Beloved Children’s Book Author and Illustrator Maurice Sendak passed away earlier this morning at the age of 83. His career spanned 65 years and included a Caldecott Medal for his 1963 book Where The Wild Things Are.
Sendak at work in his studio.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak, from "The First Shlemiel," by I.B. Singer
Proposed image for The Hobbit collaboration with J.R.R. Tolkien
Where The Wild Things Are
Where The Wild Things Are
Hi back again, I decided to share some info about the prehistoric paintings located in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave located in southern France.
These caves contain the earliest known cave paintings discovered so far. The paintings date to the Aurignacian era (30,000-32,000 years ago) and were discovered in 1994. Hundreds of animals have been depicted including horses, reindeer, cave lions, bears, owls, panthers, bison, and rhinos.
The Chauvet Cave walls are the canvas for the world’s oldest known art work! It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. The drawings are predominantly done in charcoal blended and shaded by hand just like today. There is a sense of composition and pictorial depth in the way the animals are intentionally overlapped and interspersed. The sophistication of these drawings is obvious when you consider their age.
The caves are not open to the public, in fact they have been sealed off with a solid door and are under 24 hour surveillance, only authorized persons who follow a set protocol are permitted to enter the caves for research purposes. Director Werner Herzog was granted privileged access to the caves and filmed and released Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) a 3D documentary about the Chauvet Cave art and it’s inhabitants. I doubt if access will be granted for a Roy and the Rhino research project, so this movie might be as close as I get.
I wonder how these people found the time to create works of art when living in an environment filled with all the physical challenges and threats they encountered daily. I can picture them gathered around a fire at night using these images to tell stories of a woolly rhinoceros or two crashing through the forest, and of a hunter from the group that’s not paying attention, almost being stampeded . Sounds like a good idea for a children’s book.
Zdenek Burian
Running a little behind over here at the moment, so here’s a quick post while we work up the next epic full length blog. I recently made a connection with a blogger named Aputsiaq from Denmark who posts imagery about everything and anything snails (photos, art, books, etc…). She recently used a couple pictures from Roy and the Rhino that contain snail art, and kindly gave the book a mention also. The name of her site is S for Snail and it is definitely the place to go to get your fill of everything Mollusca Gastropoda. I dug up a couple snail studies sketched for the book and decided to include them here. Enjoy!
Hi, I know its been awhile, so I decided to continue with the Printmaking Process used for the cover of Roy and the Rhino. I was about to remove the rhinos ear in the previous post, and that’s where I will pickup from.
After removing the rhinos ear with the scraper and burnisher tools (what a process the whole time I worked on this plate I thought there has to be an easier method for correcting mistakes) anyway after removing the ear I re-etched it and pulled another proof. I was satisfied with the results, the ear now looked like it belonged on a rhino not a rabbit. I just went through and reinforced some of the line work on this next proof and decided it was time to add a background to the image before I started a final fine tuning.
I had envisioned a background sky at dusk so the sky would have had a gradual gradation from dark at top to a bright sunset on the horizon. I was going to use an Aquatint to achieve this. Before I started I decided to try a test and see what a color background would look like. I took a couple of pieces of printmaking paper, made a paper mask, and airbrushed a back and foreground in. I was then going to print on top of this and get a rough idea of how a sky would look. I was so used to working in reverse that I made my mask backwards and didn’t realize this until I was in the studio ready to print.
I have always been curious about how this would have turned out, and until now never thought to take a look. I opened the image in Photoshop flipped it horizontally and placed it on top of the image I was working on at that time. It would have been a lot easier to do this from the start, wish I would have thought of this earlier.
That’s all for this week… back with more info shortly. One more thing before I signoff, we are strong supporters of pro ecology issues here at 4C’s Studio and were just made aware of a recent issue Natural Resources Defense Council alerted us about. Some foreign owned mining companies want to dig one of the world’s largest open-pit mines in the heart of the watershed that feeds Bristol Bay, Alaska. The world’s largest sockeye salmon streams run through here and the effects of this mining could have devastating effects on the entire ecosystem of this area. They are going to mine for gold and copper, I mean seriously how much more damage are we going to do to this planet before we reach a tipping point and cannot undo all the damage we have done. Some people would have you believe that we can do whatever we want to the earth because God will put a band aid on it and make it all better, that is like comparing us to little babies, let’s grow up and take some responsibility for this gift that was given to us. Anyway take a look at their site and help spread the message about these urgent problems. Thanks for looking.
Hello again! Let’s get back to where we left off.
Because I created all of my art at 18″x 24″ dimensions it was easier for me to do a full illustration in parts, basically a piece would be worked up in quarter page sections so I could keep everything in check. Once I had the whole picture roughed out I would work up the details a bit at a time.
Once I had all the elements of my picture in place I transferred everything onto my final paper and worked the whole picture up in pencil. Making pictures up out of your head can be quite a challenge especially if everything is based on our reality. This landscape doesn’t exist as far as I know, so it was up to me to make it as plausible as I could without any photo references to work from, until…
I decided to build a model of the landscape so I could get a better idea on the placement of shadows etc… This picture takes place at sunrise and I was not sure how this would effect the position of the tree shadows and Leroy’s silhouette. I constructed this set out of cardboard tubes and brown butcher paper, I placed a light at the horizon line about 12′ away (the max distance I could get in that room) and took a few photos. I am really not set up for any kind of good photography, but this image was a enough to get me by.
Before I started any final inking I did a bunch of studies to get my confidence up and to solve any problem areas beforehand, and once satisfied I worked up the finished piece. I hope these ” making of ” posts are of some value to anyone considering an artistic endeavor of their own. This project was quite intimidating because I am pretty much a self taught artist, and being self taught usually equals making a lot of mistakes. I always learned something from the mistakes, but would have welcomed any information about the picture making process I could have been taught. See you next time.
