Listening to: Pangaea Girls (Magic Feeling) by Candy Claws
It’s taking me back to when I was listening to Cindy Lee on repeat and I’m digging it.
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Zine Monday: Zines for Kids
There’s a question I’ve wanted to tackle for a while but it’s one that’s going to take more time than I have this morning to figure out. So, I’m just going to throw down some thoughts and maybe something will come of it. In short, my question is this: is there such a thing as a picture book zine?
Zines, by definition and by legacy are usually for mature audiences. They were born of the punk rock music scene and tend to stay in the “alternative press” world and they are (or were) seldom created with a kid audience in mind. Often zines were text heavy and read as (punk) music reviews of personal manifestos. Still, though, you do find kid-friendly zines from time to time (and lately, more and more) and some actually work as picture books. Here are a few from my collection with the barest bit of commentary:
PICKLE by Alina Chau
PICKLE, I think, is more picture book than zine. In form, it’s absolutely a zine. But in production quality it’s a picture book. That’s due in no small part to Chau’s exquisite watercolor illustrations but also because this book was meant to accompany a companion app. If you remember the mid to late 2000s, apps were (as CD roms were in the 90s) poised to make books obsolete. This project, I think, was meant to bridge those media.
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE by Kristyna Baczynski
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE always stood out in my mind as almost a picture book. The story feels like such a classic “how a (thing) got its name” fable but it’s told in comic form (Baczynski is an excellent cartoonist) so maybe I should be thinking of it as a graphic novel. It’s short, though, so it’s maybe a minicomic.
DOG BREATH by Joe Maccarone
There’s an energy in Joe Maccarone’s DOG BREATH that reminds me of Marc Simont’s illustrations in THE STRAY DOG. I could see this as a picture book, probably published by Enchanted Lion.
A POCKET BOOK OF WITCHFOLK AND DEMONS by Nat Andrewson
Everything Natalie Andrewson makes is magic. And, lucky for us, she’s making a lot of things. This one’s definitely a zine, but it feels like something from the Nutshell Library. It’s kind of its own thing but its very close to a picture book.
THE HELENA SERIES by Michael Furler
The Helena comics by Michael Furler feel like something between TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE NOTHING and DIARY OF A WIMPY KID. I would call them… MG autobio comics. Not quite a picture book but really, really good.
LITTLE TADPOLE MAN by Steve Steiner
Charmingly bizarre and bizarrely charming, LITTLE TADPOLE MAN is like the kind of comic you’d get in the middle of the old Nickelodeon Magazine. I think this also falls in the graphic novel camp (and I think it could be really popular with upper elementary readers).
OUR HOME by Angela Poom
Not only is Angela Poon’s OUR HOME is a straight up picture book I think it’s a Caldecott-level picture book (Poon being Canadian notwithstanding). Wholly original in technique (at least in the US, I think Korea has a tradition of using photographs of handmade dioramas like this) OUR HOME is an intimate and warm story about a kid and their grandmother moving into a new home. I have to share more pictures of this one.
I think at this point, though, you don’t call them zines. You call them “mini books”. It’s a weird nebulous distinction between the two, but I think that makes the most sense. Then again, I’m not sure I like the diminutive prefix. Here’s another “mini book” that offers as much as any traditionally published picture book.
MY BROTHER THE DRAGON by Galen Goodwin Longstreth and Jonathan Hill
See, again I feel weird calling this a mini book. To be sure, it’s small (measures 6×6 inches), but it’s also a really fun and funny (and brilliantly illustrated) annoying sibling story. And maybe I don’t need to call it a mini book. Maybe it’s just me and my need for tidy labels that’s making me draw these arbitrary distinctions. After all, I bought MY BROTHER THE DRAGON at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland where it sat proudly and legitimately amongst many other picture books, including the similarly sized Mr. Men volumes.
IN CONLUSION
So, can zines be picture books? I guess? I think in form and content, yes, absolutely. In public perception? Probably not. I think the buying public still likes knowing that picture books are vetted, to some degree, by publishers, editors, librarians, reviewers (in that order) to be made sure they are good and safe for young readers. Zines, by their very nature, are independent works and come with no such guarantee (irrespective of whether a guarantee is even needed).
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What Does the Coyote Say?
You must have seen the “don’t buy stuff” bunny by now. If you haven’t, you’ll find it here. It’s a great call to action, an invitation to participate in the February 28th Economic Blackout, AND it’s just a really good graphic. I liked it enough that I wanted to make my own version. So, here’s the “Keep Don’t Buying Stuff” coyote.
After I drew it, I found out there’s a series of economic blackouts planned which is awesome because a) these are good things and b) I want to make more animal posters. Look for the “Get Bent, Bezos” elephant coming next week.
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Appreciation: Everything Jerry Pinkney Did, Ever
When Julie Danielson and I were researching the for-grown-ups version of the James Marshall, she coordinated a call for us with Sheldon Fogelman, Jim’s agent. We hopped on a conference line and had a casual chat about his memories of working with Jim. If we had any secret hopes for good dirt (I did have those hopes), they were quickly dashed because “Shelly” (as he asked us to call him) spoke with nothing but the highest respect for his old client. At one point Shelly said “Jim was one of the two nicest people I ever worked with in publishing.” I asked him who the other was and he said “Jerry Pinkney”.
I’m on the road right now and passing some time at a public library. I was hoping to read Pinkney’ autobiography JUST JERRY but it’s checked out. In place of that, I’m reacquainting myself with his various takes on Aesop’s fables and am (as always) amazed at how much the warmth and humor in these just jump off the page. My feeling is that Shelly must have been playing it cool, there’s no way the person who drew and painted this wasn’t one of the kindest humans on the planet.
I was thinking of doing a post about the fable collections of done by Arnold Lobel and James Marshall in sort of a head-to-head “who did it better” type thing. (For some reason I always think of Aesop in the spring). Not to spoil things, but I see now I’m going to have to widen the bracket. ‘Til March, my friends.
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Uri Shulevitz 1935-2025
For some reason, whenever I think of picture books from my early school days it’s always this one that pops into my mind.
This is despite the fact that to this day I haven’t read it (grimace face). That’s not intended as any kind of insult, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to compete with Sylvester and the Magic Pebble or Herman the Helper, but the fact is FOOL OF THE WORLD is just one of “those” books. Landmark.
A Shulevitz book I have read, for years off and on, is his Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books. I used to get it from the Vancouver Public Library and flip through it, mostly enjoying it for all the illustrations (from popular artists of the time, including Steig and Aruego, as well as Shulevitz himself). These days, I like it for two main reasons: first, it’s full of really good advice on how to be a mindful creator.
Draw Boldly: Think, meditate, or debate in your mind as long as you wish on what and how you are going to draw, but once you take the plunge, draw resolutely.
I really like that line. He also has a good one about picture books being like theater. A common enough point of view, but Shulevitz says it in his simultaneously eloquent and matter-of-fact way.
Second, WRITING WITH PICTURES is a product of the era of when illustrators were ‘tradespeople’. There’s a big section on color separations and how to prepare your art for maximum fidelity. So much of this process is antiquated, but the book reminds us how much science and math used to go into art making. It’s a great historical record.
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Adobe Alternates
In follow-up to my process post, here’s a list (downloaded from Twitter a few years back) of Adobe software alternatives separated by category (photo, vector, prepress, layout, animation etc). I can vouch for Clip Studio Paint (in place of Photoshop), Affinity Publisher (in place of InDesign), and Olive (in place of Premiere). Making the switch to Clip Studio Paint and Affinity Publisher was pretty smooth. Olive had a much steeper learning curve but how often do you get to learn new things?
Zine Monday: Joonbug’s BEANBOY
As you probably noticed from the hashtag on this post (#ZineMonday), I’ve been taking a day a week to share some of my favorite and most recently acquired zines. This blog is mostly about picture books but really it’s about my inspirations. I find a lot of inspiration in zines but I have to say, they’re not always the most kid-friendly. This week’s zine* in particular is intended for mature audiences.
What I’m finding inspiring here is the technique. It’s risograph but it looks like something between a watercolor and marker.
The line drawings underneath this color remind me very strongly of Joann Sfar’s work. There’s a raw energy in this comic that I really admire.
Beanboy’s original’s story feels like a Creole folktale viewed through a sort of 1920s comic strip lens. I don’t know enough about the main character or the artist’s background to know how much of the story is drawn from life but the fact the book is dedicated to the artist’s mother makes it feels like the subject and themes are all very personal.
The book is small, measuring something like 2.5 by 4 inches, which seems to suit it perfectly.
Buy it at Silver Sprocket.
*I call it a zine but maybe it’s more of a mini-book? I’m not sure how you would differentiate the two except maybe by price.
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Process and Processing
Alright. You’ve met Emotional Jerrold. Get ready to meet Angry Jerrold.
You ready?
JIM! received a review in which my illustrations were described as “digitally enhanced ink and watercolor artwork” and when I tell you I bristled at that wording…
Yeah. I was livid. To me, the implication is that I passed an AI filter over my drawings and (deep breath, Jerrold) even typing that now brings a heavy, throbbing pressure to my neck. I can actually feel my blood pressure rising and in general I have been in a terribly distracted state since I read this review two weeks ago. I want to deal with my anger, so with your indulgence, I’m going to try and figure out just why it is I am as upset as I am. Let’s dig in!
To begin, I will own the fact that to some degree I brought this on myself. Included on the copyright page of JIM! is an art note. It reads:
The illustrations for this book were drawn with a Winsor and Newton Series 7 Kolinsky sable brush and colored with Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. Digital enhancements were added in Procreate with the Adilson Farias watercolor brush set.
First of all, why include this? Well, it’s a convention I enjoy seeing in picture books. As a note, it’s small and unobtrusive enough that I don’t think it spoils any storytelling magic, but to an art nerd this little extra information adds a level of appreciation otherwise missing. In writing mine, I wanted to let the reader in on what I felt are the most important parts of my process. It’s simplified, of course, but a full description of these steps would be:
INK
I think my greatest strength in illustration is my inking. I’m confident in my linework and have worked hard at becoming so. Here’s a piece from the first chapter of JIM! where Harry Allard is visiting Jim’s home to drop off his manuscript for Miss Nelson Is Missing!
One of the greatest challenges in inking is finding that place where you are using your rough sketch as a guide without deliberately tracing each and every pencil line—at its best, the ink drawing should have a life of its own. Sometimes, there will be a part of the drawing that didn’t quite, to my eye, meet that criteria. In those cases, I’d ink that piece on its own, cut it out and paste it to the illustration (you can see this with Jim’s head and with Harry’s entire body). It’s important to me to get the ink as final as possible, which is to say, I don’t like cutting and pasting on the computer. It really bothers me, for some reason, to have two “final” versions of an ink drawing. It’s silly and it’s immaterial, but I’ve always felt that way.
COLOR
I wish I had the confidence in watercolors that I do in inking, but I don’t. I am too hesitant (and, paradoxically, too impatient) to be a good watercolorist. I admire people who watercolor directly over their ink drawings. I don’t trust I won’t ruin the ink drawing so I trace the lines onto watercolor paper and then color it there.
A saving grace for this project was my late-in-the-game discovery of Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. Watercolors, used properly, require a painting, drying, overpainting, drying, overpainting again technique that brings out the luminosity of the media. BUT, as I mentioned above, I’m way too impatient for all that. Gansai Tambi watercolors are somewhat like gouache (in that they are much thicker and don’t require so much layering), but they retain that watercolor “look”. They felt, to me, to be the perfect media to have a painterly quality but be reminiscent of Marshall’s own watercolor work.
As a side note, Marshall himself usually colored directly onto his ink drawings, though not always. For Nosey Mrs. Rat, he colored the back sides of his ink drawings. A very peculiar technique, unique, I think, to this one book. I’ll talk more about this on a future post.
MERGING THE TWO (not mentioned)
A step I left out of my pub-page art process blurb was “The ink and color drawings were scanned and composited in Clip Studio Paint”. I actually wanted to include this to throw a shout out to Clip Studio Paint, an app I adopted after abandoning PhotoShop and all Adobe products after Adobe’s acceptance of AI scraping. I didn’t list it, though, because it felt a bit too obvious (also, would I start listing every single step? drawing scanned with an Epson Expression 13000XL scanner, files uploaded to Drive etc etc etc). Anyway, here’s how they look merged:
I will say that Clip Studio Paint did come in clutch, though, because I was working with a lot of layers. If you notice that Jim and Harry aren’t colored (besides having a slight indications of shadows), that’s because I colored them separately. Elements that required special attention (eg. color consistency in the main characters) were usually colored on their own pieces of paper, scanned and imported individually into their own layers.
STARTING OVER (also not mentioned)
There’s a trick employed in animation where scenes are animated out of sequence so that if the art style morphs over time, that distortion becomes less apparent. It’s sort of insurance against having the main character slowly grow a foot taller between the start and the end of the movie. The scene of Harry at Jim’s door was the second illustration I did for JIM! and towards the end of the project, it became apparent I needed to redraw it. I hesitate to share it here because I want to keep it a surprise for the book’s release. However, I’m mentioning the step because it’s relevant to the next point.
DIGITAL (shudder) ENHANCEMENTS
So, another—and the real—reason I didn’t include Clip Studio Paint in my art process is that as a step, it doesn’t really add anything new to the piece. It’s a merging of two existing drawings and if there was any change (say a clean up of misaligned edges), it would be subtractive. The reason I did include Procreate as a step was because new elements were added to the drawing at this stage. For example:
That single sheet of falling loose leaf paper… I drew the lines on it in Procreate. There are small elements like this on many (probably all) the illustrations in the book. It might be a spot of blush on a character’s cheek, a shadow under a vase holding a single tulip, or a shine on a medallion. I think I could have called these embellishments instead of enhancements but I do think they add to the art and to the story. In the case of this note, it adds a detail that hints to Harry’s eccentric energy and gives a nod to Harry’s self-published fourth Miss Nelson book (I’m paraphrasing a line from that story, not that anyone would know).
As a step, this provides a set of unifying details across all the illustrations (see the above point about consistency). Could I have drawn these lines on paper and scanned them in? Sure. The writing on that page is. But, fact is, doing it directly in Procreate allowed for some of that spontaneity I described in the first step (eg. not tracing).
PROCESSING ALL OF THIS
Well, the throbbing in my neck has gone down (a little) and it’s apparent to me now why that “digital enhancements” hit me as hard as it did. It’s the erasure of the human element. When you’re in the process of making a book, or at least when I was in the process of making JIM!, you might not be fully aware of just how much work you’re putting into each and every drawing. At the same time, I’m not trying to paint myself (on several separate sheets of cold-press paper with Japanese watercolors) as a tortured artist. Each of these steps, even the most tedious, was a joy and there’s no point subjecting even the most steadfast art lover to a process note that reads:
The illustrations for this book were drawn with a Winsor and Newton Series 7 Kolinsky sable brush and traced with pencil onto three to four separate sheets of Strathmore cold press watercolor paper where they were colored with with Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. The ink and color pieces were composited together in Clip Studio Paint, where any misaligned edges were cleaned up. Finer details and various highlights were drawn in Procreate with the Adilson Farias watercolor brush set. The creator took a lot of naps but nonetheless suffered two crises of confidence where he became bed bound for a total of four hours which may not sound like a lot but is actually a big deal to him. Oh yeah, he also had Covid at one point.
Although, I will admit, that might have been funny.
It’s also clear to me that much of my anger is fueled by the world right now and how the world’s richest, most obnoxious tech bros are constantly in my face insisting I employ AI assistance in every aspect of my life even as they dismantle everything I love, from National Parks to libraries. I’ve spoken out about rejecting AI art and I’ve lamented the disappearance of analog ephemera so to have “digital enhancements” attached to any part of my work, however it was intended, just felt like a particular kick in the teeth.
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