spring cleaning

Or, something about April showers bringing May flowers?

Sacha asked me the other day if I’ve given up on the newsletter. This newsletter. I felt a little defensive. What? Of course not! I just sent out that one about the Creative Mornings talk back on… I counted back to April 2, the date of the last newsletter… three and a half weeks ago.

Huh, okay, that’s a little bit longer than I want to wait between issues of this newsletter. But I cut myself some slack, as it has been a busy three and a half weeks. Really busy. April has shaped up to be one of those months that, every day, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough done. But looking back, I realize this was because I just had these massive lists of things to do. And not just things, not just tasks, but big important things. So, I’m going to write this issue, the Friday April 26 edition of Random Orbit, kind of like a blog post of yester-year, where I literally send an update on what I have been doing in April!

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Books:

I feel like I should start by sort of closing a loop I began here, with this newsletter. This past Wednesday I sent off the completely rewritten Stinkbug script to my agent, along with a second story and a PDF full of images. What a relief, but also I pace around waiting to hear back from him. “Brian! These are amazing! Publishers are banging on the door!” Or will it be “Meh, cute, but needs work.”

When I went down that Stinkbug rabbit hole back in March, Stinkbug was expected to be a picture book. But at 800 words, and wanting to be more, it was just too big. When I started re-writing, agnostic about format, and just let the story be the story it wanted to be, it wanted to be 1450 words. So 1450 it is.

In addition to the new-and-improved Stinkbug story, I also included a story about a Grasshopper in this package to Steve, my agent. This story was conceived on my birthday bike ride, last month, in Valley Forge, with four good friends. I do much of my conceptualizing on bike rides, and the first rough outline was jotted down in a small notebook at an Irish pub in Phoenixville where we were having lunch and escaping the rain.

I finished writing Grasshopper (Mister Grasshopper, to you) one morning a week ago at Bob’s Diner, a neighborhood place where I go for eggs and bacon and coffee. I’d had about half of the story written, I knew what happened at the end, and I had the characters and situations set up to perform their parts. This is my favorite part of writing, where I sit and type and tell this story to myself and it feels more like I’m reading a story, or being told a story, then creating one. Grasshopper ended up at about 2800 words, which I worried was too long, so my main goal was to make sure it earned this length. I think it’s good. I hope it’s good. It made me laugh as I ate my eggs and bacon. It’s fun to read aloud.

A few days later, I went through Grasshopper with my editing pencil, got it to where I wanted it. On Tuesday I drew several little sketches to go with the package I sent to Steve, and on Wednesday morning I zipped it up in an email and hit send.

Cross fingers, and stay tuned.

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Two weeks ago, I finished 40+ illustrations for the follow-up to a book I illustrated in 2022, called The Famously Funny Parrott. These books are collections of stories about a dandy parrot and his butler, who is a peccary.¹ The books are written by Eric Daniel Weiner, and are really a delight to illustrate. I’d never illustrated a book with anthropomorphized animals as characters before these, and I’d never illustrated a book totally in pencil either. The drawings were sent off to Random House on April 12. Get a copy of the first one now, and the second one will be out on December 24 (!)

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I’m deep in the trenches of a book called Hard Hat Hank, written by Charlotte Gunnufson. This will be published next year by Disney/Hyperion as part of their Planet Possible initiative with National Geographic. It’s a picture book about a construction crew who discover a pair of birds nesting on top of a skyscraper they’re building. The sketches for this book got approved in late March, and I’m onto the final drawings now. This last week I drew the cover. I can’t really show any much of this right now, but here’s a little piece. This book will also be out in about a year.

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I am just starting work on yet another book. This one is written by the great Kate Messner, and it’s about a whale and an otter arguing over which of them is cooler. The trick here is that the book can be read in one direction, where the whale is telling its side, or back to front, where the otter is doing the telling. I love digging into books that have a mechanical twist, and this one is a real puzzle. I’ve been reading and re-reading this script, and had a call with the editor last week about it. I need to solve the structure of this book over the next month, but the heavy lifting will really start later in the summer.

I have nothing to show of this one, but here is a weird old drawing of a whale I found while digging for inspiration.

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Not books:

My friend Paul runs a small bike shop here in NW Philadelphia, and I occasionally do some work for him. Posters, flyers for races and events, and so on. He asked me to design a pattern for a bike jersey. It’s a lightweight merino wool jersey, made for the summer months, so the thought was to make it like a Hawaiian Aloha shirt. The shop sits on a trail-head in the Wissahickon Valley, the huge park a half mile from my house where I spend a lot of time on my bike, and where I learned to ride a mountain bike twenty years ago. This place is important to me, so I decided to make a pattern inspired by plants and flowers and trees found there. I watched a LOT of youtube and skillshare videos on making seamless patterns in Photoshop and Illustrator. This is something I would very much like to do a lot more of. Hint hint. The jerseys should be manufactured and ready to go in a few weeks. I’ll write more about it!

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More? Yes, more.
I was asked by the National Wildlife Federation to illustrate a dinosaur game for their kids’ magazine. This was drawn on the iPad in Procreate, and finished up in Photoshop. When it’s published, I’ll get it up on the illustration page of my website.

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Getting to the end here. On Wednesday, I taught my last class of the semester at Tyler School of Art, at Temple University. My third semester at Tyler, and I really loved this class. Some talented, curious students, who followed my encouragement to try new means and methods of making their work.

I teach one class that meets twice a week. Each Monday and Wednesday I find myself at the Manayunk train station waiting for the 7:34 train. My sister suggested that I take a photo each morning, and I’ve collected these images here and here.²

Speaking of photography, I’ve been feeling the itch to turn some real attention to snapping photos. I’ve loved taking pictures since I was in high school. I took a lot of classes in college and shot a lot of film in New York and Paris and on a spring break in Tunisia. Having no access to a dark room, however, I didn’t keep up with it until digital cameras came along in the early 2000s. I bought a Canon Rebel dSLR in 2005, took more than 16,000 photos in 2006, and my camera became a constant presence in my kids’ faces as they grew up.³

I go through periods of shooting a lot, then barely shooting at all, often defined around some traveling Sacha and I are doing. Well, we’re about to do some traveling, and I’m back at thinking about F-stops and Adobe Lightroom settings. We’re going to the south of France for five weeks, leaving on June 6. I have a decent little Canon point-&-shoot that I took to Iceland in 2022. But I’ve been Fuji-curious for a while, and picked up a used X100f rangefinder-style camera last week. I’ll be taking both the Canon and the Fuji to France, so expect to see some snapshots. Probably a lot of them.

The third picture I snapped with the X100f, and the look and detail blew my mind. Right out of the camera.

Now, as April becomes May, this France trip becomes a moving train that we have to catch. I’m not going to complain about getting ready to go to France for five weeks. But it has quickly gone from “oh neat, we’re going to France for five weeks!” to “Holy shit, we’re going to France for FIVE WEEKS!”

Sacha and I both plan to do a lot of work while we’re there. She’s setting up projects to dovetail with our time in Provence, and I’m trying to finish work here that I don’t want to take, and prepare work, mostly the Stinkbug and Grasshopper stories, that I do want to work on.

I expect to get another edition of Random Orbit out before we go, and then will likely put image-heavy missives out while we’re there. Restez à l’écoute!

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I’ve been obsessing over Arnold Lobel while working on the Stinkbug and Grasshopper stories. Will you just look at this beautiful drawing I found on an auctions site? It apparently sold for ~$15,000, a bit out of my range. But I just love it.

This 1973 video of an interview with Lobel. It’s fascinating for the production, for Lobel’s personality, and for the interviewers.

Finally read Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird. Worth it. Read it.

Lastly, an obligatory bizarre cat photo:

1. A peccary is a pig-like ungulate of the family Tayassuidae. They are found throughout Central and South America, Trinidad in the Caribbean, and in the southwestern area of North America. They usually measure between 90 and 130 cm in length, and a full-grown adult usually weighs about 20 to 40 kg. -Wikipedia

2. Inspired by several photographers who have done projects like this, specifically and probably most famously, the fictitious shopkeeper played by Harvey Keitel in Wayne Wang’s film, Smoke, based on Paul Auster’s book. https://psychogeographicreview.com/permanence-impermanence-auggies-pictures/

3. Pictures I took and posted on Flickr were used by Subaru in an ad campaign, National Geographic Traveler magazine in a story about holiday travel, and most famously, the US Postal Service used a picture I took of my kids in a national campaign for their custom postage stamps.