Category: New Art

Everyone needs a Foot in the Door…

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One of my recently designed products has been added to the new 2008 collection at RISDWorks! There’s a press release here.

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This lovely piece o’work is called Foot in the Door, because, well-
it’s a doorstop. And it’s shaped like a shoe.
It’s FOOT IN THE DOOR!
Visit the FRED site for more stuff like this, or for a fun retail experiece, shop RISDWorks in person or online. They carry a bunch of my products: MonKeys, Chopstick Kids, Pony Tales, etc.

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Me and some of my stuff at RISDWorks a few weeks ago.

For the record, I have never owned a high-heeled shoe in my life.
No, wait. I take it back.
I have a doorstop shoe now.
That counts, right?
At least I don’t have to walk on it!

What’s In a Name?

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This is a mocked-up page from my upcoming pop-up book, What Kind of Rabbit Are You?.
Interestingly, this is not the name the book has had during it’s birth and lengthy development process- I have been calling it Rabbit Rainbow for years!

As a title, What Kind of Rabbit Are You? probably speaks more to the point of the book. It’s a baby’s first look at diversity and differences, as shown through bunnies! It is a line from the book’s text, too, so it makes sense.

Quite a few things have changed with this book as I have developed it with Little Simon, and I have to say they are good changes. The text has been edited down and tightened, and it is now a pop-up book (with Eric and I doing the actual paper engineering). The engineering made doing the art very different from flying straight though on a standard book- and the end result is WAAAAY more fun than my original dummy. I have LOVED working on this aspect of it!

Good news! This book will be available sooner than I thought…January 2008!

Do YOU Know the Muffin Man?

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A funny thing happened to me at the Target today. As I walked down the aisle, A DVD caught my eye. “Hooked on Baby.” It sounded familiar. Then I realized that it was the very DVD that has my Muffin Man sequence on it! That was a strange sensation- I guess I thought it would take longer for these to hit the stores, so I wasn’t expecting to see it. These film fellows work much faster than publishers!

Anyhow, I had done drawings for this DVD over the summer. It’s brought to you by the awesome people who created Reading Rainbow, together with the Hooked on Phonics/Educate Products folks. What a great job they did of “animating” it! They took my still drawings and added little film twists and turns- the muffins bounce around, the Man rotates- very cute and interactive. They also have live action sequences with real babies, and some of them have been superimposed on my backgrounds.

The most interesting part of this is that on TV the art looks big- really BIG- and happily, it holds up nicely. You can really appreciate the texture of the fabrics when they are blown up.

Got babies? I think they’ll like this! There are 3 DVDs in the series, this one is called Read, Rhyme & Clap. It’s got that Reading Rainbow feel, but for the younger set.

Something new

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Here’s a piece from a new project I am working on. This is a book for very young kids (which I am sure you could have guessed)!

I use real (digitally scanned) fabrics in my illustrations, and I have about 50 more new fabrics waiting to be scanned so I’ll have more texture/pattern options to work with. Before I can do that, though, I have to re-iron them, because my REAL cat Georgia keeps crumpling them up. She has decided that my previously very neat stack of fabric squares makes an ideal bed. I had to throw away about 10 fabric swatches the other day- you don’t even want to know what she did to those!

Vacation…a new perspective

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I just got back from traveling through New Hampshire, Canada, and Vermont. It was a welcome change of pace, and for the most part, a slower one than we’ve had lately. Construction of the studio is still underway, but we just packed up and left once the plaster went up. Hey, it had to dry for a week, anyway- so what better time! We were able to enjoy the slower pace, allowing the road to take us where it wanted. The kids certainly picked up all kinds of creative ideas from traveling, and so did I! I really want to carve my own totem pole for the house now! OK, I have wanted to do that for a while, but now I REALLY want to! All along the way, we met artists of all kinds, and got to see a lot of works, both “old” ones (like the Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe and Tasha Tudor exhibits at the Shelburne), and new (freshly made teddy bears at the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory!) Sometimes you really do have to drop everything and GO somewhere different.