimes i see some people saying they knew of one of the "hat" books but did not know there were others, which is understandable, we're all busy people. but, in case it is of interest, there are THREE of them & you can even buy them in a set! i will sum them up for you:
EVERYONE - i have a new project, with my mom. We're making felt pennants to go in your houses. You can buy them. I'm designing them & she is making them HERSELF. In her HOUSE. 12x20 and 12x18 &, if i do say so myself, they are beautiful
me reading my own book to my kid "wait, see, the bear SAYS he DIDN'T eat the rabbit but remember...you're not looking, this is really funny, come on. I've seen other kids laugh at this. Now. Remember what the rabbit said before. Look at the page, Isaac."
saw this getting passed around today & finally took a look. i don't think i really understood how isolation combined with recovered people not passing it on is what kills things like this but it's a beautiful explanation
*sitting at my desk, 6 old cups of tea in various molding states around the computer, a half-eaten baby nutrient bar in the wacom pen holder, wearing the hoodie i slept in & 4 tabs open about wood-whittling tools* "sooo you guys wanna work from home eh? lemme give you some tips."
usually around now I’m on book tour by myself or with Mac & later in the month we finish off with this one and leave a gym of second graders with their mouths open (and often we hear of a run on this book at the library after). i still can’t believe it’s only 5 spreads long.
oh man just got reminded of these boat covers. i think they preceded any books I actually worked on. 2007? I was hoping you could do books without having to draw characters. would still like to do "Regular Boat" someday, even out of context.
sometimes you get the question about pros/cons to illustrating other people's things & a big pro is that you end up roughing out pictures that you yourself would probably not have come up with on your own
been thinking lately about the comparable advantages to puppet animation vs stop motion & this is absolutely the number one reason I would choose puppets.
curious if it's just the midwesterners/Canadians who are really stressed out because the masks block the small almost apologetic non-smile/smile you give to strangers so they know you're not a murderer
that ghost table drawing led to this little story, again pretty old now, but it’s actually an idea I had in third grade. I’ve been trying to expand it into a book but it’s tough to expand without ruining it - it makes me kind of emotional just the way it is.
GOT AN ADVANCE COPY IN THE MAIL. 5 connected short stories, 96 pages. It came out pretty good. Out in April but we’ll start pre-order campaign stuff soon 😬