Owl-a-Minx is indispensable

It's Owl-a-Minx time again on the shores of the Blue Lagoon.

What is Owl-a-Minx? Owl-a-Minx is indispensable!  Not to be confused with Owl-a-Winx.

The difficulty in making a choice!

Here's an example of how many variations on a page element an artist might try. Of course digital art makes changes easy... but the flip-side of that freedom is the difficulty in making a choice!

It's fun to watch the movie and see the images change... and picking a new 'favorite'.

A pastoral scene from a new book...

Here's a scene from a new book... lots of nice pastoral scenes.
I guess it'll be released some day... don't know when.
Artists are always the last to know anything.

I suppose when you're a ghost it doesn't matter much... lol!
I think it'd be nice to drift through life like a ghost, don't you?

I quite enjoyed painting it in real paints on real paper.  A nice challenge.  It was finished off with photoshop, of course.

A super school visit...

I had a marvelous time doing a school visit at the Norman Rockwell School in Redmond.  It was lots of fun being able to run my movies and slideshows off the giant 'smart screen' bulletin boards they have.

I got lost trying to find the location.  I finally found a gas station, where no one had ever heard of the school or the street and no one even knew where the main arterial was.  And they all live there!

But the classes were a big hit.  So much fun!  I made up about 8 movies and 3 Powerpoint slideshows, one of them with a geography quiz about Washington State - from my new book about Washington.

It's funny how each class is like a different audience... laughing at different spots in the 'material.

One of my teachers at the Parsons School of Design was Peter Rockwell... (or maybe it was David).  He was a classy old duffer with a pork pie hat and a quiet studious manner.  I think it could be fun to be a teacher.  It certainly is a nice change of pace to get out of the studio.

Long live Mickey & Max!

Long live Mickey & Max!

I got to spend my only quarter at Parsons in Maurice's class. Looking back, it was probably the high point of my little career as a book illustrator, in the sense that I got to be amongst giants.

I remember being so nervous showing Maurice my work.  I showed him my two dummy books I'd done to date. He liked the one about Dr. Dabbleduck, the hamster who wanted everyone to eat pancakes three times a day. I was nervous... he said, "Relax, I'm just an old man with a beard".  I remember being struck by the 'rich' language... well salted with choice explicatives. 

Another time the class got a sneak peek at the pencil dummy to 'Outside Over There'. It was exquisite.  I said 'It looks like an opera!', which Maurice really liked, since he was so obsessed with Mozart and music.  It was raining cats & dogs so I lent Maurice a plastic bag to safeguard the original pencils (which are probably worth about $300k no doubt). All his art goes directly to the Rosenburg museum in Philadelphia.

Maurice was thrilled when I told him I was dropping out of art school (already after just 1 quarter) and had already started freelancing. He was always very helpful giving his students names of editors to call and generally helping with real life problems that none of the other teachers ever bothered with. 

My regret is that I had a mid-term final on the one day Maurice invited some of us to lunch. I should have gone.
Maurice certainly made my life a richer one... in spirit.

I blogged about it all years ago...