At the risk of stealing a bit from Fuse Eight, here’s two oddly similar books*, THE CAT WAY (October 8, 2024) and I KNOW HOW TO DRAW AN OWL (October 29, 2024). 2025 may be the year of the rhinoceros, but 2024 was apparently the year of the red flannel and black jeans clad nocturnal naturalist.
*superficially, anyway. Each story is beautiful and beautifully unique.
The Owl and the Pussycat Read More »
I’m not one to rain on another’s parade. I’m not the type to tell someone their favorite band is, in fact, not very good or the sort who’d suggest a chef add one more shake of pepper into their chowder. All the same, I’ve got just a *little* bit of a chip on my shoulder about how many people have moved from social media to Substack… and I’m not sure why. To be clear, I have no problem with the move from social media. When Twitter was bought out and people began migrating to Mastodon, Hive, Threads, and Bluesky—and none were seeming to stick—I had a secret hope that the end result of all these false starts would be a return to blogging. The Substack format is, more or less, blogging and the Substack site is, more or less, an RSS aggregator. But I just can’t seem to get into it.
I have, for the last… let’s say ten years… lamented the death of blogging. I remember so fondly the early part of the 00s, how my time was spent online. I would surf from site to site and hope any one of my favorite writers or artists would have uploaded some new essay, photo, sketch or, best of all, an interesting link. In that case, you would surf over to this new undiscovered part of the internet and lose yourself in some new information or experience. It was the best! It was also (not so unlike modern social media) a huge time suck but there was an active participation that was very different from having an algorithm spoon feed you content.
Okay, so here we are, more than a few first steps into a post micro-blogging world and guess what, Substack is taking off! Artists and writers are posting fairly regularly over there and my reaction… a mild indifference! What the heck?! I’ve been granted what I wanted and I’m still holding out for something else.
This is clearly a me problem. I *think* what it is is that I haven’t yet grieved the old internet, I haven’t yet shed my frustrations at the engagement driven social media apps, and I haven’t yet accepted that the world spins ever forward. We can’t go back to blogging as it was, so maybe Substack *does* make sense—there is, actually, a lot of good kidlit stuff on there, illustrator Alina Chau has collected it into one big list.
Anyway, I feel like a bit of a Rotten Ralph. There is no reason for me to be salty at a platform that is giving writers and artists a place to share their work. All the same, I’m going to keep blogging. It works for me. I have zero means of tracking engagement, but I like that. It’s kind of like my private YouTube livestreams where I am simultaneously speaking to everyone and to no one. A bizarre exercise, but I like it.
Until next time, everybody and nobody.
Substack? More Like SNUBstack, Am I Right? Read More »
I’m in the market for a new favorite word.
Remember my watchword picker? Those words were crowdsourced from an Instagram favorite word poll. I had done something similar back in Twitter days where I traded a chance to win a free session of my “Dummies for Authors” class for new followers’ favorite words. People liked this idea, I guess, because I received in total 108 words. Of those 108, four were SERENDIPITY.
Now, I’m not judging anyone’s choice of favorite word, but seeing SERENDIPITY appear so often made me realize there are two ways to look at a favorite word: you can like the word for how it looks and sounds or you can like a word for its meaning.
To me, SERENDIPITY belongs in the latter category. I subscribe to serendipity and I have great trust in things falling into place but I don’t know if saying the word gives me any particular pleasure. “IPITY” is a fun chain of letters to pronounce, but the “S” start seems severe. Overall, I think the sound of “CHANCE” is better matched to the meaning of random but meaningful coincidences.
So this brings us to me. Previously (up until, like, twenty minutes ago) my favorite word was ARCHIPELAGO. But to be honest, I appreciate it more for the image of exploration it conjures than I do for how it sounds. “PELAGO” is nice, but if that’s my favorite part, I may as well pick PELICAN for my favorite word. But I don’t like PELICAN that much.
My friend Kristan (who is a poet and who I trust on the subject of favorite words) has SHAMPOO as her favorite word. The “SH” start and the “OO” end… settling into the “M” before popping with the “P”… this very well could be the perfect favorite word but it’s not quite for me.
ZAMBONI is a great word but I can’t pick it because that’s my friend Jason’s favorite. SPELUNK might win in both being fun to say and carrying a fun meaning (caves! exploration! diamonds! bats!) but that’s my son’s.
I should maybe turn this matter over to word expert (and my Invisible Things collaborator), Jennifer Thomas. I have no doubt she could recommend something lovely. Maybe SUEDE, SOLIGENE, or SUSURROUS. You know, all these S words are making me thing that maybe the answer is right in front of my face. Shampoo Kristan once mocked up a cover for self-help books as written by members of our families. This is what she imagined I would write:
So! The next time I’m asked what my favorite word is, I’ll say:
Wanted: Zamboni, Slightly Used Read More »
I’ve been using my Ahab Noodler fountain pen to sketch out a graphic novel I’m collaborating on with a certain librarian but I noticed the pen is in need of some maintenance. I’m going to head out to Flax and buy a new nib so I can finish up these thumbnails. Until I get back, please enjoy this timelapse I made back when I was first test-running this pen:
Ahab Noodler Fountain Pen Test Read More »
I picked up three outstandingly beautiful picture books at the Oakland Public Library’s Friends of the Library booksale for one dollar each, a terrific deal. Generally, I spend about five bucks on the old titles I pick up at my local used bookstore and somewhere between five and ten for the titles I buy off ThriftBooks on ebay but from time to time I’ll drop a bit more moolah on something special. Something like this:
Thurber is great but I really bought it for Simont, who’s art I absolutely love. Also, for the paper texture. Look.
The Wonderful O is the fifth of Thurber’s fairy tales. It’s been a while since I’ve read Many Moons (1943) and The Thirteen Clocks (1950) but I think this book has a thinner plot. It’s centered around a mysterious figure who bans all Os from the island nation of Ooroo. The citizens of R (as Ooroo comes to be known), need to fight back but the secret of their salvation is hidden in a missing word.
The islanders remember HOPE, they reclaim LOVE, they have VALOR. What do you suppose the fourth word is? The book is sixty-eight years old so I’m not worried about spoilers. Here’s the word:
Following up on my favorite animals post to let you know there’s more to the Baby Bear story. Here it is.
When I was about three years old, my mom took me to Mervyn’s. She was shopping, I started exploring and got lost. I was found by someone on staff who took me to the customer service area and asked me my name. I would only say “Baby Bear” so they had to go on the PA and say “Would Mama Bear please come to customer service, your Baby Bear is looking for you.” Apparently, everybody in the store thought this was incredibly endearing and the manager of the store thought it worth preserving as a series of newspaper ads that ran in the Napa Valley Register from February to April in 1977.
Okay, that last part is made up but everything up until the newspaper ad is true. My mom loved telling this story and would, for the rest of her life, address her cards to me with “Dear Baby Bear”.
If you asked me what my favorite animal was when I was a little kid, I would have said bear. No hesitation. I loved bears and even, up until I was three or four years old, believed I was one, calling myself “Baby Bear”. When I was a bit older, around ten years old, tigers were it. I thought they were beautiful and I loved the mythology of them being the only cat that liked water. There may have also been some decolonization of my imagination at play (bears were my favorite when I was living in California, tigers became my favorite when I moved to Jakarta).
At twelve years old, my family moved to Canada but beavers never became my favorite animal. Years later, however, moose would.
So, what’s my favorite animal now? It’s actually a little complicated. I answered this question for my students (when I was making videos for them during Covid) thus:
So, yeah, rhinos are up there. The fascination is recent, relatively speaking. I got most interested in them when I saw a The Dodo video about a baby rhino who befriended a kitten. That video made me realize that rhinos are much more like cows (in attitude) than they are the short-tempered, tank-bodied behemoths cartoons usually portray them as. They are interesting to look at and fun to draw.
You won’t be surprised, then, that I have a couple or rhino manuscripts. One of them is coming out in June of this year. How special! How specific! How singular! Right?
WRONG.
It turns out there are a LOT of rhino books coming out in 2025. Take a gander. We have Big Bike, Little Bike by Kellie DuBay Gillis and Jacob Souva.
Little Rhino Lost by Candy Gourlay and Jamie Bauza.
Never Take Your Rhino on a Plane by K.E. Lewis and Isabel Roxas
And, of course, Big Rhinoceros, Little Rhinoceros by me
Everything’s coming up rhinos! And I’m not sour that I’m sharing shelf space with these other books. The more rhinos, the better (a saying I would apply to Earth as well). I do find it surprising that rhinos are, apparently, 2025’s animal of choice. I remember hedgehogs being big, then octopuses, then sloths, then llamas. I don’t think I ever expected rhinos to make it there but I am thrilled that they have. It looks like my collection of books with “rhino” in their title is going to almost double in size!
Everything’s Coming Up Rhinos Read More »
Has there been too much negativity in these last posts? I feel like there’s been too much negativity in these last posts. I took a lovely walk this evening and caught a gorgeous sunset. Here’s a photo that doesn’t do it justice.
Just saw that Instagram test ran an AI and OF COURSE they chose to use a Black woman. Years ago, maybe 3 or 4, I said that the only reason companies were eager to develop AI was so that they could tell a computer to “tell me a Black story”, then reap the rewards without paying any Black artists (I’d dig up screenshots of this conversation but it’s buried somewhere in my archived Twitter DMs). A few months after writing that, Shudu, an AI fashion model “from” South Africa debuted on Instagram. Shudu (or, rather, her tech bro creators) secured a modeling gig and made it into Vogue. We should have burned it down then, but we didn’t, and now we have an AI “proud, Black, queer, truth-telling momma” launching her IG account. (update: “Mama Liv” as well as other AI accounts were taken down following “backlash“)
My annoyance with the AI debate is that it’s usually centered on AI not being as “good” as humans artists. And while that may be true, it’s not the fight we should be fighting. Do you think the guy who gave AI the prompt “Taylor Swift covered in marinara sauce” cares that her wrist is bent at a weird angle or that there are two light sources in the image? Hell no. AI is good enough for all the average person cares about “art”. The issue has always been who gets paid. Vogue can subscribe once to Shudu and never hire a model again. Instagram can run the Mama Liv AI and never do revenue sharing with influencers again (quick side note: I find it incredibly creepy that HiMamaLiv kind of reads like “Hi, I’m Alive”). Hollywood would love to replace actors and animators, and I’m sure there are publishing higher ups who wonder if ghost writing could just be handed over to ChatGPT and cover design to Canva. It’s always been about the money.
Anyway, I’m not going to harp on the ugly side of this debate. I’m going to share proof that supporting human artists feels good! Check this out…
Back in my Twitter days, I followed a lot of artists. Periodically these artists would open up for commissions and if I found myself in a place where I could support them, I would order their take on my old profile picture. If that seems narcissistic, well, A) I kinda am and B) I originally tried “one person stealing french fries from another person” but that turned out to be too open-ended for what I wanted to be a simple commission (what characters? what’s the setting? what type of fries? steak or crinkle cut?). I received a number of these but I never knew what to do with them. Most are buried (again in my archived Twitter DMs), but here are a few favorites that I had saved in weird places.
They’re all great but that last one really cracked me up.
All to say, it’s very easy to take art for granted. And, personally, I have a very hard time balancing how much I like a piece of art and how much I’m willing to pay for it. But I do know this, there’s no piece of AI art I like enough to pay one cent for.
The Truth About AI (featuring Muppet Jerrold!) Read More »
Last year, over on Twitter, illustrator Lee Gatlin posted this sketch:
It made me think about a topic that’s been nagging at my mind in recent years. Namely, I have a worry that that young people’s visual literacy is dropping at an alarming rate. Why is this a concern to me? Let’s talk about CRT TVs.
Computer monitors (which essentially looked like CRT TVs) were a big staple in my early career as an illustrator. I worked mainly in kids educational media and was often called on to draw kids sitting around computers. These computers were big and bulky and hard to draw in an appealing way. I always kind of wished there was a better looking computer. And then came the candy colored iMacs.
That was an exciting moment. I actually remember the first time I drew one of those. They were fun, friendly, and gave me the hope that maybe we were entering a new golden age of design. Maybe we’d get back to things like this:
As an illustrator, you want to draw interestingly shaped and proportioned things. When you do this your imagination runs wild, and connections happen in the most unexpected ways. Could a TV double as a fish bowl? Maybe the TV is full of teeny tiny actors who put on shows just for you? Maybe the TV can be mixed with other types of electronic or mechanical gadgetry? The possibilities seemed endless.
The educator in me thinks a lot about how illustrations help shape how kids see the world. At their best, picture books are gateways to imagined worlds and a kid who reads picture books can learn to create their own imagined worlds, and then their own real worlds. The artist in me wants to draw worlds rich in design and in meaning. I hope that these worlds inspire kids to make their own, better worlds. I might draw a bubbly computer, but maybe the next generation will draw a bubbly computer with wings, that works off solar energy and delivers educational programming to kids all over the world. Endless possiblity!
But, sadly, it was only a year or so later that the first iPhone came out and very soon all tech was designed to be a black rectangle. TVs? Black rectangle. Computers? Black rectangle. Telephones? Black rectangle. Digital books? Black rectangle. Everything is a black rectangle these days and it depresses me.
One of the most magical things in the world to me when I was a kid was the toy store. San Francisco had a four story tall FAO Schwarz, San Mateo had the shorter (but wider!) Talbot’s Toyland. Both are gone. Do they make sense in books anymore? Would a young reader understand what a toy store is? 3 Magic Balls was one of my nephew’s favorite stories. I read it to him dozens of times.
When kids today grow up and become illustrators themselves, what will they draw? The toy aisle at Walmart?
Okay, I just said “kids today”. It’s totally possible I’m indulging in Boomer Doomerism—after all, Corduroy took place in a department store—maybe none of this is a big deal but I can’t help but think that it is.
Other things that are going extinct that makes our world poorer:
Bus drivers
Newspapers and paperboys
Paper maps
Colorful elders
And anything Richard Scarry drew.
One time my nephew and I were watching old cartoons and we saw an old Mickey Mouse short in which Mickey and Donald ate corn on the cob. They did it like all good cartoon characters did, thus:
My nephew said “Why are they eating like that?” I explained they were mimicking the action of an old typewriter. His reaction: “Oh.” It didn’t diminish his enjoyment of the gag that he didn’t know what a Remington was. And his curiosity was fired up for a moment so I dunno, maybe none of this is such a big deal. But, still, those damn black rectangles.
So… is there a point to any of this? So much of what I’m describing is out of our control. Apple isn’t going to suddenly make cartoonishly round iPhones again and Toys R Us has long ago declared bankruptcy. I guess what it comes down to is that the job of the children’s book illustrator has become more important than ever. Sounds dour and dire (and maybe self-aggrandizing) but it’s entirely possible picture books have become the best last stand against the death of imagination. So let us fill our books with the richest, most beautifully imagined worlds we can conjure. The fate of the world may depend on it.
“The Hungry Typewriter” or “A Dwindling Assortment of Visual Iconography” Read More »
