03 Thursday Jan 2013
Posted in PHOTOGRAPHY
20 Saturday Oct 2012
Tags
artist as brand, cartoonist, cartoons, childrens books, comic strip, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, Levinland studio, lon levin, Lucky Kool, Nazis
Posted by Illustrators Journal | Filed under Lucky Kool
08 Monday Oct 2012
Tags
abstract art, artist as brand, charcoal, childrens books, illustration, illustrator, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, Levinland studio, lon levin, painter, technology
Posted by Illustrators Journal | Filed under EDITORIAL
02 Sunday Sep 2012
Posted in ARTICLES, Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, cartoonist, childrens books, digital media, drawing, illustrators journal, innovation, Levinland studio
Jon Berkeley (b.1962) is a Dublin-born illustrator and children’s author.
He travelled widely in the 1980s, working freelance in London, Sydney and Hong Kong before returning to Dublin in 1992, where he formed a loose coalition known as Baggot Street Central with other leading Irish illustrators Roger O’Reilly, P.J. Lynch and Angela Clarke. He has lived in Barcelona since 1997.
His illustrations appear in high-profile publications worldwide, including Time, the Sunday Independent, Backbone and The Washington Post, and regularly feature on the cover of The Economist. His 2003 Economist cover on obesity has since been reproduced in over a dozen publications.
Jon Berkeley’s work typically features a strong central concept with a twist. He is also known for his sharp and colourful caricatures which have appeared in The Sunday Times UK, Hot Press andThe LA Times among others. He has received awards from the Society of News Design, the 4A’s, and the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design.
WritingBerkeley is the author and illustrator of Chopsticks (2005), the story of a mouse who brings to life a carved Chinese dragon.
In 2005 he was offered six-figure advance by Harper Collins to write a trilogy of children’s novels. The first of these, The Palace of Laughter was shortlisted for the 2007 CBI Bisto award. Its sequel, The Tiger’s Egg, was released in September 2007. The third and final book in the series, The Lightning Key, was released in January 2009. The series, illustrated by Brandon Dorman, is set in and around a sinister circus, and features such colourful characters as a 400-year-old girl, a talking tiger and a stately dowager who lives in a tree. It has been described by Angie Sageas ‘a vivid journey of discovery.’
Berkeley’s latest book, The Hidden Boy, was published in February 2010. It is the first in a new series about a young girl who wins ‘the Holiday of a Lifetime’. She and her family are transported to a strange hidden world, only to find that there is no way back.
09 Thursday Aug 2012
Posted in Happy Birthday
Tags
cartoonist, cartoons, childrens books, digital media, drawing, illustration, illustrators journal, lon levin, Posey Simmonds, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio
Interview with Posey Simmonds about Flaubert is pretty interesting if you got ten minutes to spare.
Rosemary Elizabeth “Posy” Simmonds studied fine art at the Sorbonne in Paris and graphic design at the Central School in London. In 1969, she began her first daily cartoon feature ‘Bear’ in The Sun. In 1972 she moved to The Guardian as an illustrator. In 1977, she recalled one of her childhood favorites ‘The Silent Three’, originally drawn by Evelyn Flinders in the 1950s. In 1981 Simmonds produced the original graphic novel ‘True Love’. Besides making short satirical strips, she also made a free interpretation of the Flaubert novel ‘Madame Bovary’ for The Guardian in 1999, called ‘Gemma Bovery’. She is also the author and illustrator the children’s books ‘Lulu and the Flying Babies’ and ‘Fred’, whose film version was nominated for an Oscar. In 2005 she made another reworking of a 19th century novel, this time ‘Tamara Drewe’, which is based on the Thomas Hardy book ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’.
06 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, cartoonist, childrens books, innovation, levinland, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio
Barbara Cooney and her twin brother were born on August 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, where they lived for only two weeks before moving to Long Island. Cooney’s father was a stockbroker; her mother was an artist. She attributes her interest in art to the fact that tubes of paint, brushes, paper and other art supplies were readily available as she grew up. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in art history from Smith College in 1938, Cooney studied lithography and etching at the Art Students’ League in New York City. In 1940 she illustrated Bertie Malmberg’s Ake and His World. In 1941 the first of her own books, King of Wreck Island, was published.
In 1942 Cooney joined the Women’s Army Corps and later that same year married Guy Murchie, a war correspondent and author. They had two children. Murchie and Cooney divorced in 1947, and in 1949 she married C. Talbot Porter, a medical doctor. They also had two children.
Cooney draws what is familiar to her. Many of the plants drawn for her Caldecott-winning book Chanticleer and the Fox, an adaptation of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest Tale,” were from her own garden. Chickens, borrowed from a neighbor, also served as models. Many of her more than eighty books have resulted from her travels to Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, England, France, Haiti, India, Tunisia and Greece. Early in her career, Cooney worked primarily in scratchboard. Later she began working in pen and ink, pen and ink with wash, casein, collage, watercolor, and acrylic, illustrating books written by both herself and others.
Cooney won the Caldecott Medal in 1959, the University of Southern Mississippi’s Silver Medallion in 1975 and the Smith College Medal in 1976. She has illustrated a number of award-winning books, including Green Wagons, Kildee House, Miss Rumphius, Ox-Cart Man,Too Many Pets, When the Sky Is Like Lace, and Squawk to the Moon, Little Goose.
29 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, artwork, Betty Page, cartoonist, childrens books, Dave Stevens, digital media, drawing, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, nude sketch, Rocketeer, social media, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio
Dave Stevens (July 29, 1955 – March 11, 2008) was an American illustrator and comics artist. He is most famous for creating The Rocketeer comic book and film character, and for his pin-up style “glamour art” illustrations, especially of model Bettie Page. He was the first to win Comic-Con International’s Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award in 1982, and received both an Inkpot Award and the Kirby Award for Best Graphic Album in 1986.
The Rocketeer was an adventure story set in a pulp fiction-styled 1930s (with allusions to heroes like Doc Savage and The Shadow emphasizing the pulp tradition), about a down-on-his-luck pilot named Cliff Secord who finds a mysterious rocket pack. Despite its erratic publishing history, Rocketeer proved to be one of the first successful features to emerge from the burgeoning independent comics movement. Influenced by Golden Age artists Will Eisner, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Maurice Whitman, Frank Frazetta and Wally Wood, Stevens was widely recognized, along with artists such as Steve Rude and Jaime Hernandez, as one of the finest comic book artists of his generation.
The first comic book featuring Stevens’ signature Rocketeer character was released in 1982. Those first stories appeared as a second feature in issues #2 and #3 of Mike Grell’s Pacific Comics’ Starslayer series. For its next two installments, Steven’s feature moved to the anthology comic title Pacific Presents #1 and #2. The fourth chapter ended in a cliffhanger that was later concluded in a lone Rocketeer comic released by Eclipse Comics.The character was then continued in the Rocketeer Adventure Magazine, with two issues being published in 1988 and then 1989 by Comico Comics; a third and final issue was published six years later in 1995 by Dark Horse Comics. Stevens’ extensive background research and meticulous approach to his illustrations contributed to the long delays between Rocketeer issues. 
The first completed story line was then collected into a graphic novel by Eclipse Comics, in both trade paperback and hardcover formats, and simply titled The Rocketeer (ISBN 1-56060-088-8); the second story line was collected into a glossy trade paperback graphic novel by Dark Horse called The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure (ISBN 1-56971-092-9).
IDW Publishing announced a hardcover edition collecting the entire series for the first time, due originally in October 2009. Dave Steven’s The Rocketeer, The Complete Adventures would contain all-new coloring by Laura Martin who was chosen by Dave Stevens before his untimely death. The book finally appeared in December of that year in two separate states: A trade hardcover edition with full color dust jacket and a second, more lavish, deluxe hardcover edition (ISBN 978-1-60010-537-1) of 3000 copies. The deluxe edition sold out almost immediately upon publication, and IDW announced a second printing.
In 2011 IDW launched an all-new Rocketeer comic book series, illustrated by various artists, called Rocketeer Adventures; the series features four quarterly issues per year (the second series of four began appearing in May of 2012). The four 2011 issues were then collected by IDW and published in hardcover as a graphic novel. All four issues in each series offers additional variant covers in shorter-run editions, some of them reprinting Stevens original Rocketeer cover art in both full color and just black and white.
Stevens began developing a Rocketeer film proposal in 1985 and sold the rights to the Walt Disney Company, which produced the 1991 film The Rocketeer. The film was directed by Joe Johnston, and starred Billy Campbell,Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin and Timothy Dalton. Stevens co-wrote the screenplay and was a hands-on co-producer of the film. It received a mixture of highly positive and lukewarm reviews and disappointing domestic ticket sales, insuring no immediate sequels would follow. Dave Stevens always felt that a majority of the problem was that the studio’s movie poster and promotional graphics were over-stylized, vague, and didn’t convey to people what the film was all about.
Following The Rocketeer, Stevens worked primarily as an illustrator, doing a variety of ink and painted illustrations for book and comic book covers, posters, prints, portfolios, and private commissions, including a number of covers for Comico’s Jonny Quest title and a series of eight covers for various Eclipse titles, which were also published in the form of large posters. Much of his illustrations were in the “good girl art” genre. He also returned to art school to study painting.
Following several years of struggling with uncommon hairy cell leukemia, which caused a gradual reduction in his artistic output, Stevens died on March 11, 2008 in Turlock, California.
Artist Laura Molina, with whom Stevens had a romantic relationship in the late 1970s, used him as the subject of her controversial Naked Dave series of paintings.
In 1980 Stevens married longtime girlfriend Charlene Brinkman, later known as horror film scream queen Brinke Stevens; their marriage ended in divorce just six months later, but she later modeled for her ex-husband.
Two characters that show up in the Rocketeer stories were based on personal acquaintances of Stevens: the “Peevy” character on cartoonist Doug Wildey and the sleazy “Marco of Hollywood” character on real life glamor and porn photographer Ken Marcus.
Stevens was a longtime admirer of 1950s glamor and pin-up model Bettie Page; he modeled the look of the Rocketeer’s girlfriend after her and featured her image in other illustrations too, which helped contribute to the renewed public interest in Page and her modeling career. After discovering that the retired Page was still alive and lived near by, Stevens became friends with her, providing both personal assistance and helping to arrange financial compensation to her from various publishers for the use of her image and reprints of her many glamor and pin-up photos.
At the time of his death, Stevens was working on a career retrospective collection of his work to be titled Brush with Passion – The Life and Art of Dave Stevens from Spectrum Publishing. That book was finally published by Underwood Books in 2008.
His work has had a significant influence on comic book and fantasy illustrators,among them Adam Hughes.
“Dave had more artistic integrity than anyone I’ve ever known. He always marched to his own drummer whether it benefited him financially or not. He turned down many lucrative job offers — including a monthly pin-up assignment for Playboy offered by Hugh Hefner as a replacement for their regular Alberto Vargas feature — when they didn’t jibe with his own highly personal vision of what he should be doing. As a businessman, Dave often drove his close friends nuts. We’d watch in astonishment at the riches passing him by.” – William Stout
“Dave was truly one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life… and was certainly among the most gifted. Our first encounter was at Jack Kirby’s house around 1971 when he came to visit and show Jack some of his work. As I said, Kirby was very encouraging and he urged Dave not to try and draw like anyone else but to follow his own passions. This was advice Dave took to heart, which probably explains why he took so long with every drawing. They were rarely just jobs to Dave. Most of the time, what emerged from his drawing board or easel was a deeply personal effort. He was truly in love with every beautiful woman he drew, at least insofar as the paper versions were concerned.” – Mark Evanier
“Well, I do expect a lot of myself. I’m a harsh critic because I know what I’m capable of. I have hit those occasional peaks amongst the valleys, but the peaks are so few-things like genuine flashes of virtuoso brush inking, like I’ve never executed before or since-I can count on one hand the number of jobs where I’ve been able to hit that mark. The same with penciling. Sometimes it just flows, but more often than not, it’s pure physical and spiritual torment just to get something decent on paper. I often get very discouraged with the whole creative process.” – Dave Stevens
01 Sunday Jul 2012
Tags
artist as brand, childrens books, dave mcPhail, digital media, illustration, illustrator, illustrators journal, innovation, Levinland studio, publisher's weekly, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, technology
Recognized as one of the most influential and prolific children’s writers in the country, David McPhail has been a passionate artist since the age of two. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and began illustrating books for children in 1972. Since then, he’s created over 75 books, including the celebrated Mole Music, which was a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year.
David McPhail is an award-winning author and illustrator of more than forty books for children, including Santa’s Book of Names, to which Edward and the Pirates is a sequel. His other books include The Party, which Publishers Weekly called “a spirited blend of fantasy and gentle merriment”; First Flight, which the New York Times praised as “hilarious and helpful at the same time”; and Lost! which was chosen as an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists. David McPhail lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
01 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, caldecott award, cartoonist, childrens books, Emily Arnold McCully, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, twitter
McCully’s simple, warm and sweet stories and characters are the essence of what writing and illustrating for children is about. Her career is also one to look at when you think about how long it may take as a writer/ illustrator to get your worked published. Even a successful illustrator, like McCully had to wait twenty years to get her own words and pictures published. The long wait was worth it.
Caldecott medalist Emily Arnold McCully has been in the children’s book field for nearly thirty years. She was born in Galesburg, Illinois and raised on Long Island, by her father, Wade, a writer of network radio shows and her mother, Kathryn, a teacher. She credits her mother as her early inspiration, and teacher of discipline and perseverance in her early artistic efforts. Her mother, encouraging her independence saw her artistic talent as a skill that may support her someday. As a child she was very innovative. She wrote and illustrated her own stories, bound them and gave them a copyright date. McCully was not only a child artist and writer but an entrepreneur. She illustrated postcards, greeting cards, scenery, portraits and copies of the old masters and then set up a stand to sell her work at the end of her driveway. McCully attended Pembroke University (now Brown University) with the intention of becoming an artist but instead opted to concentrate on theater and art history which became her major in undergraduate and graduate school. After graduation she held odd jobs in the art field, as a commercial artist, a designer of paperback covers and illustrating advertisements. She came to children’s illustration in a “roundabout way”. In 1966 a children’s book editor saw some of her artwork on an advertisement in the subway and suggested she consider illustrating Greg Panetta’s Sea Beach Express. She accepted and has gone on to illustrate over 100 children’s books. In 1969 she illustrated Meindert de Jong’s Journey from the Peppermint Express which was the first children’s book to receive the National Book Award. After almost twenty years of contributing art to books by other authors she made her solo publishing venture with Picnic, the wordless picture book about a family of mice. Picnic won the Christopher Award in 1985. McCully has continued to contribute entertaining, memorable characters to children’s literature: Zaza, Blanche, Grania, Felix and Little Kit. In 1993 she won the Caldecott Medal for Mirette on the High Wire, which introduced the independent, dare devil tight-rope walker, Mirette. The sequel to Mirette on the High Wire will be published in 1997. Ms. McCully divides her time between New York and her country home. She is an organic gardener, avid reader, cook, tennis player and participant in theater productions. She has also written adult short stories and novels. Ms. McCully is the mother of two grown sons, Nathaniel and Ted. Emily Arnold McCully offers words of advice to aspiring artists and writers. “Don’t worry about what other people are doing. Don’t try to emulate. Work from what is inside you, crying out—-however softly, however timidly—-for expression.”
Source: Through the Looking Glass Children’s Book Reviews
20 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in INTERVIEW
Tags
blogtalk radio, Chet the Architect, childrens books, design, guggenheim, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, kathryn Koller, levinland, Manhattan, museums, New York City
Today at 3PM PST Host of “This Week In Digital Media” Lon Levin interviews Kathy Koller, writer and author of Chet The Architect: Shows You NYC Museum Mile.
The book is a wonderful companion for any cild or adult traveling in the city who wants to know more about the historic sites. Aside from being informative it is also an activity book for kids who can draw or color to their heart’s content while learning nifty facts about the museums around town.
Listen in at 3PM pst today to hear Kathy and Lon discuss this terrific project. “This Week In Digital Media” is a production of the Illustrators Journal and it’s parent company XanateMedia, strategists for the social media and digital communications space, with expertise in the nexus between art and its commercial applications. The company’s focus is health(care), health and wellness, action sports, e-publishing and entertainment verticals.
This link to the broadcast is http://www.blogtalkradio.com/xanatemedia/2012/06/20/this-week-in-digital-media-with-kathy-koller
