Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.

What a pleasure it is for me today to feature artist Laura Bledsoe, who is a former colleague of mine from Knoxville. Laura teaches at the Tennessee School for the Deaf, where—once upon a time for a brief while—I worked as their librarian. Laura, as you can see here, is not only a talented artist, but I can promise you she’s just about the nicest person you’ll meet, and she’s a top-notch teacher as well. Laura, who has been painting for approximately eight years, prefers her acrylics but has worked with oil and chalk pastels as well.

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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you. I have so many images for you today from illustrator Andrew Bannecker, because a) it was very difficult to pick favorite images from all the eye-catching work he does and b) he very graciously sent a whole heapin’ handful of images from which to choose the ones featured today.

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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.

What a pleasure it is to have here today award-winning Canadian artist Jody Hewgill. Jody first came to my attention when author Tanita S. Davis, aka TadMack at Finding Wonderland, posted this over at Readers’ Rants in July. It’s the cover concept for Tanita’s 2009 novel, Mare’s War, and it was created by Ms. Hewgill. (That cover is pictured here below.) Fortunately, Jody agreed to a Sunday 7-Imp feature. Pictured above and opening our post this morning is “Portrait of a Lady with Fox ” (acrylic on masonite panel — and how much do I LOVE that Jody included her medium of choice for each painting? A whole lot, ’cause a} it’s fascinating and b} I didn’t have to guess, as I usually do). Jody tells us, “{this is a} visual commentary on the environment, and a play on Leonardo da Vinci’s classic painting. It’s a depiction of my vision of a modern classic beauty.”

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Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.

As you know, we feature students of Illustration or brand-spankin’-new illustrators the first Sunday of every month.
Today’s featured illustrator, Jeff Miracola, isn’t exactly new to illustration—he’s been working as a freelance illustrator since 1993 for companies such as Wizards of the Coast, Inc., Hasbro, Inc., Upper Deck Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Inc., ImagineFX Magazine, Advanced Photoshop Magazine, and many more—but he is new to children’s books, so we’re featuring him today. Welcome, Jeff!

These illustrations today are from Jeff’s upcoming thirty-six page picture book, Welcome to Monster Isle, written by Oliver Chin and to be published by Immendium this month. The book is about a family’s vacation gone haywire when a perfect storm tosses their skipper’s tiny boat off course. Seven castaways are stranded on an uncharted desert island. A boy named Finnegan, his sister, his parents and his dog, Howl, venture into the wild and encounter a zootopia of mythical creatures with names like the Yowie and Ogopogo. Super-keen. Or, as Jeff puts it: Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: I really, really hope that folks are around this weekend, despite it being a holiday weekend, to see the art work of our featured illustrator today, Hyewon Yum, who studied painting, printmaking, and illustration at both Seoul National University and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Jules: Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.

You know we really love featuring illustrators and artists here at 7-Imp, and we like to pride ourselves on featuring all different styles of art. And it’s not often that we feature art that hasn’t been created for a children’s book, though we love doing that, too. And I can’t remember that we’ve ever featured art like today’s — straight-up realistic portraits of animals, rendered in colored pencil. These are from artist, author, and musician Maggie Stiefvater, who calls herself an “equestrian artist…Suffice to say,” she writes at her site, “I draw and paint a lot of horses…I take my horse portraits very seriously. It seems to me that if you want an exact replica of what any horse looks like on a given day, there are plenty of cameras out there to help you with that. You need an artist only if you want to capture the mood of the day, the character of the horse, the feeling of the moment frozen in time. There’s a point where the camera just doesn’t cut it. That’s where an artist steps in.”

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As many of you know, we feature the work of illustrators/artists every Sunday here at 7-Imp, as well as gather together to list what we call our “7 Kicks” of the week. Yesterday, our featured artist was Ursula Vernon, but I moved her feature to today, since I didn’t want our partying down yesterday to distract from her illustrations. Thanks to Ursula for being so flexible and giving me the okay to do that.

As she puts it at her site, Ursula is a freelance illustrator, artist, and creator of weird thingies. “I live in North Carolina, with too many art supplies and a cat,” she adds. Ursula uses a wide variety of media in her artwork, “generally some combination of acrylic ink, fluid acrylic, watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, etc.” – as well as some digital maneuvering. Metal & Magic is the site where Ursula displays her art work. She is the creator of a number of comic projects, including Digger, which was nominated for an Eisner Award. She is also the creator of the short comic Irrational Fears for older children and adults, and the Little Creature stories for teens and adults. Pictured above is a sneak peek — an illustration from Ursula’s Dragonbreath, “which should be forthcoming next summer from Penguin Dial, ” she told me.

The way in which I became familiar with Ursula’s work is through her first children’s book, Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures Of A (Somewhat) Brave Shrew, released this Spring from Harcourt, which Ursula both wrote and illustrated and which I enjoyed. (I’d love to hear from others who have read Nurk, since I don’t recall seeing a lot of blogging about it, though I certainly do my fair share of getting-behind-on-blog-reading, so maybe I missed some posts.)

Nurk tells the story of a mostly-brave shrew, who packs up a few pairs of clean socks and sails off on an accidental adventure, guided by wisdom found in the journal of his famously brave and fierce grandmother, Lady Surka the warrior shrew. In fact, his grandmother’s portrait hangs in Nurk’s front hallway, and “it was the first thing anyone saw when they entered his house. (Since the portrait showed her brandishing a severed head, this was a bit of a shock for first-time visitors, but Nurk’s love for the portrait was undimmed.)”

Check out this bit from Chapter One, which tells us a lot about Nurk and, well, had me at word one: Read the rest of this entry �

Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, where we invite everyone to share Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you. And we feature some lovely illustrations. Today is special:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EISHA!

You knew I’d use a marquee tag for that, right?

I’m throwing you a birthday tea party (with apologies to Sir John Tenniel):

Eisha, thanks for being my BFFABBBE — that’s Best Friend Forever And Best Blog Buddy Ever (expressed in my best fifth-grader manner)! And that’s BFF since…well, wow, for about seventeen years now. And my BBBE for two.

Here we are — Then and Now: Read the rest of this entry �

eisha: Did you hear that? BRIAN PINKNEY!!! Can you stand it? Can you possibly bear the full-on hard-core joy explosion that is this collection of illustrations? Look at that little boy! Is that not the most perfectly captured moment of summer sweetness ever? And how about this one:

I know, right? It’s like those kids are so vibrantly buoyantly happy that gravity has totally given up on them.

Oh, hey, I’m getting ahead of myself. Welcome to our weekly feature 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, where we invite everyone to share Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you. And we feature some lovely illustrations. This week, we’ve got a few spreads from We Are One (Harcourt, 2008), a new picture book by Ysaye M. Barnwell (member of the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock). Obviously, Mr. Pinkney did the fabulous illustrations. Here’s another:

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Jules: AUGUST 3rd?? IT’S AUGUST ALREADY? Mercy sakes.

Whew. Yes, it’s the first of the month. And that’s when we feature a student of illustration or a brand-spankin’-new illustrator here at our seven kicks list, our meeting ground for listing Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you. And I can hardly believe it’s already…well, almost Fall. Sorta.

This week we’re featuring artist Eric Lamson, who studied illustration at Montserrat College of Art in Massachusetts. As Eric’s bio at his site—featuring his award-winning, Poe-esque “Gold Bug”—states, he works in pencil, acrylic, and oil. He also creates illustrations in relief, “using a unique method that he originated, utilizing: masking tape, cut illustration board, glue, joint compound and gesso.”

HOWEVER, that bio—and Eric’s site, for that matter, and the artwork on it—is dated 2006. And it just so happens, Eric told me, that he has been “kind of on a soul search. I’ve been struggling with finding the right way of working that best suits me…I’ve been kind of moving away from children’s illustration lately.” So, the opening image up there, “Shiva Monkey,” also a Montserrat award-winner, and these three below images—one from a fable of Aesop; one entitled “Introvert,” and the 1984 image—are examples of Eric’s earlier work as student of illustration:

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