Goblin Summer Mini-Tour

Here is where you can find me this summer!

New Books, Studio Visits, and the Eisners

What a busy year it is! As I write this I am closing in on the last 30 Pages of Mighty Jack Book 2 (that's the best title I've got so far). I spent last week in Sicily visiting a school on the Sigonella Navy Base and when I returned the very first physical copies of Mighty Jack (book 1) were waiting on my desk. They look great! The paperback edition has spot gloss and fancy flaps! Here are a few pictures:

And here it is with Nobody Likes a Goblin:

Both books are available for preorder. Goblin releases on June 7th and Jack releases on September 6th. (I'll throw some permanent links up on the sidebar soon).

And so...

Last year my friends at Mirandum Pictures helped put together a little studio visit video for me. They were so patient with how much I wanted to cram into this video and even went so far as to climb up to a mountaintop for firebreathing. We totally got lost in the woods after dark on the way down. The video finally debuted over at Paste. You can follow that link or watch it here:

Finally on my list of things to mention today: Little Robot has been nominated for an Eisner Award! (Best publication for early readers). Remember, all industry professionals can vote here:

EISNER VOTING

Maybe you will vote for Little Robot? But I will be just as happy if you vote for my friend Liniers' lovely book Written and Drawn by Henrietta.

Little Robot and Children's Book Week

It's Children's Book Week, and I am all over the internet!

First off, it's always an exciting day when I receive my first real, physical copy of one of my books and that happened last week when Little Robot arrived in the mail! I was so excited opening the envelope that my hands were shaking. This is the first book I've had produced at this trim size and I've very happy with it. Here are some pictures:

There are more pictures of the book over on the First Second website RIGHT HERE.

And speaking of Little Robot, I made a new Little Robot strip for the Washington Post to celebrate Free Comic Book Day (which was on Saturday). Here's the comic:

(click to embiggerize).

It ran in the Post with a nice little interview in which I talked about the art and influences for the book. You can read all that over by CLICKING HERE.

On Sunday Boing Boing ran a short article I wrote about kids comics. I don't know if I said anything groundbreaking about comics for kids, but I did post a list of comics that I think are great for summer reading. Check out the Boing Boing piece by CLICKING IT UP HERE.

And finally (for now), there is a short piece over at Sharp Read about my next picture book. This book is about a Goblin. You can see some concept art read a little bit about where that book came from HERE. I'm sure I'll be posting more about this one in the coming months.

And there's more to come. I have a couple more book announcements coming up this week as well as a look into my Little Robot sketchbooks. So much is happening! Stay tuned.

And as always, to everyone reading, thanks for following my work.

Hermit Mode

(click image for a larger version)

I haven't been getting out a lot lately.

This job, making up stories and recording those stories in words and pictures, it's a funny business. Sometimes I get to travel around and meet lots and lots of people. Other times I am in "Hermit Mode" and I stay at home for days on end, writing and drawing through the day and into the night. I'm in Hermit Mode now.

If you've been following me online, whether through Twitter or Tumbler or this very blog, it will probably come as no surprise to you that I am currently working on a project that involves Goblins. The picture at the top of this post is from this story. The illustration is ink and watercolor -purely traditional media with no digital work. I thought it would be interesting to share the process that I use to reach the finished piece...

I start with the original doodle from the dummy book (I might have something to say about the writing process and the idea of dummy books in a later post). It is the quickest of sketches that shows my first idea of how the text (blurred out here) and illustration might go together:

Now I'm a big proponent of anchoring every story and every picture in something from life. In works of fantasy you will have to create some things from whole cloth, but if you are able to pull at least one or two elements from the world in front of your eyes those elements will act as an anchor. So for this picture I called up my friend Andy and we went out looking for an old cave that I had once spent the night in in college. That cave was going to be my anchor.

To get to the cave we had to take a short hike along the railroad track by the river. But the cave was just as I had remembered it.

Except this time it was guarded by a pair of Ice Sentinels.

(It's hard to tell without something there for scale but these guys were 2, maybe 3 feet high).

And a tiny bat:

But I got the photos I needed and a good Sunday mini-adventure to boot.

So the next piece of the process is taking a look at the various reference photos and playing with layouts. Layouts are about getting the shapes to work together in a pleasing way. It usually takes several tries.

Once I have a layout I'm really happy with I move on to pencils. For this picture I work in a nice dark pencil on a piece of 8.5X11 copy paper. Nothing fancy. Here are my final pencils:

Now it's time to break out the nice paper. Arches 140 pound hot press watercolor paper. I buy it in big sheets and cut it down to manageable sizes. Now I move the pencils over to the light box and trace the final lines onto the watercolor paper with a 4h pencil that makes a very light line:

Once I have the light pencil lines on the watercolor paper I ink over it with a combination of micron pens and a brush with India ink. I forgot to take a picture of this stage.

And then, when the inks are done, I just sort of throw watercolors at it until I think it's "finished." (I could do a whole post about watercolors, but this post is already long, and there are watercolorists out there that put me to shame):

Finally, I look at the finished illustration, try to figure out if I like it or not, and then move on to the next one.

It won't be winter forever.