Tub Toys: "Sneaky Snark"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the last of 5 tub toy woodcuts I made this week. The others were "Splashy Crab", "Sated Gator", "Sea Star Veneer", and "Gleeful Turtle".

Goodnight, pinky. 

Tub Toys: "Gleeful Turtle"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the fourth of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. The first three were "Splashy Crab", "Sated Gator", and "Sea Star Veneer". I knew I wanted to write some brief text in cursive before I knew what I wanted to write. I decided on "rip and tear" because I imagined the turtle was ripping open the wrapping on a present, and I also liked the contrast of the subtle violence of the words with the overall soft and cheerful tone of the image. 

Tub Toys: "Sea Star Veneer"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the third of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. The first two were "Splashy Crab" and "Sated Gator." Those two and the two that are coming are more cartoonish characters, where this tub toy was more of a flat, abstracted representation of the actual animal, thus I turned it into a sort of glib overlay. 

Tub Toys: "Sated Gator"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here the second of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. "Splashy Crab" was the first and is posted here. 

Tub Toys: "Splashy Crab"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

I made five small woodcut stamps of tub toys representing some other water-dwelling species that were also alive during the time of the ammonites and dinosaurs. They will ultimately end up in the background in the Nautilus and Ammonite book project, but for this week I'm having some fun adding watercolor to some of the proofs.

Another influencing factor here is that I'm currently teaching a "Chemistry of Watercolor Paints" unit to 8th graders through SNAP, and why should my students have all the fun?

Process (The Nautilus and the Ammonite)

I haven't typically shown much documentation of studio process on this blog in the past. I usually like to keep that to myself because I worry it will color how people view the final work. Generally I also feel that my experience as the maker of the work should be profoundly different from the audience's experience of it.

I'm sharing some process today because I thought it might be interesting to some readers and because I'm still very much in the middle of working something out that I've been at for a while (and then took a very long break from) and it helps me think to either say things out loud to someone else or in this case type them.

This will eventually (possibly) be the first double-page spread of The Nautilus and the Ammonite picture book project. The following text would be included:

The nautilus and the ammonite

     Were launched in friendly strife, 

Each sent to float in its tiny boat

     On the wide, wide sea of life. 

The idea here is that the title characters are somewhat infantile (thus the tub toys and kids' drawings) and perhaps meeting each other for the first time. This is just me working on the backdrop. I'm figuring out the placement of the background figures in the scenery; they are currently printed in black on acetate sheets so I can play around with placement. When I go to actually print them on the paper they'll be printed in a muted, blue hue that pushes them back.

I was originally going to go with this simple blue color backdrop with a sandy blue ground and the handful of figures printed in blue. I was thinking that less is more, and that the monochromic field and empty spaces would be more suggestive of a world that is at this point smaller for the main characters. I still might go that way, but I'm also toying with the idea of more layers. In other words, I'm deliberately attempting to rely more on my intuition. In other, other words, I don't  really know (at least consciously) what I'm doing.

This is not how I made my last picture book, Owl and Cat In Love. For that I first created a whole storyboard that I stuck to with the exception of a few minor details here and there. For this book I have instead some sketches of the characters in a sketchbook where I first started exploring the idea of taking on this project, and last year I made a dummy book with some vague sketches inside that serves as a storyboard, but it is really only the scaffolding. I have screenprinted backdrops and I've printed all the shells of the characters to collage onto those screenprints, and I've begun to make woodcuts for scenery details such as the linocut dinos and bath toys pictured here. But I'm not sure if there will be other collage or painted elements, and I still haven't decided if I'm going to hand write the text, collage it, or leave spaces for it to be added by a graphic designer.

Now I must decide whether or not to publish this post. Well, if you're reading it, I decided to hit "Publish." In which case, now I feel uncomfortably exposed, like the Wizard of Oz when his curtain gets pulled back. But it's good to get out of one's comfort zone. (And most likely only a handful of the few people who see this post will bother reading it.)

Sketchbook Sunday: Birds at the Wagner

I first discovered the Wagner Free Institute for Science in 2005 while in grad school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I took an elective Animal Drawing and we went on a field trip to the Wagner to draw from its collection of skeletons, fossils, taxidermy, and other specimens. After graduate school I continued taking trips to the Wagner to draw, but I ceased the practice as my teaching work piled up and then I had my children.

Today I work for the Wagner as an artist/scientist-in-residence with their SNAP (Science Nature and Art in Philadelphia) program, which uses art to enrich the science curriculum of middle schoolers. In between meetings and visiting public school classrooms I have had the time and opportunity to go back to the Wagner and resume drawing from the collection. It's a joy to return to this practice and I hope to make it a habit.