Sketches from the ’20s (approx.)

I was on Governor’s Island yesterday and came across: an orchestra playing ’20s-era jazz, a flock of flappers, two gramophones, and three vintage cars — a “jazz-age lawn party,” the poster told me. Here are sketches. (Click to enlarge.) The one car is a Ford Model A from 1930, the other a Packard from 1940. The Packard was as clean and bright as it must have been in the showroom window seventy years ago.

Run, don’t walk!

The benefit auction for 826LA, organized by Dan Santat (more on Dan here) and described in my previous post (which is here) is now underway. You can see and bid on the first round of donated art on eBay, here. Happy shopping!

Oh No? Oh Yes!

The talented, funny, and, as it turns out, charitable Dan Santat has put together a benefit auction on the occasion of the publication of his and Mac Barnett’s great new book, OH NO! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World). Dan, who did a virtuoso job illustrating Mac’s story, brashly asked thirty illustrators to take their own shot at imagining Mac’s text, with the results to be auctioned off. What Dan’s request had going for it was, one, the story concerns a girl who creates a giant robot for her school science fair, a robot that nearly tears down the city before (spoiler alert) being defeated by a giant frog. Two, all monies raised will support Los Angeles’s 826LA, “a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.”

My contribution is above, a little something I threw together with some leftover Soyuz hardware. (Click to enlarge.) You can see the work of all the contributors and learn how to bid, bid, bid at the benefit auction’s online gallery, here. From August 14 to 17, you can see the actual drawings, paintings, and so on at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California. More information on the Gallery Nucleus exhibit is here. You can read more about the book here, visit Dan’s site here, and visit Mac’s site here.

Thanks for bidding!

EDIT: And! Completists, please note: the auction has a blog, here, and there was a nice piece about it in Publishers Weekly, here.

Ballet for Martha

Tomorrow, August 3, is the official publication date for Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, which I illustrated. I’m very happy to report that the book recently picked up its fifth starred review. (The stars have come from The Horn Book, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and, most recently, School Library Journal. Excerpts are on my web site here.) An interview with me on the SLJ site is here. The idea of leaping into the air for the accompanying photo was not mine but I was game, despite the fact that the photo shoot came the day after I tried wakeboarding for the first time, and that I was sore that day in muscles I didn’t even know I had. Other reviews that have warmed the heart have appeared on the Fuse #8 blog, here, and from the San Francisco Chronicle, here. Thank you to all the reviewers!

As I hope I’ve conveyed in the interviews I’ve done for the book, this was a wonderful project on which to work. I’m grateful to editor Neal Porter for thinking of me for it, and for the chance to work with Jan and Sandra on the book. I hope you’ll give the results a look!

I’m hitting the road to research the past…

...with a road atlas from the future. I hope this thing doesn’t lead me anywhere that won’t be built for another six months.

41

If it occurs to me that today is the 1st anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, does that make me nostalgic for last year’s nostalgia? Don’t answer that. Now other books are coming out (Ballet for Martha, next month) and other books are in the works (It’s 1869, not 1969, on the drafting table these days) but Moonshot will always have a special place on my shelf, and I do appreciate my memories of last year, especially of listening to NASA’s real-time internet broadcast of the original mission transmissions. Through that broadcast and through all the attention the anniversary received I got to share with friends what I had worked on for so long in relative privacy of my studio, and that’s worth remembering. Happy 41st, Apollo 11!

ALA recap

Recently I’ve been trying to spend (a little) less time on the great and terrible internet, so I’m late in saying thank you to Simon & Schuster for sending me to Washington for ALA, where I had a wonderful time, and thank you to this year’s Sibert Committee for the Sibert Honor for Moonshot (a considerable contributor to the wonderful time), and thank you to Roaring Brook for a chance to have a Ballet for Martha signing while at the conference. (Ballet for Martha! Coming next month!) Thanks also to everyone who came by and picked up a book!

After conference duties were done I spent a day at the National Gallery, and after seeing a few great things, I happened onto the museum’s collection of Renaissance Portrait Medals. The medals, given as “tokens of esteem,” were created very deliberately on the model of ancient Roman coins. (Click to enlarge the sketch.) I looked at these for a minute before I realized, ah ha, here are the great grandparents of the Newbery, the Caldecott, the Sibert (the Pulitzer, the Nobel) and so on. Today’s children’s literature medals have fewer swords, less nudity, and no elephants, but the connection is clear. That discovery made a coda to ALA, and I left Washington satisfied. (Also, the exhibit was an opportunity to to brush up on usage for the word “obverse,” so that was another bonus.)