I had a great time at TCAF this year! When it was all over at 5:00 Sunday afternoon, a big round of applause went up on our floor. This is the first time I can remember that this happened, and for some reason I got a little verklempt. I guess the magnitude of the event really hit me. Scores of people have spent months of mostly donated time organizing this incredibly massive celebration of art and writing. Many more flew in from all over the world to attend an increasingly beloved Festival. Hooray for comics! And warmest thanks to Peter and Chris, all the folks from The Beguiling, and the dozens of crazed and obsessed volunteers who make everything run so smoothly.
One of the highlights of the Festival for me was the presentation I did with the smart-as-a-pin, very funny designer-writer-editor Chip Kidd. We had the pleasure of announcing a book we’ll be working on together:
The deal with Pantheon is pretty exciting, thanks in part to my faboo new agent Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. I also got the fantastic news last March that the grant I applied for from The Creative Writing program of the Canada Council was successful. I’m really and truly grateful to the Council for this; being an illustrator is not easy these days. Times have been pretty upsy downsy the last few years – part of the reason I’ve had the time to think about and develop this project.
Anyhow, I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me – better get to it!
I was so incredibly honoured to be asked by Chris and Peter from The Beguiling to create a poster for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival’s 10th anniversary year! (I lobbied pretty hard too, I should add.) I certainly festered and obsessed myself into a tizzy over this baby. This, the final version, was scanned and assembled by the ever-patient Landon Whittaker of Reactor from three separate pieces of art. I wanted it crammed with detail and our scanner can only fit one 11 x 17 piece of art at a time.
This earlier version was done in a bit of a hurry for a booklet produced for The Beguiling’s trip to Japan last November. Because of the time constraint I couldn’t quite get it as stylized as what I saw in my head. This one’s made up of six different pieces and I think the joins ended up being a little too obvious. Eventually I decided I wanted to try a slightly less literal iteration in a more limited palette and started over in January of this year.
Here is the original sketch,
and here is a selection of the dozens of sketches and colour trials I went through to put all this together, laid out on my living room floor.
I’ll have a table at TCAF this year, as in the past. Also, I’ll be signing posters and doing a presentation with the marvelous Chip Kidd on Saturday afternoon. Also, I’m part of a show with the amazing Gengoroh Tagame that evening and on Sunday I’ll be part of a panel looking at fashion in comics. For more information and schedule, go to:
http://torontocomics.com/
So excited for the Festival this year, hope to see you there!!!
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Last week me and my fella celebrated 11 years of martial, I mean marital bliss! (“Martial bliss” was a joke of my old friend Paul’s father George Baker. Oh, and we’re not married) So-so dinner at Gabardine on Bay Street mitigated by great martinis and plenty of wine.
Here are the reference pictures I used. Gordon says this must be junior high for him, I am in Grade 12 by this time. Late bloomer – in grade 8 I looked like I was around 9 years old. For years I tried to in vain get my hair to go into that casually tossed center part every other guy in high school achieved so effortlessly.
Thanks, honey, for amazing ride, let’s grow young together!
Paul Kim, Senior Designer at The Walrus asked me to create this image for a review of Anne Carson’s book “Red Doc” by Sarah Liss. The book is a poetic take on the relationship between Hercules and the mythological monster Geryon, updated to the present day and re-imagined as a torturous gay love story. Paul asked if I would use the gouache-on-coloured-paper style of some Christmas cards I made last December, which I was excited to do with the aim of getting more samples of this style out into the world.
The art director also asked me to come up with more than one sketch for consideration and here is another approach we eventually discarded. In her piece, Sarah Liss talks about her personal associations with the story of Hercules, specifically the 1960s animated Saturday morning cartoon series she grew up with called “The Mighty Hercules”. Of course, being a certain age, (ahem) I knew this cartoon very well from my childhood. Looking at it again on Youtube, I felt it’s cheapness opening up a weird realm where, because of its almost transcendent awfulness, it becomes almost abstractly open for interpretation. I thought an illustration in this style might work for the piece and sketched characters based on designs from the series. The ad preferred my more original sketch and the colour piece up top was the final result. (I liked this one best too.) Thanks, Paul, for thinking of me for this challenging assignment!
Last autumn, the Toronto Pride Committee asked me to come up with costume designs for some mascots they were considering creating for the World Pride festivities coming to town in 2014.
There were to be 4 designs for typically Canuck animals representing various types in the LGBT community. I offered variations on a couple of them.
The Committee eventually decided to use another artist’s designs. Thanks anyhow to Pride Toronto for a very fun, challenging assignment!
Here is the new cover of In Toronto Magazine celebrating, of course, Valentine’s Day and Black History Month. I made this with Doctor Martin’s dyes and Pentel’s ink brush pen on blue paper. The clouds are paper cutouts. (Full disclosure: my partner, Gordon Bowness, is the editor – thanks for the fun assignment, darlin’!)
A couple of years ago I made these designs for an imaginary production of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande. It occurred to me the opera is really about a highly dysfunctional family and so I thought to approach as if it were an Ibsen or Strindberg play by updating the setting to late 19th century Europe. Above is the opening scene where Golaud finds Mélisande by a pool in a forest.
I imagined a stationary unit set that would remain throughout. It could have props easily moved in and out and backgrounds projected on a cyclorama. For these pictures I used drawings and cutouts on acetate overlays for the foregrounds and separate watercolours behind the unit set painting – also a cutout.
This is the scene in which Golaud and Pelléas explore an underground grotto.
This final scene shows the death of Mélisande. I wanted to give it a sense of transfiguration to reflect the unearthly beauty of the music at this point in the opera. I imagine the light from the rear of the stage gradually increasing to a blinding intensity as the opera closes.
Here are some of the inspirations for my designs. Sigh, I long to design an opera. What I really need to do is make a toy theatre!
Saturday, December 22, 2012
More Christmas cards: like the holiday promotional mailers below, these were all inspired by the Albert Racinet book, “The Historical Encyclopedia of Costume.”
Friday, December 21, 2012
This past weekend I cranked up CBC 2 and painted these gouache on coloured paper Christmas cards for colleagues and family. Saturday was Aida, live from the Met and Sunday was the all-day Christmas concert from countries across Europe: the perfect soundtrack for making these pictures!
I had so much fun! Happy Holidays, y’all. I’ll post some more tomorrow…
Thursday, December 20, 2012
This is the third promotional mailer I did with Reactor for the 2012 holiday season: gouache on coloured paper with some different coloured paper elements glued on. This one was inspired by my recent trip to Japan. Tokyo is populated by what, to western eyes at least, seem to be gigantic crows. Each morning you hear them calling loudly to each other from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Happy 2013!
