Love.
Chronicle Books had only a dummy of the trade edition at BEA, but the book is out now. (Buy it through Indiebound.)
Continue reading “To be fond of ; to like ; to have good will toward ; to delight in, with preëminent affection.”
Category: illustration
from the Guardian
They’ve been doing a lot of nifty slide shows at the Guardian. Here are four recent ones:
- British Library launches online newspaper archive
As you may have guessed, I love this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, the archive website’s not working—at least, for me. I click on links and get nothing but error messages. I’ve written to Gale’s tech support, but I’d be interested to know if the site’s working for other people, especially those in the UK.
- Article: “British Library publishes online archive of 19th-century newspapers,” by Maev Kennedy, June 18, 2009
- The archive itself: British Newspapers, 1800–1900, at Gale Cengage Learning
Vanessa Davis, computer whiz and more!
The charming and talented Vanessa Davis has a new comic about past jobs, good and bad, over at Tablet, which is Nextbook’s reconceived, redesigned, and mostly restaffed* online magazine: Vocation, All I Ever wanted!
Vanessa’s also, after a long period of dormancy, reorganized and relaunched her own website, Spaniel Rage. With a blog and everything! Yay!
- Yes, yes, I’m going to clean out my office today, finally, I promise.
(Cross-posted at Clusterflock.)
———
Update, 7/16: There’s a great interview with Vanessa over at Largehearted Boy: Antiheroines: Vanessa Davis
We love Vanessa Davis so much
at my workplace that we asked her to do a monthly column. The first installment was posted today:
Vanessa also did a holiday comic for us that I was too frazzled to blog when it went up: Crispy Christmas.
Do circuit diagrams count?
Yes, folks, once again it’s that magical time of year: only six days until DrawMo! 2008!
Who: People of the Internets
What: Try to make at least one drawing a day for a month
Where: Offline, online, on blogs, on Flickr, wherever
When: November 1–30
Why: Because it’s fun
To join the DrawMo! group blog, send me an e-mail or leave a comment here or there. You can also join the Flickr group.
I have no idea how I’m going to make time for it this year, since I’m already, like, totally overscheduled, but I’ll certainly try.
Flash vs. substance
A few weeks ago, Rachel Sugar, one of my coworkers, had an idea—based on a book called Jews and Shoes—to present some illustrated factoids about footwear in Jewish tradition. Staff favorite Vanessa Davis was nominated for the art portion of the project, and I asked if she’d be interested in working on what was then still a very vague idea. She was game, fortunately, because she rocks.
Continue reading “Flash vs. substance”
Maira Kalman’s Tel Aviv
This here, my friends, is art direction at its finest: I ask an artist I’m all fawny over if she wants to draw something for us, she very kindly says yes, and then I don’t lift another finger (well, except to digitize five gouache paintings, which was a nontrivial task given their size, my mediocre scanner, and the fact that the text was written on separate tracing paper overlays). If only I could get paid for doing this.
Oh, wait . . .
Go see “My Tel Aviv” by Maira Kalman. As one of our senior editors just opined, it “KICKS ASS!”
The Week in Pictures
I’ve been on vacation since last Thursday, so I forgot to take screenshots of the glory until yesterday, but for nearly every day in the past week, Nextbook.org has been running stories garnished by illustrations I commissioned. Two are by artists you’ve seen here before—Samantha Hahn and Vanessa Davis—and two are by new! people!—Jonathon Rosen and Leela Corman.
You can see the pretty pictures at the following links (I’d do an image map on the banner above, but WordPress.com won’t let me):
- Samantha Hahn: The Rise and Fall—and Rise—of “Jewess” by Daniel Krieger
- Vanessa Davis: The Dangers of Salmonella by Danit Brown
- Jonathon Rosen: Inherit the Windbags by Peter Bebergal (home page screenshot)
- Leela Corman: The Half-Life by Rebecca Spence (home page screenshot)
Yay, illustrators!
A-lines are always in style
Brainiac Josh Glenn takes issue with Steven Heller’s facile assertion that although “The human leg has evolved continually over many eons, adapting from an underwater propeller to its current form . . . on book covers and on film and theater posters, the leg has evolved very little.”
I hate to quibble with the master, since I’m a fan of Heller’s books. But this time he hasn’t put his best leg forward. Even a cursory glance at the leg-scenarios on display in Heller’s Print essay — and at Print Magazine’s A-Frame photoset at Flickr — indicate that the A-Frame is forever evolving.
The Flickr set is not entirely work-safe, but do check it out if nobody’s looking over your shoulder. Much excellence therein.
Now I just have to think of some excuse to put an A-frame illustration on the front of Nextbook.org . . .
Fore-edge books
Had you heard of fore-edge paintings? I hadn’t. From Karen at hangingtogether.org:
During Merrilee’s and my visit to the Boston Public Library last Friday, Tom Blake and Maura Marx introduced us to the results of the BPL’s digitization of its fore-edge books—books with paintings on their edges that can be viewed only by looking at the sides of the book. Some are “double fore-edge” books – one painting is visible when the leaves are fanned one way, and another painting appears when fanned another way.
The BPL has posted a CC-licensed Flickr set of fore-edge paintings with detailed captions. Love!
Thanks, Dylan!
Photo: [View of London Bridge.] posted by the Boston Public Library; some rights reserved.