Characters from a canceled storybook project. The doorman was sort of Mephistopheles and Dream Mom Helen of Troy. Dream Mom is supposed to be the ideal of a six-year-old boy. I tried to blend aspects of the dream girls from my earliest youth—Julie Newmar; Julie Andrews; Betty/Veronica; the girls’ gym teacher at my elementary school.
Rollie Ivers, my high school art teacher, passed on this week. I haven’t seen him for many years, but we exchanged news at Christmastime somewhat regularly. Mr Ivers taught me to consider a painting as a design. He always had us students draw at least 10 thumbnail sketches for every project—of course we hated doing […]
Way back when I was a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, a bunch of us got together and founded a society devoted to nothing more than throwing parties. This was back before cable tv, gameboys, x-boxes, iPods—so we had to amuse ourselves. Back in these primitive times, when boys and girls wanted to […]
Art for the Renaissance & Baroque Society of Pittsburgh—two German military musicians. Soldiers really wore these fantastic costumes 500 years ago.
Character sketches of bad moms from a canceled project, The Mother Store.
Others who are better than me forget to return library books on time.
The improbably mustachioed King Umberto and Queen Margherita come to visit Nini in his caffè— (By the way—yes, this is the Queen Margherita for whom the pizza is named.)
The jacket for The Famous Nini, and Dean Cornwell‘s inspiring illustration of a Venetian night scene.
Of all the images for a picture book, the jacket art gets the biggest going-over. I sent 4 rough thumbnail ideas to Kerry Martin, the senior design editor (in the olden days there was an art director and an editor; Kerry’s title reflects the melding of those 2 positions over the years). Number 2 was […]
Giuseppe Verdi makes his entrance in The Famous Nini. More research for Nonna’s costume can be found here.
