A couple of weeks ago Jess Hannigan and I were talking about what type of preorder goodies we were going to include with our upcoming releases. I had been thinking of doing a limited edition art print for JIM! Jess was thinking of doing (and did do) stickers for THE BEAR OUT THERE. As happens when I talk to immensely talented people, I got jealous and decided I wanted to do something like stickers (but not stickers because Jess, that immensely talented rat, has that market cornered). This got us talking about our favorite freebies to receive as kids. At the top of the list, naturally, stickers. In second place… those folded posters you used to get in the middle of your favorite magazines.
For some of you, this might have been the Teen Beat centerfold of Jonathan Taylor Thomas or maybe the gray wolf or snowy owl fold out from the center of Ranger Rick. For me, it was the inserts in Muppet Magazine (side note: when I was a kid living in Sumatra, I had a subscription to Muppet Magazine and even drew a picture of the Muppets for their monthly art contest but, sadly, never sent it in). Every issue came with a poster in the center spread. The Muppet Magazine posters were Muppet parodies of famous albums of the day (I remember most vividly a parody of John Cougar Mellencamp’s SCARECROW with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as “John Cougar Melonhead”). I was always too chicken to remove the posters from the magazines (what if I tore the paper on the staples?!) but I always liked the idea of decorating my room with them. Jess enthusiasm and encouragement and this fond memory led to the brainwave that is (drumroll, please…)
YES! Jim! is now available for preorder with one of three James Marshall-themed parody posters exclusively from Mr. Mopps. One of three? Heck, yeah, one of three! Check them out!
Your first option is my take on the infamously dim-witted Stupid family. As my book takes place in an all animal universe, I did the only logical thing:
The second design comes from a rarer Marshall title, the out of print BONZINI! THE TATTOOED MAN.
And last, but certainly not least, is my take on what is undoubtedly Marshall’s most famous story, the one that gave substitute teachers everywhere a bad name, MISS NELSON IS MISSING!
Each of these posters measure 11×17 inches and will be folded twice to fit into your book. I’m very happy with the designs and I hope your young James Marshall likes them enough to tape or thumbtack them on to their walls.
But wait! There’s more!
I can also sign the books (if you so wish) and will personalize your copy in (almost) any way your heart desires. Just leave a note on the order page with your preferred witticism, or leave it to chance. We like to live dangerously around here.
A big thank you to Mr. Mopps’ for hosting this pre-order campaign.
Alright! That’s it. And with that, I think the JIM! pre-launch festivities have officially begun.
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.
from NOSEY MRS. RAT, photo from UCONN archives
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 Idid 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.
As I immerse myself in the Sendak world this week, I thought it would be fun to try out some of Sendak’s fountains of inspiration:
William Blake
Mozart
Emily Dickinson
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
And if I have the time, I’ll also check out Schubert, Hugo Wolfe, Palmer, Proust, Eliot, Middlemarch, Randolph Caldecott, George Cruikshank, Ludwig Richter, Wilhelm Busch, A. B. Frost, Edward Windsor Kemble, Ernst Kreidolf, Hans Fischer, André François, Watteau, Goya, Winslow Homer, Mahler, Beethoven, Wolf, Wagner, Verdi, Walt Disney, James, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, or Melville
This brought to mind my own attempt at the same with James Marshall. Not so much in the literary (goodness knows I am not a reader) but in music. I had the idea that maybe if I played Marshall’s favorite composers, the air in my studio would be imbued with an ethereal Marshall-ness that would manifest itself in the art I was making. A romantic thought, but in practice… not so great. Marshall was a classical music egghead (I say this with respect as a classical music geek), and his favorite of favorites, Shostakovich, just didn’t do it for me. Marshall’s tastes tended towards the grander, heavier symphonies and I just couldn’t get into those while drawing a cartoon fox motoring a speedboat up a river. I did, however, include this little detail in one of my illustrations:
So, what music got me through this project? Let’s start with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
If you remember this post, there was a time, almost exactly a year ago, where I was feeling haunted by images coming out of Gaza. There was something in Storm that helped me find a place for my feelings of despair, and allowed me move ahead with the first final illustrations I did for JIM! In fact, I would turn to Godspeed again and again over the course of JIM! and I think it’s fair to say Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven got me through the first half of this project.
There were times when my feelings of despair turned into anger, and in those moments I sought help from Bill Evans.
Speaking of “feelings in the ether” and all that sort of thing, it was important to me that the primary feeling surrounding JIM! was love. Peace Piece always managed to return me to a calmer place where I could check in with myself and see if I was meeting my goals.
The other feeling I wanted, and this is probably obvious, was joy. For that, I turned to the theme from the George and Martha cartoon, Perfidia, as performed by the Mambo All Stars.
The comment section to the above tells you a lot about how fondly Marshall properties are remembered.
Granted, those comments are about the George and Martha cartoon (produced after Marshall’s death) but they put me in mind of this notion of legacy, and what I hoped to accomplish with JIM! Somewhere during all this, my family went to a Belle & Sebastian concert. They played If She Wants Me and the line “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy” hit hard.
I would call If She Wants Me the anthem of the middle half of the project. I had found my stride and this song had the right mix of hope and purpose. The second half of the chorus goes: On second thoughts I’d rather hang around and be there with my best friend if she wants me.
Okay, we need to switch gears. So far everything has been loaded with meaning and intention. This next choice is a bit more lighthearted. There’s a scene in JIM! where Jim is signing books at a bookstore sometime, I imagine, in the late 70s/early 80s. I wanted to transport myself back to that era and I figured the best way was with muzak:
A lot of my late-night sessions were set to the soothing sounds of Ethiopian jazz:
While I usually prefer to curate my social media feeds by hand, I tend to let YouTube’s algorithm recommend (or auto play) my playlists. I was rewarded late last summer with and introduction me to Diamond Jubilee:
I had never heard of Cindy Lee but I became obsessed with this album and had it on repeat for probably the last third of JIM! Besides enjoying the music, I was inspired by Cindy Lee who released her album only on YouTube and who’s website is hosted on geocities. Be still, my old-internet lovin’ heart. There was something about the artistry of Cindy Lee’s project that kept me wanting to keep JIM! as authentic as possible. Here’s another easter egg from inside my book:
“To thine own self be true”
I’ll end by returning to classical music to tell you the one piece that did play a part in JIM! This was for the final chapter:
Clair de Lune accompanied the hospital scenes. I won’t say any more about that until after the book comes out. At which point you can tell me if I missed the mark entirely.
Late last year I asked Betsy Bird and Travis Jonker if they would like to do a joint cover reveal on their respective blogs over on the School Library Journal website. Heroes of children’s literature that they are, they agreed. Thanksgiving came and went, as did Christmas, then New Years, and then this morning…
The cover was revealed on Fuse Eight! This is, technically, a “spotlight” as the cover was already available to be viewed online at various retail sites. The Fuse Eight spotlight comes with an interview, nine questions that I had a lot of fun answering. I hope you take time to read it, Betsy’s sharply focused question anchor this project and sets the stage for JIM! perfectly.
JIM! cover
Travis Jonker did me the honor of featuring the case (what you find under a dust jacket) on his blog, 100 Scope Notes. In this case, the case reveal was indeed a true reveal as this illustration isn’t shown in any online retail gallery. Case covers tend to be a surprise and not everyone thinks to look for them. Travis gives attention to this sometimes hidden, often underappreciated art form in his end-of-year award celebration “The Undies“. I’ll look forward to seeing where JIM! lands in 2025’s contest.
JIM! case
But I need to come clean about something. I lied to you, my dear friend. Neither of these reveals, nor those at retails sites, were the true debut of the cover. That happened on Halloween of last year. You see, our house gets about 1,200 trick or treaters and I had the idea that this could be an excellent grassroots marketing opportunity. I mean, how often do you have a guaranteed 2,400 young reader aged eyeballs passing by your front door? At the last minute (almost exactly an hour before our first trick or treaters would usually arrive) I covered a sheet of plywood in paper and began painting.
left: in backyard, in progress || right: in front yard, almost complete
You’ll see a small blank spot above the “scan to learn more” sign. I wasn’t sure what to write. I didn’t want to do the hard sell, that didn’t feel right. Then it hit me:
High five!
It was a celebration more than a sales pitch and it was centered for kids, exactly where I’m most comfortable. Speaking of comfortable… the “unicorn” in question is me, I bought a fuzzy unicorn onesie at a garage sale in the summer and decided to wear it as my Halloween costume.
Saddest or most awesome author debut of the year? You decide.
So there you go. I hope you can forgive me for the trickery.
Once more, a big thank you to Betsy and Travis for featuring me on their blogs and making the cover reveal available to the broader public. I am very grateful to them and to everyone sharing their enthusiasm for the book. Exciting times ahead!
Today, the 13th, marks the 31st anniversary of James Marshall’s passing. And it falls on a Friday. Feels like the perfect time for a trio of UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES.
Don’t blame me if you get goosebumps.
STORY NUMBER ONE: THE MYSTERIOUS VOICE
It was late 1999 or early 2000. My work in children’s education media was taking off but I wondered if I wouldn’t want to direct myself to picture books instead. In a rare case of taking my destiny into my own hands, I dove deep into my local public library and looked for the books that resonated most strongly with me. As it turned out, it was the Marshall early readers. This surprised me. As a kid my favorite books were by William Steig and Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey). I remembered many early readers (of those Frog and Toad rated highly, Amelia Bedelia and Encyclopedia Brown were there, too) but I couldn’t recall reading any Marshall in school. I knew his work best from much later when I used to read MISS NELSON IS MISSING! to my nephew and niece.
Excited by this new discovery, I looked up James Marshall and found a short biography that told me he died in 1992 of a brain tumor. Something inside me said “No, he didn’t.” I’m not sure where the voice came from. I remember it as a strong gut feeling, but I didn’t do anything with it. I would periodically search “James Marshall” on google (when it became a thing), but I never learned any new information.
It wasn’t until November of 2010 that I stumbled across a blog called “Wandervogel” and found a post by author Dan Dailey where he describes coming across across the cemetery in Marathon, Texas where James Marshall is buried. He eventually meets James Marshall’s mother and sister and learns that Jim had died of AIDS. It was the first time I had confirmation of something I realized I had already known.
The spooky question: What was that voice?
*****
*****
STORY NUMBER TWO: THE UBIQUITOUS FACE
There’s a character that appears in many of James Marshall’s books. It’s this guy here:
He appears often enough that I’ve always figured it must be a self-insert, a caricature of James Marshall himself. Never having seen an author photo, I decided that James Marshall must have looked like television actor, Gerald “Major Dad” McRaney (I’m a child of the eighties and I watched a *lot* of TV). It made sense to me because if this:
equaled this:
Then it stood to reason that this:
Would equal this:
Many years later I would see my first photograph of James Marshall (again, on the Wandervogel blog) and I realized I wasn’t far off.
The Inexplicable Inquiry: How did I know???
*****
*****
STORY NUMBER THREE: THE TIME-TRAVELLING DONUT SALESMAN
Speaking of uncanny resemblances… look carefully at the televisions in the appliance store window.
The Confounding Conundrum: WHAT AM I DOING IN CRAZY TIMES AT DANCE CLASS????
*****
*****
Okay, so probably only one of those stories is a mystery. Story 2 could be a result of Marshall and I sharing a certain visual literacy, Story 3 is a straight up con (CONfounding CONundrum, indeed) but Story 1… I dunno. It could be intuition. It most likely was. But on the eve of Spooky Season I always wonder if it was something more.
I was tagged on Twitter the other day in connection to the Harry Allard essay I wrote as part of my Marshall Fellowship. That tag was a first, in fact, (if you don’t count me retweeting myself from my alt accounts) it doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention on the bird app. Twitter does suppress external links, but even if it didn’t, I just don’t know if people are in the habit of going to blogs anymore (he says as he spends another afternoon updating this one). But heed my word, reader: if you’re not visiting blogs, you’re missing out! There is a treasure trove of Jim related materials over at the UCONN Archives and Special Collections blog.
For day four of James Marshall’s birthday week, here’s a roundup of the Marshall Fellow articles.
The process of researching involves looking through the digital catalogue with whatever search terms are relevant to your research. For me it was “James Marshall Miss Nelson Viola Swamp”. The database returns a list of boxes with their relevant contents. You fill out a form requesting one of these boxes (in this case #5), hand it to an archivist who retrieves it from storage and brings it to the reading room. Going into this I didn’t know if I was going to be required to wear white gloves as I went through the materials. I wasn’t, but I did find out pens are not allowed (you can only take notes in pencil). I wasn’t worried that I was going to spoil any originals, but I did feel a great sense of anticipation before opening the box. When you open it, this is what you find:
The number of materials presented to you can be overwhelming, but luckily I had an area of interest (Marshall’s collaborations with Harry Allard) to help me stay focused. I also told myself to take snack and brain breaks, I didn’t want to find myself with a massive headache halfway through my research.
Spoiler: I did, in fact, take picture of everything.
I definitely overdid it on pictures, but figuring this was a once in a lifetime situation, I wanted to be able to have as many resources available to me as I worked on my UCONN paper and Marshall’s biography (that’s the “homework” I’m referring to). Looking back, I should have traded a couple hours at the camera for the chance to get another box from the archives. In some ways they’re like boxes of chocolate, you never know what you’re going to get.
As I mentioned, the boxes are catalogued by their contents. The archivists, as they catalogue the materials, list every keyword that might be of relevance to a researcher. In this case my search for “Viola Swamp” returned Box 13 which held Marshall’s work on CINDERELLA (in some of the sketches one of the stepsisters was drawn as Viola Swamp). This wasn’t relevant to my research but the discovery was a happy accident, I gained a new appreciation for Marshall’s illustration with this diversion.
I was slow to appreciate Marshall’s illustrations. I think there’s often a crudeness to how he handles perspective and it can be hard for me to tell what is purposeful and what is accidental. Seeing the originals for CINDERELLA convinced me that his choices are deliberate. I’m coming to understand his drawings more and more.
On the other hand, his storytelling and processes as a writer are clear. I feel like I know exactly what he’s going for when he builds a story and I can almost track his choices through his manuscripts. I see some of the same in my work. Not just in how we work, but in how we see our work. I’ll never know how much alike we are, but if you’re going to compare yourself to anyone, why not one of the greats?
THE MELTED REFRIDGERATOR is a hefty (just look at the picture) autobiography by Marshall’s landlord-turned-friend, Francelia Butler. I scanned through this huge stack of papers for anything relevant to Marshall. There was a short bit that hints at Marshall’s sexuality. While known to be gay (at least to friends and colleagues), Marshall being a gay creator didn’t appear in any of the materials I looked at.
The Francelia Butler box came with a whole bunch of personal correspondences. She ran a series of “kiddie lit” lectures at the university and there were letters from some creators (Sendak) thanking her for the opportunity to speak and others (Seuss) sending their regrets that couldn’t participate. Each of these notes were handwritten and some had doodles. They were wonderful to see but it left me wondering:
Back to my research. I had almost exhausted the Miss Nelson related materials so I wanted to be sure to check out the audio and video part of the collection. In that I found a video of Marshall talking about working with Harry Allard.
This discovery wrapped up my feelings about the Marshall/Allard collaborations so I felt a bit more free to indulge myself in looking at other materials. I went to something Julie Danielson had insisted was not to be missed, the box of Marshall materials donated by Maurice Sendak. It held a very funny back and forth between the two friends where they exchanged some catty remarks about a fellow picture book creator.
It also held two THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT dummies which (as I clumsily attempted to write in my journal) took my breath away. That was followed by a visit with Bill Gray, Jim’s surviving partner.
I did spend some time outside the library. Besides visiting Bill, I went for a hike, went for a run, and had dinner with an aggressively friendly roommate.
It was a whirlwind of a trip and things were wrapping up quickly.
That’s the broadest view of my research trip. In all, I had 24 pages of notes and something like (no joke) 1,000 photographs. Wanting to preserve my memories as best I could, I took my last half hour of the trip to capture the moments that happened at the end of the day on Friday.
It was definitely an experience to appreciate. I’m forever grateful to Kristin Eshelman and Melissa Watterworth Batt for the opportunity. It’s worth mentioning that the library and its materials are available to researchers with or without the Fellowship. You don’t even need to make the trip in person, there’s a form for requesting digital scans of any material in the collection (it costs something, but not a lot). Still, though, there’s nothing like holding an original work by a creator you admire in your hands.
