Help Make A Book! Part II

There are just 6 short days left to make "A Map in the Dirt" into a beautifully printed book!

Now is the time to tell all your friends about the sweet rewards: sketchbooks, original artwork, the book, the giant coloring poster, music, and the new personalized 24x36" poster filled with drawings of you and your friends or whatever you want!

http://kck.st/bH6PPT

Odes to Animals

I've just finished up a short series of five portraits, this time the subject is animals. The portraits are odes to some of my wild friends, including: Brown Bear, Sparrow, White Tailed Deer, Fox and Jack Rabbit. I've surrounded them with some of their own loves as well as some of my own.

My friend was leaving his house the other day to go feed birds in the park. "I love animals!" He smiled. He pointed to his shirt, which was teeming with bears and trees and wildlife. "See?!" He gave me his 10 pound sack of bird seed and said, "You know what you can tell about a person that loves animals?" He paused and I tried to understand the question. "...They love people even more." He gave me a hug and we went our separate ways.

Animals have a soft and mysterious place in my heart. They seem to know something we don't and we've been given the unique responsibility of caring for them and sharing this world with them. These portraits are my small attempt to capture their majesty and mystery.

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I'll be turning one of my five portraits into a beautiful letterpress print. Please vote for your favorite here.

A Map in the Dirt (update)

Bleeding Cool News and Super Duper are helping spread the word about A Map in the Dirt! The project is at 18% and there are 43 days left to get a copy of the book.

In other news: Noah and I are sick, sick, sick! We've had 2 hours of sleep the last three nights and Noah's been throwing up. We both have ear infections and, as of last night, I have Pink Eye. We've been watching The Princess and the Frog over and over and over again. The music is great and the story is a lot of fun. It makes being sick a more bearable experience :)

Free Coloring Pages and iPhone Wallpaper

THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS FRIGHTFUL is a giant, 2x3 foot coloring poster I made for the cold winter days we'll surely spend inside. I thought I'd try something new and make some printable coloring pages and iPhone wallpapers with the drawings and you can find them here.

Enjoy!

Coloring Book

This is an 8-page music coloring book that I made all by myself.

You can buy your very own music coloring book for $2 by emailing me at jess.smiley@gmail.com and sending your address. I'll be selling these at Pablo's secret show on July 20 and at the Arts in the Park on August 17.

***BONUS***
Send in your best colored page to jess.smiley@gmail.com The winner gets a prize!







Jessica Goldfond (from the Shiny Squirrel) was kind enough to mention the coloring book on her blog. Thanks, Jess!

Ladders to Get You to Stay

They Went Swimming

I LOVED making this picture! More and more I want to make pictures like this on a big surface. Get a big canvas and cover it with houses of paint and paper creatures and crayon walkways...I have trouble justifying such a big purchase, though.

This is another picture I'd love to see as a print.

Light Bugs

The world of details and newness and picture-making is really calling out to me right now.  This picture took me a good forty minutes to make, while my little boy jumped on the couch and my wife did her homework. I used tracing paper, lined paper, pieces of mail, pencils, markers, a bandaid, a quick drawing Mikelle made the other day, and a ghost I cut out and lost last September (it became our friend's beard!).

I'd love to make more of these little scenes on a bigger surface.

The Topography of a Page

Something that's been on my mind for a good two or three years now is the idea of paper as a landscape. Just like the hills and valleys of a city, I wonder what the citizens and growths of a page are. I get kind of weird, I guess, about relishing in the dips and dry ravines of a crinkled piece of paper. Hovering my hand above the surface of a page, and feeling it's jagged peaks and shadowy creases is such an intimate experience---it teaches me things I couldn't learn anywhere else.

This picture was made by crumbling a textured gray paper, then slowly scratching curves into it's waxy surface with a salad fork, then cutting lines and shapes from both sides with an Xacto knife. A few accents in value were made with a white charcoal pencil. 

The actual mark-making didn't take long to make, but I've been learning how to make those marks and how to apply and combine them for about three years. I love making colorless impressions on a page that only show up when turned just so into the light, or when they become a bowl of shadows or a belly on the backside of the page. I love making both sides of the paper become the backside and the frontside---making them interact, and creating a dialogue between the two.

I'm always amazed how so many pictures can be more than the sum of their parts, a pictorial synergy of sorts. It shows that I love the process, but the actual making of a picture is just as appealing to me as the finished piece.

Cats

Here are some playful cats I made with charcoal pencils, graphite, crayon, colored pencils, and pens.

I think I've always liked the idea of cats more than the animals themselves, but I've been liking 'em more and more over the last year and a half. I've also started eating spinach.

If anyone wants to talk about "cute" in pictures, this post might be a good place for it. We'll get a good forum on Rob James' "Cute Face Theory" and my thoughts on the "Cute Factor". It'd be nice to get some comments from Andrew Christensen and Kelly Larsen, too. 

Huh.

Wild Horses

Detail from "Wild Horses"

Before I put anything down on paper and pictures are still sorts of ideas in my head, I think they sometimes look like the picture above---a mess of details, specific shapes and colors, but no apparent object or message. 

It's always a tough decision for me to take that messy picture in my head in only one of two directions: I could stop there, and flesh out the beautiful shapes I see, and the layering of textures and colors, loving the process as I create, and how the marks make a picture all their own. It's a pretty new way of doing the same thing I've done all my life. 

I remember even back in third grade I'd draw some creature I made up. Something with a big, heavy body, then long arms and a goofy face. "What is it?" Someone would ask. "Just something I made up," I'd say. And that was usually the end of the conversation. "Can you draw a Panda Bear?" And I'd draw a happy-go-lucky Panda.

In junior high when the same thing would happen ("What is it?" "It's just that---I made it up."), and someone would ask "Can you draw me?" I'd either feel like I had to prove that I could draw (because, obviously, drawing things that were made up didn't really prove anything about my drawing skills) and I'd end up only getting a partial portrait done in class, or I'd draw them as a sort of cartoon, and then they'd be offended. "What'd I do?" I'd ask myself. I'd never ask the offended what was wrong, because everyone thought it was obvious, too. "I don't get it."

Of course I didn't entirely "make up" the creatures I drew. I thought I was just making them up, but I only knew to draw a feathery wing on a slithery back, because I'd seen a feathery wing and a slithery back before. Not together, of course, but I subconciously put big and small pieces of other things together to make something new. 

This picture is the same kind of thing. I've taken elements used in all sorts of artwork: faint lines, bold lines, pencil lines, pen lines, areas of textured paint, torn pieces of colored paper, imprints on the page, etc. These are techniques used by artists of "realism" to make a face, or a flower, a dog, or a bowl of fruit. This picture is a celebration of shapes, symbols, values, composition and exploration. I love sharing the process of an image, because so much of the process is usually hidden in a picture. For me, the process shows that the picture was made by a person. It shares a sense of time and movement. This picture seems more alive to me than others.

When I have this mess of imagery and excitement inside me, that wants to become a picture, I could choose to celebrate the parts, or I could develop it a different way and find other connections between the parts---what object do these pieces make together? And then I usually end up with a figurative picture, or a story of some sort.

I love that, even though the only recognizable figure in this picture is a pink horse, there is still a story and several figures in this picture. I can't escape 'em! 

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"Wild Horses" is the first in a series of images I'm going to be making prints from. I'm on the lookout for high quality print presses, that use archival inks and papers. I want to share a personal experience with everyone that wants to see it, or have their own copy.

"Wild Horses" was made on my front porch, in the wind, with my boy, using: charcoal pencils, gouache, crayons, tracing paper, carbon paper, pencils, pens, ink, glue, scrapbook paper, erasers and tape. It was made on 7x9" Fabriano artist paper, mounted on mat board.

GREMLIN

My internet has been acting funnier than one of the Marx brothers and its kept me from posting all this time. Found out there was a gremlin in the system. I made a print of the creep. Its a wanted poster. If you see this gremlin, notify the authorities immediately. More posts on the way...