Jack's Sketchbook

Here is a father and son sketchbook collaboration- and no he wasn't drawing this during church!

This week in John Brown

A handful of JB related news items today:


Following a wonderful starred review, Publishers Weekly just selected John Brown as one of their Top 30 Books for Children from 2009! Incredible!


John Brown also won the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Medal for Books for Older Children.

Also, for all of you in St. Louis, this saturday, Nov 7th, I'll be doing a reading and signing my two recent books, John Brown and Abe Lincoln Crosses A Creek at the CCS Book Fair at Borders Bookstore in Brentwood. The reading starts at 12:30, but I'll be signing books starting at 11am.

Today in the Sketchbook

Villans! Famous Fictional...

The brilliant Dan Zettwoch invited me to participate in a show about famous villians. We were asked to make a diptych, selecting one villain from 20th century film, and another from pre-20th century literature. (I loved this assignment so much that I subjected my students to it as well.)



This gave me the rare opportunity to draw one of my childhood obsessions, The Raiders of the Lost Ark- along with all it's face-melting spectacle. From Raiders, I chose Rene Belloq. The ark opening scene was part of my young interior life. Whenever I thought of the twin sided mystery of God's Glory- beauty and judgement- I thought of this scene. Naturally, I chose the Headless Horseman as Rene's counterpart. (Few seem to remember Rene Belloq's demise quite like the other two because in order to secure a PG rating, Spielberg had to cover the Belloq's exploding head with translucent flames.) Part of the fun of this show was that I couldn't count of Photoshop to clean up all my errors, I really had to make the physical drawing count! So I used a bunch of media, colored pencils, block printing ink and brayers, watercolor and pen & ink.




The show will be at Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis, opening Friday November 6th. Hope to see you there!