Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: Yes, that’s a clock. A beautiful clock. But I’ll get to that in a minute. First of all…

Happy Sunday to all! It’s a new week, and—as usual here at 7-Imp—we’re 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.

This week we’re celebrating with Rima Staines, U.K.-based illustrator, painter, maker of things, and teller of tales, “inspired most of all by stories and by the edge of things, strange and odd and dark yet familiar.” Rima told me, “I grew up in an artistic household and now scrape a happy living making {my} art.” Rima has always loved to combine words with her images and likes to play with language and rhyme. Her fledgling stories are aimed at child-adults and adult-children, and her paintings are reminiscent of an old medieval-coloured folktale world where things are not quite as they seem. She is living for the moment in the hills of Scotland, building a home on wheels with her boyfriend to live and travel and write stories in. At Rima’s site, The Hermitage, you can see many of her sketches, drawings, paintings (watercolors and oils on wood and paper), and prints (She’s also started experimenting with stop-motion animation and, for the near future, has plans for making a puppet show and at long last writing and illustrating the tales that have been stored in her head, as she put it.) And you can see clearly that, as her site’s bio puts it, she’s always “had one foot in Early Medieval Europe.” The rest of her bio sums up well what you get when your eyes take in one of her paintings or drawings:

“Rima’s curiosity leads her through the many worlds of words, languages and lettering, books and stories, puppetry, nature and interesting people, music, superstitions, folklore and fairy tales, and most of all the otherness that can be found on the periphery of our lives, the strange and grotesque, the absurd and unnerving…that topsy turvy in between place…”

As for that lovely clock pictured above…Rima has recently announced that her newest creative venture is clock-making—or making “unique original oil paintings on rustic chunks of wood” and making them tick, as her new site, Once Upon O’Clock, explains—since she has “a delight in Heath Robinson-like contraptions, automata and all things that clink and clonk, I love to paint folk tales in medieval hues, and make things from wood.” I cannot even BEGIN to tell you how much I want to start saving my pennies for a Rima-clock and how very much in love I am with the web site, because not only do I love the sound of a good, hearty clock ticking, but when you launch the site, there’s this wonderfully bizarre and discordant clock song of sorts that plays, which I’ve been listening to repeatedly as I type this. If you like a good clock like I do (which is an affinity that’s difficult to explain), you’ll enjoy it as well.

Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: We’re so nerdy-excited to be featuring author and artist Laini Taylor and her Laini’s Ladies today. And that’s ’cause dang-it-all if she isn’t just a huge inspiration to us all. For serious, check out the art page at her site: Collage. Oil paints. Stamps. Paper dolls. Mosaics. Clay. Garden art. Mixed media and digital art work. Drawings. Stationery. And her beautiful Laini’s Ladies, which are the focus of this kicks feature today.

Read the rest of this entry �

Happy Sunday, everyone!

So, what do you do when there are tentacles in your hallway?

Jules: We’re featuring the illustrations of artist and freelance illustrator Jen Corace this week, and we’re excited to be doing so. Some of you may have seen this Spring’s Little Hoot, released by Chronicle Books, another pairing of Jen and author Amy Krouse Rosenthal (who also created Little Pea in ’05). I’m actually not terribly familiar with Little Pea (I read it once and liked it is about all I can say on that), but I’ve got a copy of Little Hoot, and it’s . . . well, a hoot. Go check it out. When Betsy Bird reviewed it in January, she wrote: “Here’s the deal with illustrator Jen Corace… uh… she’s awesome. Not very descriptive but whatcha gonna do? Maybe it’s her design background and alternative feel, but when Corace illustrates a book, that book has done been illustrated, consarn it.” We couldn’t agree more.

Let’s pause for another moment of Jen awesome-ness: Read the rest of this entry �

Late-Sunday Addendum: Why don’t we leave our kicks post up on Monday? It was a holiday weekend, and some folks might not have been able to come kickin’ with us. So, if you didn’t, feel free to do so on Monday. Come on, you know your kicks-lists brighten our days.

Plus, we want to show Maris’ art work to more people.

Jules: Well, happy holiday weekend to one and all on this Sunday with the kickin’ numerology goin’ on (“7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #70”). It’s the first of the month again when we here at 7-Imp highlight the work of student illustrators or those new to illustration. This week we welcome Maris Wicks, whose above illustration is a re-imagining of Wonder Woman. “I submitted this to an on-line contest (Project: Rooftop) that challenged artists to redesign Wonder Woman’s costume,” she told us. Maris, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, has found herself drawn (excuse the unintentionally lame pun) to the world of comics, as she explains below.

Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: We have the ever-resourceful and thoughtful Little Willow to thank for our featured illustrations this week. Knowing that we like illustration and knowing that we have a particular fondness for Alice images, Little Willow passed on the web site of Argentinian illustrator Fernando Falcone to us. And then we all three ooh’ed and aah’ed over his art work featured over there; pictured here is A Mad Tea-Party (created in 2006). And then I shamelessly asked him if we could feature some of those illustrations over here at 7-Imp. Despite our language barriers (man, I wish I spoke Spanish), he agreed to let us show his art work. Isn’t it amazing? Eisha is travelling as I type this, but I believe her words when she saw the White Rabbit here were “positively terrifying” (and that’s a compliment).

Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: Is it really true that British cats drink tea? Well, this globe-trotting cat, brought to life by illustrator Kyrsten Brooker, knows. He’s the star of Caroline Lazo’s Someday When My Cat Can Talk (Scwartz & Wade Books, April 2008), the story of one little girl’s fantasy about her cat. Someday when he can talk, he’ll tell her lots of things, including the story of how he “hopped a ship and where he stowed away” in order to launch his European adventure, including a trip to England, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece, and Holland. I love Kyrsten’s collage style (don’t forget to throw in some oil paints) and always enjoy her books (I reviewed Jacqueline Davies’ The Night is Singing back here in ’06). Kyrsten even opens the book with a map and itinerary of the cat’s adventures on the endpapers. These are illustrations which reward if you take the time to pore over them with your favorite wee one (and the book, I’m here to say, can also launch you into your closets for a search of your own globes and can lead to some informative geography discussions with children before you know what’s hit you). Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: Happy Sunday to one and all . . . We’re happy you stopped by today, as we’re featuring some work this morning from artist and illustrator Gianna Marino, a.k.a. “Boomerang.” (And that’s because she’s done a wee bit of travelling in her lifetime, as you can read about here.)

As I was linking to Gianna’s site in the fairly recent Jim Averbeck interview (even though I’ve linked to her site before), I went and explored there and fell in love with her botanicals, painted in gouache and all featured here at her site. Pictured here is her Himalayan Blue Poppy, and below is “Chocolate Cosmos.” She also has some mixed-media paintings featured here, created using Japanese and mulberry papers, pencil sketches, gouache paint, and acrylic glazes over canvas. At her site, she writes: Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: Welcome once again to our weekly 7-Kicks list, the 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.

This week we’re featuring illustrator Philip Huber, who is a professor of art at Lock Haven University, a Fulbright scholar, received his Master’s degree in illustration and a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual communications at Syracuse University, and who illustrated this year’s A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry by Marjorie Maddox (also a professor at Lock Haven; Marjorie teaches English and is the director of the Creative Writing program there).

Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: It seems like just yesterday that we started featuring student or newly-graduated illustrators at the beginning of each month here at 7-Imp, but it’s already June. JUNE, I tell ya! And this is our sixth one. Yeesh, before you know it, it’ll be December and snowing. Where does the time go?

And we’re happy that illustrator James Hindle agreed to share some art work with us. He sent us a handful of images, but how can we not open up with cupcakes? (And cupcake tattoos and a cupcake belt buckle, at that. Has Fuse, the self-proclaimed cupcake fanatic, considered these things?). This is “Bake Sale” from 2007. James, who lives in Massachusetts, has some more illustrations and comics featured at his web site, WorryStories.com, and here are some of the ilustrations he sent us for today’s feature (the first, untitled; the second, “Bed Head”; and the third, “The Tall Man,” all from 2007): Read the rest of this entry �

Edited to add on Sunday night: I say, since folks were so busy today on this holiday weekend, that we leave this post up for a bit longer. If you are so inclined, feel free to leave your kicks on Monday, too (which you’re always welcome to do anyway)! Happy Memorial Day to all . . .

Edited to add on Monday: For a beautiful Memorial Day “Dedication,” go read Sara’s original poem.

Jules: Well, howdy, friends. Put on your best bib and tucker, ’cause we’ve got art work from one ace-high illustrator this week, the one and only Barry Moser, whose woodblock-
engraving illustrations in last year’s Cowboy Stories (Chronicle Books; September 2007) are being featured today. I’ve had this book for a while and have been slowly enjoying it, particularly Moser’s highly dramatic, black-and-white illustrations — all line and shadow and heroism and wonder. Yes, this is a round-up of tales of the quintessential American icon, the cowboy — from authors such as Louis L’Amour, Annie Proulx, Dorothy M. Johnson, Elmore Leonard, and much more.

And one reason I’m sharing these images this week is that my father-in-law, a true cowboy at heart, had a bit of a spill this week — fell off a horse and broke some ribs. He’s going to be okay, but these images are for him and all the other cowboys and cowgirls who get right back up and get back on their horses—in more ways than one—after they’ve been thrown off.

Read the rest of this entry �