Slow Train Coming

This was apparently the take-away message from a school visit I did a couple of years ago. It was true then, and it’s truer now. I’ve been working on my current author/illustrator project, Locomotive, for longer than I care to say. 

What happened? 

The book started off simply enough a few years ago, when I pitched a picture book about a steam locomotive to Atheneum/Simon & Schuster. The idea was simple: to show a locomotive going from Point A to Point B, and in the process to show how one of these marvelous machines worked. After a couple of false starts, I sold a draft of the book, and everything seemed, as they say, on track.

What I had not really figured out yet, though, was exactly what and when Points A and B would be. Eventually I settled on a ride on America’s first transcontinental railroad. I set my engine on that line of track, in the summer of 1869, and pointed it west—and then the trouble began. The amount of information I was handling expanded like steam in a boiler. With hindsight I realize that I had imagined, naively, that the choice of setting would affect only the finishing touches of the book—the views outside the window, that sort of thing. Instead it meant rebuilding the book from the foundation up. It took me a while to figure that out, and then it took me a while to figure out what to do about it. 

And now, finally, I am painting, painting, painting.

I’m working toward a May deadline, aiming for a Fall 2013 book. 

Let the following illustration say something about my pace, but also let it show that the book is underway. My hand is on the throttle, my eye is on the rail!

Salad days

I’m off to Providence, Rhode Island this weekend for a college reunion. Above, work done for the Brown Daily Herald in the distant and bygone era of my undergraduate education. (Mac Plus: 8 MHz of pure processing power.) My deadline handling has gotten only moderately better over the years. Or is it moderately worse? Regardless, I’m looking forward to the weekend. And as it happens David Scott of Gemini 8, Apollo 9, and Apollo 15 will be there to receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree. He’s already got two graduate degrees (of the non-honorary type) from M.I.T., his bio says, but I don’t guess you can have too many. Probably I’ll cart a copy of Moonshot up to campus in case I’m able to corner him in the refectory.

Cover me

Over at the Fuse #8 blog today Betsy Bird covers the HarperCollins librarians’ preview. One of the books on show is Eric Luper’s Jeremy Bender Vs. the Cupcake Cadets. The cover design is by talented designer (and friend and picture book author) Polly Kanevsky, and I did the spot drawings. This was a small but fun project.

Typing about that work reminds me that I never blogged about another cover I enjoyed working on this year, for the paperback edition of Avi’s The Traitors’ Gate, a story full of twists and turns that I enjoyed taking a crack at illustrating. (Illustrating the cover for, I should say. The interior illustrations are by Karina Raude.) The designer for the Traitors’ Gate cover was the adept Michael McCartney at Simon & Schuster, with whom I also had the pleasure of working on Lightship and Moonshot. (And to whom I owe some sketches for the next book we’ll work on together.)

Sketch break

The deadline said: Work all weekend. The central nervous system (trembling, tired, and vibrating) said: Take a break. I broke. And how do illustrators take a break from drawing? Different drawing. Busman’s holiday’s are the only kind I know. So, I joined author/illustrator Tim Bush and others for some looking and sketching at the Met on Monday. My sketch of Germain Pilon’s bronze bust 0f the long-faced Jean de Morvillier is above. Now it’s back to drawing another long-faced certain someone.

More about her soon.

Poppy’s Progress

Recent posts have been all about Moonshot and The Hinky-Pink, but the real action on the drawing board these days (and nights) continues to be Poppy and Ereth. Among the former cast members returning for this the final act is Bounder the fox, shown here both as sketch and as he’ll appear in the book. Click to enlarge.

Return of the Hinky-Pink

While Moonshot has been burning along here with a fire - up - another - carafe - of - the - strong - stuff - and - give - me - every - waking - moment urgency, off out of sight The Hinky-Pink has gone and turned into a bona fide book. It’s good to have this reminder that the contained chaos and labor that goes on here does indeed eventually resolve itself into book form, and it’s good to see The Hinky-Pink on its own terms, too. I’m pleased with the look of the book, and the nice small size of it, and it perhaps goes without saying that Megan McDonald’s text still feels as funny and spry as it did the first time I laid eyes on it, almost five years (!) ago.

Therefore, even though the book doesn’t come out until September, I say now: Avanti, Hinky-Pink!

You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?

Here’s a quick note wishing No Country For Old Men good luck at the Oscars tonight, if only because it is, to my knowledge, the only Best Picture nominee ever to mention my hometown. I don’t remember seeing the fellow behind the counter around while I was growing up but he seems a man of his word so I’ll assume we just missed each other.

A longer post would extrapolate on the funhouse mirror parallels between the character of Anton Chigurh and Leonard Smalls, a.k.a. the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, from an earlier Coen Brothers favorite, Raising Arizona. But that’s for later. I’m on deadline now.

Space Race

What can I say? If I had hired someone to run this blog and they were posting at this pace, I’d fire them. But there is no support staff here at the studio, and no one to blame but yours truly, and the moon. I throw the moon in the mix there because the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing is coming up in 2009, and I have an oversized (thank you, Atheneum) picture book that must hit the shelves by then. For years this has been a story that I’ve wanted to tell, and these have been drawings that I’ve wanted to make, and so I wake up every day thrilled to have the chance to do it. And then I look at the calendar and the nausea kicks in. Well, NASA made their deadline (barely), and I’ll make mine. It’s just a matter now of seeing about the barely.

Quasi finito

I’ve been blogging blogging blogging about Lightship here, but off the Internet I’ve been finishing work on drawings for The Hinky-Pink, by Megan McDonald, a fine and funny folk tale-ish story of a young seamstress, set in Florence, Italy. Just a few weeks ago I thought that I was running at least a little late with these drawings. In what may be a first, though, it turns out that I am just about on time, which to a publisher is as good as early. Still, the book, which will come out next year from Richard Jackson Books/Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing (try saying that ten times fast), has been a long time coming, and I am grateful to Megan for the patience she has showed as the process has dragged out. In the best of circumstances an author can wait about two years to see a picture book text turned into, you know, a picture book, and The Hinky-Pink has been cooking for longer than that.

Given the above you might think that at the end of the strada it’s all relief and huzzahs here. The truth is that these big projects more often end with a whimper than a bang. And that’s no metaphor. This will sound a little dark, given that I love my work, but look at those pictures of our heroine Anabel up there, struggling to finish an important sewing gig. That pose is from the heart, reader. Illustrators and authors invest a lot of their professional and even personal hopes in their work, and several ironies and trials await those raw and vulnerable feelings at the end of each undertaking. First among them: By the end of a full-sized project like this you’ve logged so many hours at the desk that you can barely remember what you were trying to do in the first place, and yet it’s not until the whole thing is finished that you really get to see what you have in fact done and, more poisonously, could have done. Add to that the fact that in this line of work (“work”) you get about one shot on stage per year, and that's if you're lucky, and you can really crank up the pressure on yourself if all you do is sit around and, say, blog about this stuff.

Still, it beats the salt mines, and I know it. And fortunately there is a cure to the condition, which is to have the next project in mind (or already lined up, if you are, again, lucky), and to jump right back in.