I got to add to my shelf last week, when I got a couple sweet packages in the mail: two books for which I had done the cover art several months ago. The finished product at last!

Dust City is a book that I can heartily recommend. It’s a wonderful modern fairy tale, about a young wolf with a bad reputation (his dad, it turns out, is the Big Bad Wolf himself). It’s set in a gritty urban environment where all the precious “fairy dust” is controlled by an evil multinational conglomerate, making for some very dark fairy tales indeed.

Here are some of the sketches:

And here’s the final art:

The other book is called Sign of the Beaver. It’s a classic, winner of the Newberry Award in the 1980s, and it’s a lovely story of a young boy fending for himself in the Maine wilderness, with the help of a Native American family who teach him the basics of survival. I loved it, and it was a real privilege to illustrate.

Sketches:

Final:

I don’t always like the books I illustrate. But in this case, both these books are wonderful, and I’m happy to recommend them. Pick them up for any young adults in your life, or get one for yourself if you happen to be a young adult who never grew up!

The packages kept coming this week. I got a couple of bottles of wine with a label I contributed to. This was designed by my friend Alicia Buelow, featuring a figure that I illustrated with Alicia’s art direction. My first wine label! (It’s a small producer, so it might be hard to track down.)

Anyway, I’ve always intended to have some kids shirts printed up with that character, and I have now finally gotten around to it. These are printed on Gildan shirts, royal blue, and the inks used are discharge inks, which despite their unfortunate name have the nice quality of disappearing into the feel of the fabric after the first wash. Printed by my pal Mick of Graphic Facts!

I only have 4 of each size, so act quick! Here are the links to the various sizes on my Etsy shop:

Toddler size 2
Toddler size 4
Toddler size 5/6
Youth size S
Youth size M

That was an easy question to answer. I have loved this book since I first read it in the 7th or 8th grade. In fact, I believe this was one of the first books that really showed me what a great book can do. Re-reading it a few years ago, I remembered how this book made me feel transported to another time and place, and how it helped me grapple with really difficult questions about morality and injustice. It’s a powerful story, told with such simple, elegant language. I hope it remains on the bookshelves of kids and adults for a long time.

The great thing is that this edition is designed to do just that. It’s a gorgeous (if I do say so myself) leatherbound edition, the kind of thing that is designed to endure a long time, and survive the rough handling of generations of curious youngsters.

I even got to design endpapers for this book! How’s that for class?

As with most book covers, this one took a lot of back and forth between myself and the publisher. We had to get all those little details right, from Scout’s ponytail to the type to the Southern courthouse featured on the back cover. The biggest surprise in this process was the fact that Harper Lee herself was involved! Yes, she is alive, and though she is careful to stay out of the public eye, she collaborated with Barnes & Noble on this edition, to the degree that she looked over my sketches and gave surprisingly detailed notes. As you might suspect, they were sharp and insightful, with suggestions on how to ensure that Scout looked as if she were actually tipping up on her toes to view the gifts hidden in the knot of that old tree.

I’ve done quite a few book covers now, but this cover is by far the one that means the most to me. It sounds a little silly to say it, but it really is quite an honor to have a commission like this one, working on such a great book, with feedback from such a great author, and for a publisher that is willing to put out such a quality product. The best part: this will be a book I can give to my nieces and nephew and other youngsters I know, in the hopes that they will one day find some of the magic that I enjoyed when I first read it.

You can order copies on the Barnes & Noble website, or stop in to your local B&N and buy a copy there.

PS: A number of people, hearing that I had done a new cover for this book, wrote me over the past few months to congratulate me. It seems that this cover, a classic re-issue of an old cover, has been in stores, and I dont’ blame people for thinking this beautiful, eerie silhouette cover art might be mine. Alas, it is not, although this may have been one of the reasons that Barnes & Noble wanted to have me for their version. I hope my version has some of the flair of this classic!

Last year I was busy for several months, working on the artwork for a picture book for Gibbs Smith Publisher. The book is called Y is for Yorick: A Slightly Irreverent Shakespearean ABC Book for Grownups, which is a pretty accurate title. The author is Shakespeare scholar Jennifer Adams, and her text is both funny and informative.

Each letter is matched with a character from one of Shakespeare’s plays, which was both enormous fun and pretty intimidating. (It’s not every day you have to illustrate the work of the greatest author in the English language, right?)

Here are some of the spreads:

You can get a copy on Amazon, or look for it in your local bookstore!

I’ve just had a new batch of Psychokitty shirts printed up, by my friend Mick Laska from Graphic Facts — Mick is a great printer to work with if you are so inclined and I highly recommend his services. They are printed onto black American Apparel shirts with discharge inks, a new printing technology that imprints on the shirt without leaving any plastic-y surface. Once you wash the shirt, the printed area is as soft as fabric. (The colors are less intense than the old plastisol inks, but I actually prefer this more muted look.)

Will you look as cool as these über hip models once you have your very own Psychokitty shirt? Yes you will.

Here are links to my shop where you can buy your size and gender!

Men’s Psychokitty shirts:
Medium
Large
Xtra Large
Xtra Xtra Large

Women’s Psychokitty shirts:
Small
Medium
Large
Xtra Large

This is a limited run, and it will likely be a long time before I have more shirts printed. Know what that means? It means you need to buy one today if you want one tomorrow!

If you’re down at San Francisco’s Ferry Building this week, you’ll find yourself nicely saturated with my art. I did the poster again this year, and it’s lovely how they’ve plastered the entire place with the image I created.

The Ferry Building folks say they have a hard time holding on to the posters — people keep stealing them! That’s got to be the best kind of compliment. Of course, you can get one free by peeling back the tape, or you can always buy one from me! I’ve got a bunch for sale.

(I’ve got both the 2010 and the 2011, which are identical except for the dates.)

Check out some of the photos from the installation!

My incredible talented wife Mati McDonough is the star attraction (IMHO). In addition to some recent paintings, she installed a whole wall of her inspiration — replicating the beautiful creative chaos of her working space.

Our good friend Lisa Congdon is in the show as well — she installed a series of her beautiful animal paintings that are a wonder to behold:

In addition to us three, we also included Jason Munn of the Small Stakes, who is one of our favorite artists working today. Jason’s rock posters combine incredible design savvy with conceptual brilliance. I really want to own this Dr. Strangelove piece, but think it is sold out!

I displayed a bunch of my own poster and book work:

My poster work and books!

But to really make the show special, Mati volunteered me to design a mural for the show. It took two days and three of us working to do it, but it came out great!

Los Medanos Art Gallery is on the campus of Los Medanos Community College, way out in Pittsburg (at the end of the BART line). Here’s the info in case you’d like to make the trek to join us!

Opening: Thursday, February 3, 2011 · 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Through March 3, 2011

Los Medanos Art Gallery
2700 East Leland Road (map)
Pittsburg, CA

I mocked all four of them up with my color printer, and here’s how they would have looked:

The cool part was that each box had a special die cut window to display the voodoo doll:

The new packages never appeared on the company’s website, so I never got around to blogging them. The other day I came across the files as I archived some old work, and I gave them a call to check in. Turns out the new designs were never produced! They paid me, so I guess I shouldn’t mind. But it is sort of sad never to see your work come to fruition. That must be one of the pitfalls of being a commercial artist — relying on others to print, produce and sell your work for you. You can do your job, but that’s no guarantee they’ll do theirs!

On the other hand, I now have a nifty portfolio piece to share! Anybody want to some voodoo packaging?

That's me in my art school days, looking scared of my own work.

Now I’m back in the academic world, doing a little teaching at the SF Art Institute, and just finished my first class, an introduction to illustration using digital tools. And I guess it’s appropriate that most of my students were people just like me — born illustrators working in an almost exclusively fine art-oriented school. Which, it turns out, is not such a bad place to be if you’re an illustrator!

To give them a sense of the “real world” of the working illustrator, I made each assignment a “job” from an art director — and for extra realism I attached an imaginary dollar amount tagged to each assignment. The students did a total of five jobs, ranging from editorial illustration to fashion illustration to my favorite assignment, the gig poster, which I saved for their final. They did some great work!

Read on to see some examples of their work…

Artwork by Jonny Thomas

Artwork by Elise Inferrera

Brian McHugh

Artwork by James Calder

(I made a small tweak to this piece — sorry James, couldn’t help it!)

Artwork by Charlotte Cunningham

Artwork by Madison Meyer

So, you might be wondering why I say that the world of fine art can be a good place to study, even if you’re interested in illustration. Wouldn’t it make more sense to study illustration at a school that specializes in that? Well, I think that the fine art academic environment really affords students a chance to think creatively, with incredible freedom. At art school, it’s still really a matter of “anything goes.” And that is a really great thing for a young student. When you’re just starting out, you don’t want to get bogged down worrying about “the market,” or worrying about style and fashion and all that. You need to be free to develop your voice, which is really the most important thing for any artist, whether doing commercial work or not — your voice. How do you speak, and what do you speak about?

Anyway, I’m quite happy to be contributing to helping these budding artists find their voice. And I’ll be back it at for the fall semester of 2011!

It’s always really important to get a wintery feel for the poster. Here’s the sketch I started with:

The SFBC gave this the green light right away, with the caveat that they preferred a modern font, since we had done a more retro-look in a previous year. This reminded me that I have always loved the hand-drawn type from my favorite film of all time, Dr. Strangelove, created by the film’s designer, Pablo Ferro. Here’s an example:

There is a nice computer typeface inspired by this lettering, but when I posted a link to this font on my Facebook page, my friend Alastair Johnston made an interesting comment. Why not draw the type yourself? Who needs a computer font for this effect?

So for this poster, I hand drew the type, inspired by Ferro’s Strangelove font, but with my own added elements — a few choice curlyques and such — and I think it came out much better than it would have otherwise!

I also created the artwork for the pint glass that will be available. Pay $20, get a pint glass and all the beer you can drink.

And then, since I felt I hadn’t done enough work already for Winterfest, I also created a painting that will be part of the art auction:

It’s called “Return of the Scorcher,” which of course is the name of a fantastic documentary by Ted White. This film, about the rise of global bicycling culture was made in the late eighties or early nineties, and featured a brief story about bicyclists in China who pile up at intersections until they have enough bikes to achieve a “critical mass,” and thus gain right of way. This little anecdote gave the name to a social bike ride that was at that time brand new, and has now been going strong in San Francisco and hundreds of other cities around the world for 18 years!

Drop by Winterfest tonight — get a beer, and maybe bid on some fantastic art!