The Year in Pictures, 2024 edition
what I did, what I'm doing
Hey, happy New Year!
Not quite? Almost.
Almost new. It’s Dec 31, New Year’s Eve. Almost happy? I don’t know how to feel about this transition from 2024 to 2025. Ask me in a year. A lot went wrong in 2024. One thing more than most. I’m less despondent than I was in early November, just after the election, I suppose. I make myself feel better by convincing myself that they’re all buffoons, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing either since it feels like I’m normalizing it, somehow. There is a pessimistic side of me that just sees everything sliding into some sort of dumb oblivion, and I think to hell with all of this, we get what we deserve. It would be easy to fall into some depressing stupor. Instead, I try to spend my time doing things I like doing, with people I love. I guess it’s what people describe as being intentional. I try to do something every day: make a thing, accomplish a task, learn something. Less doom, less scrolling. (I spent a lot less time on social media this year, and I’ve started wondering why everyone isn’t doing the same.1 )
This is my 28th issue of Random Orbit in 2024. And, as I did at the end of 2023, I’ll use it to sort of wrap up what I did and show off some of the things that were done.
If I were to categorize the last two years, I’d say that in 2023, I focused on drawing, and in 2024, I focused on writing. But apparently, that is entirely an internal feeling. It’s just where I feel like my focus was on my intents and expectations for the year. It wasn’t intentional, either. I began 2024 feeling somewhat frustrated about the writing and excited about the visual work I was making. I’d taken Mike Lowery’s class in 2023, I started teaching at Tyler School of Art, and I had opened several new doors to new sorts of illustration and design work. Mostly, this was work for grown-ups, as opposed to the children’s publishing I’d been doing exclusively for more than a decade. I planned to reach into the world of surface design, packaging, and editorial work, and have it slide in neatly next to the picture books I’m working on. I was frustrated with the two stories I’d been poking around on for years, one a science fiction middle-grade novel about the end of the world and another a picture book about a Stinkbug, and I didn’t really see any clarity or direction there.
Wood working
As 2023 rolled over into 2024, I was mostly excited about some work I was doing in wood.
This little skull figurine I designed and created in January gave me more satisfaction than anything I’d done in years. By the time I wrote about it here, I’d expected to be going down this road all year. I signed up for a jewelry class so I could add metal and stone elements to the work, and I’d sketched out dozens of small drawings that I’d planned to work on.
But then something happened. Namely, this newsletter.
Writing right
More specifically, I began using this newsletter to work out some of the frustrations I was having with my writing. The first several issues of Random Orbit were, to be honest, a real pain in the ass to put together. Writing didn’t come easily or naturally. The very act of writing helped this. But more importantly, I began writing about writing. And in doing so, the stories began to come into focus. One rainy day in March, on a bicycle ride with some friends, I imagined a story about an annoyed grasshopper. It was clear, it was good, and two weeks later, I had a first draft that I am still excited about. This story fell into place unlike anything I’d written before and was a perfect little companion to the Stinkbug story that I’d finally begun to wrangle into submission as well.
Writing leads to drawing2, of course. I immersed myself in this insect world I had spinning in my head, and my year shifted. I haven’t turned on the bandsaw in my studio in eleven months. Not how I thought things were going to go, but certainly the way they needed to.
And my god, I’ve enjoyed drawing these flowers and flies and beetles and grasshoppers and wrens and moths. These two stories have turned into three, and I’ll be updating this project as 2025 rolls along.3
Actual Books
I completed the work on two books in 2024. One was a picture book called Hard Hat Hank. The story was written by Charlotte Gunnufson, and the book will be published by Disney Hyperion this Spring.
The second was the follow-up to The Famously Funny Parrott, which is a chapter book written by Eric Daniel Wiener. The illustrations for this book were drawn in pencil, which is a process I like and hope to get a chance to do more of.
I’m deep into two new picture books as we turn the calendar over. One is a story about an arguing whale and an otter. The other is about a town whose buildings up and switch places overnight. More will be written about these here in 2025.
I had two books published in 2024. One was the Halloween eye-ball board book I wrote and illustrated, called On Top of Linguine. The other was a picture book written by Carrie Finison titled Pigs Dig a Road. I wrote about both books here.
Drawings for the grown-ups
My expansion back into making things for grown-ups did take place just not to the extent that I’d planned a year ago. This began in January with a call from Anton Klusener at the Philadelphia Inquirer asking me to draw a huge double-page spread for the newspaper. I had a blast making this illustration and wrote about it here.
Later in the year, I pitched a cover illustration to Tape Op magazine. It ran as the cover for their November issue.
I did some really fun work for some clients in the bike industry. A bike shop here in Philadelphia asked me to design a pattern for some jerseys. We did three colorways of the design, and later in the year, we made wind vests of the pattern as well.
One of my favorite bike events is UnPAved, a very difficult ride here in Pennsylvania. They asked me to design a hat and pint glasses for the ride this year. I like wearing hats and drinking beers and riding bikes, so this was a TOTAL WIN.
What I did on my summer vacation
My wife and I spent five weeks in the south of France this last summer. Oh, you knew that already? I expected to spend a lot of time there working-drawing. Instead, I spent a lot of time drawing-drawing. It was good drawing-drawing, but I returned way behind on everything. I did two drawings there that I hold onto. One was of the trees on the property we rented, and the other from walks we took into town.
And what I’m doing
If you follow Random Orbit, you know that I’ve been buried deep under thousands of scraps of paper since late summer. I have a collage show coming up at a local gallery/cafe, and the opening is on January 10.4 I’ve created twenty new collages, which I’ll be showing in the next issue of this newsletter. Here is a detail of the largest one (and my favorite), as well as an invitation to the opening (please come if you’re nearby!).
I’m attending a week-long collage workshop retreat in London in May, so expect collage to be present in 2025 as well.
I’ve already mentioned the new picture books I’m working on, and the insect stories, which will be pitched in 2025. I’m also working on a graphic novel pitch about an astronaut that I hope to make real this year. I wrote and illustrated a picture book called The Space Walk in 2019, and I’ve always wanted to get a re-do of this book. I rewrote the story, and I plan to make it longer, weirder, a little darker. And I plan to make it a graphic novel
I’ve felt frantic all year. I’m a naturally anxious person, but this feeling has been something more than that. The list of “things I am working on” isn’t that long, but each of the things is themselves somewhat huge and complicated. The insect stories, for example. Three stories and the shortest of them will be 72 pages. And the collages. Twenty of them. I love making collages, but I need to clean my studio! And picture books. When two picture books are the easy thing I’m doing, I’m in trouble.
That said, when I look at this year’s output, I feel slightly better. Mostly because a significant chunk of my work this year has been for things that are coming up in 2025 and beyond. I suppose it’s laying the groundwork. It takes time to dig a foundation and fill it with concrete, and the whole time, anyone walking by just sees a hole in the ground. Right now, I have a lot of holes in the ground.5
Thank you for subscribing and reading and commenting. And have a happy and safe new year.
-Brian
Is Substack social media? It seems to want to be. And people seem to use it that way. I hope it doesn’t just become another Facebook, another Instagram.
This is how it goes. I am an illustrator. I draw pictures. Unlike many writers who use illustrations to illuminate and accompany their stories, my writing is a vehicle for my drawings. I know where my bread is buttered.
I worry a little, as these stories don’t fit nicely into any of the various formats that children’s publishing seems to want to shoehorn everything into. The year began with me realizing that the stories weren’t picture books. They sort of feel like early readers, but they’re not so circumscribed as that. Are they chapter books? I hope an editor (and my agent!) can see past these “rules” and we can find a home for my bugs.
I really should be spending this New Year’s Eve in my studio, glueing things, rather than here writing things. I’m up against the wall.
May your holes get filled in 2025. (Can I write that here?)
Hi!
It seems like you have a ton of irons in the fire, actually.