Princess Leia, slightly older

A quick portrait for an interview with Carrie Fisher about her new book and one-person show "Wishful Drinking"- for More Magazine.

Enlighten!

I was asked with a bunch of other great illustrators to design a custom lampshade as part of a benefit for Inner-City Arts in LA. It was fun to combine some of my drawings with the problem of projecting light through the back of them.

Here is a 3-D comp of the lamp they are selling with my drawings on it. It is a limited edition of only three... and here is the full art below. $200 bucks each, and you get the lamp too!

American Illustration 28

Over the summer, I was given the extreme honor of working with Matthew Lenning on the art for this years American Illustration annual, number 28. Truly, I've never had a project that produced as much emotional anxiety as this did over the three months we worked on it together. I would often wake up in the middle of the night with new ideas, forced to go to the studio and get them down before I could sleep again. A few shots of the final book, from the vendor.






I've made a long and detailed post on the process over at my corner of the illustration blog Drawger. Head over there for much more on how this came together.

Freeway Series

Growing up in St. Louis, I love baseball- so I'm always up to take any work diamond-related illustration. This cover for the Playoff Preview for The Los Angeles Times represents the hope of greater So-Cal for a 'freeway-series' between the Dodgers and the Angels. (No chance.) With the team colors, it seemed an opportunity to draw the fans and players connected to the quintessential LA architectural feature- the overpass. Thanks to Derek Simmons for the great gig.

Paint-By-Number

I'm revealing my dark secret- all my work is actually paint-by-number! I discovered a vast catalog of unused P-B-# illustration at a rummage sale and have fabricated an entire career out of my lucky find!

Actually, this is the upcoming cover of Hemispheres, the United Airlines in-flight magazine. I did one for them a few months back (giant panda with cute sailboats, etc.) The topic was awesome, the revitalization of New Orleans. But, I had to put the tendency to draw disasters in my back pocket. You may not be aware of this, but in-flight magazines are mandated to be incredibly perky.




My favorite two ideas above.
The first a play on 'Re-NEW ORLEANS' (probably a trite play on words by now) with colorful parade behind French Quarter porch row. The second a paint-by-number, with the uncolored part being destroyed by the hurricane and the colored in part being restored back to glory. I thought this was a nice nod to the events of August 2005, without being too gloomy. But, even that amount of gloom was too much. So, I revised the sketch to show the band coloring the town with their music (or something.)



A shot of the pile of reference I had to track down. One hard task: create a true sense of an environment you really aren't able to see first hand. For something as iconic as the French Quarter, you really have to know what you are drawing.



It was something of at trick to get the image to appear like it was being colored in when the way I work involves black lines (not blobs of color shapes like a traditional P-B-#). I was really concerned it wasn't working about halfway through the inking... then started using more black and it popped out. Without all the solid blacks, the blue lines just looked like they were turning into black.

Booklist Profile

The nice people at the library journal, Bookpage, decided to do a feature on me in the October issue, in connection with the John Brown book. It is an illustrated Q&A they send to illustrators to have fun with- always the same questions each issue. Hope you learn something new- most of you will not.

CA Story -Up Close

I've had many people asking to read the Communication Arts story- so I wanted to post it here. Though it is online at the Communication Arts website, you have to be a subscriber to read it. The four spreads are here along with the story written by Tiffany Meyers, a delightful freelance reporter from Chicago.

Highlights include: Fourth paragraph shout out to my favorite quasi-hipster coffee shop, Meshuggah, in the St. Louis Loop- former art director of the New York Times, Brian Rea, saying I have too much drawing ability and a closing paragraph that is way too good to be an actual quotation.

__________

John Hendrix

By Tiffany Meyers

It’s a good thing that, when John Hendrix said he’s “a passionate believer in Jesus,” it was over the phone. Otherwise, he’d have seen the rude double-take happening on the other end. Hendrix is 33. He’s articulate, unreasonably talented and an SVA grad—all fairly strong indicators of someone with ironic sensibilities.

But now, it’s clear that the fire-and-brimstone drawings scattered about his blog, are not ironic. Rendered “pew side” during church sermons, they’re Hendrix’s sincere attempts to make sense of, say, false idols, God’s glory and the Pentecost.

Hendrix, who describes himself as “very much a guy with a sketchbook,” feels most at home as an artist when drawing. It shows. The church sketches are freer and weirder (in the good way) than anything you’d expect from church. They’re also much funnier. Whatever serious stuff he’s working through in his head, he’s also clearly having fun with the surreal tropes of Biblical scripture. There are robots. Nearsighted rabbits. And dry bones, rising from the dead.

Later, in a St. Louis coffee shop named, hilariously, Meshuggah, Hendrix talks openly about being a young, evangelical Christian illustrator in a secular world. In his T-shirt layers (short-sleeve over long), Hendrix fits in at Meshuggah, where Washington University hipsters and—educated guess—Lit Crit majors drape themselves across varied pieces of furniture.

Critical of the inclination for some Christian artists to relegate themselves to the “Christian art ghetto,” Hendrix never went in for the idea that he had to choose between making art for the secular world and being a Christian. And he’s committed to debunking the notion that Christians can’t also live a life of intellectual rigor and reason.

In fact, Hendrix grew up professionally in a stronghold of intellectual rigor and reason, when his 2003 grad-school internship at the New York Times’ Op-Ed page turned into a post as assistant art director. Working under art directors Steven Guarnaccia and Brian Rea until 2005, when he was offered a Washington University teaching job, Hendrix had the terrifying pleasure of talking shop with the likes of Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd and David Macauley (pleasure) and occasionally requesting different ideas on The Times’ behalf (terror).

Hendrix also illustrated letters on occasion, working on tight deadlines. “It really was the Xtreme Sports of illustration,” says Hendrix, who loved working with the intense, politically fraught subject matter. “I wanted to be a part of that page in a newsy way. I wanted that responsibility.”

Today, Hendrix’s editorial work has appeared in Time, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, WIRED, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, earning recognition from American Illustration, Society of Illustrators and Communication Arts, among others. Hendrix is also something of the go-to guy for calamity illustrations.

Annually, “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” estimates how close we are to the end. In Hendrix’s 2007 illustration, the world—ravaged by flood—hurtles toward obliteration. You’ll recognize the central figure—a Satanic, horned bird with freaky blue talons—from the medieval hellscape of “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Hendrix’s “Doomsday” gets its party atmosphere from action-packed, miniaturized vignettes scattered throughout: Melting icecaps, concerned penguins, evil scientists, genetically mutated octopi. If this is Armageddon, it’s Armageddon on a sugar high—as if you’ve binged on the horribly fun, make-it-stop-no-don’t candy of a Roald Dahl book.

“With John, you get this overabundance of drawing ability,” says Rea, who was sad to see Hendrix go in 2005, even as he encouraged him to take the next step. “And he draws those vignettes with an overabundance of detail—without ever losing sense of the whole. Within all those elements, there’s tremendous storytelling. For an illustrator to be able do all that, is unique. It’s the kind of thing you see in some of the greats.”

As a young artist, Hendrix resisted his overabundant drawing ability, since Serious Art happened with a paintbrush. But life kept nudging him back. While reviewing Hendrix’s tightly rendered, dry brush paintings at a college art fair, Jon Swindell, a University of Kansas (KU) professor, asked about the sketches and comic books hiding in the back of his book.

Hendrix thought he’d been found out: Oh, those aren’t meant to be there. They’re just nothing.

But Swindell recognized an illustrator in Hendrix, who lit up at the professor’s description of illustration, starting at KU in 1994. Not that he ditched the dry brushwork; he graduated with a dual degree in design and illustration, and a pile of paintings. “I was trying to make them important. That was my first mistake.”

By the time he got to grad school, Hendrix was working overtime to ignore an uncomfortable feeling he had about the important paintings. But when SVA instructor David Sandlin noticed Hendrix working on a piece in red and blue pen, he told his student to stop. He was done.

“What makes John’s drawings great is that you can see the artist’s thought process,” says Sandlin, who remembers Hendrix explaining ardently that this was just the under-drawing for a painting. “They’re full of his off-the-cuff, improvised sense of humor. I thought he was losing some of that in the paintings.”

Eventually, Sandlin convinced his student to put the brush down and back slowly away from the drawing. For his thesis on disasters large and small, he depicted a zeppelin, crashing in to a water tower. When American Illustration accepted it—a mere drawing—scales fell. “It blew my mind. I realized, OK, the stuff I love to do and the stuff I’m doing aren’t the same.”

In April 2009, the tenure-tracked Washington University professor sits in his attic studio, reviewing a stack of color proofs for John Brown: His Fight for Freedom (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2009), which he wrote and illustrated. And he’s feeling like life is good in the land of books. With his ultra-thin, “recipe for insanity” pens, over which he uses fluid acrylics, the illustrations are full of rich detail and Hendrix’s signature, hand-drawn type. But from start to end, he sustains the same, free immediacy of drawing.

Hendrix got hooked on books when he illustrated Deborah Hopkinson’s Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek (Random/Schwartz & Wade Books, 2008). Already, he’s illustrating another: Marisa Moss’s story of spy Sarah Emma Edmonds, who dressed as a male soldier during the Civil War (Abrams Books, 2010).

His adventures with Brown started at a 2003 portfolio review, when a Scholastic art director saw a Brown drawing from Hendrix’s thesis. She suggested a book. Hendrix didn’t take it too seriously, but then she called: Did he have anything to show yet?

Absolutely, Hendrix lied, which was not very Christian of him. But he cranked out a dummy book, landing a deal with Scholastic in a matter of weeks. When Scholastic later decided that Brown was too controversial, Hendrix approached Abrams with success.

Brown wanted his 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry to broadcast the message that the fight to abolish slavery was on. But it failed, and Brown was hung at the gallows. Since then, he’s polarized Americans. Many support a theory that Brown was a fanatic who killed in the name of God. Others, including Hendrix, believe he was a freedom fighter who, however imperfect, awakened a complacent nation to slavery’s brutality.

That’s a lot of gray area for a children’s book, even if you share Hendrix’s conviction that kids can handle ambiguity. In order to tell the whole, violent truth while protecting his readers, he wrote the story with factual remove, leaving the bloodshed and broadswords out of the illustrations altogether.

But this is John Hendrix, drawer of horned birds. So in early iterations, his apocalyptical leanings tried to sneak in. At one point, Abrams suggested that Hendrix’s depiction of Brown on the cover was slightly too: “Saturn about to eat his children.”

So Hendrix did what any self-respecting child of the mid-’70s would do and researched Superman imagery, fusing his gestures with those he found in Moses imagery. On the final cover, Brown is mission-driven and mentally stable.

Had Hendrix plucked from history one of the myriad heroes we pretty much all agree on, he’d have made things way easier. But he stuck with his flawed protagonist, even when his first publisher wouldn’t, in part because he identifies with Brown.

Hendrix’s faith doesn’t come up in professional contexts, so it’s not like anyone’s calling him a fanatic. But the fact of his evangelical Christianity does make him vulnerable to people’s knee-jerk assumptions and, well, double takes. “We come from a similar faith background,” says Hendrix of Brown. “I think that people use his passionate faith to cast him as a madman.”

And then, there’s the fact that Hendrix never met a complicated topic he didn’t want to discuss or draw. When he jokes about doing a “controversial figures in history” book series, it’s only sort of a joke. For Hendrix, the disorder of ambiguity is far more interesting than squeaky-clean absolutes.

“As an artist, I just don’t see any other choice but to describe all the uncomfortable, ambiguous and messy things in the world, as well as the things that are good and beautiful. I think that’s why we make art. It helps us sort these things out.” CA

Snowmen in Sneakers

When you get a call from Runner's World, you know that you'll be drawing someone or something running. For a story about staying conditioned during the holidays, I thought an bipedal snowman might do the trick. Note the lazy, slovenly snowmen in the background who have given in to temptation.

Over heard while in non-hipster coffee shop

Actual order in front of me:

"Double grande, little-more-than-half-caf Dolche, skim, sugar free, no whip latte. "

Then she had to repeat it twice before they got the whole thing. Must happen all the time.

Sled-Dog Flood

Last week, I got an enjoyable assignment for Mother Jones- a piece about the sudden devastating flood that hit Eagle, Alaska when a glacier unexpectedly broke up. Though the article is about the dangers people face who are on the front lines of global warming, the art director hoped for a kind of illustration that I rarely get enjoy- the adventure story! Illustration used to be full of drawings that were related to fiction and non-fiction adventure tales, so the chance to illustrate a moment from a very harrowing tale of disaster and rescue was a welcome challenge.

I did thumbnails and ended up with a bunch of solutions that felt right, but similar to other 'flood' related drawings I have done. This was my first tight sketch.

Before I sent this, which felt right but was familiar, I remember thinking, "How could I solve this in the hardest way possible?" So, I did a quick idea that was seen from below the flood itself- a big challenge in just the construction of the image itself. Tim Luddy, the art director really liked that one and I was excited to have the best one picked for the final art.

I did a color study and got some good reference for the final drawing- like actual sled dogs and the precise model of the helicopter mentioned in the story. You'll notice I had to photoshop the ladder out of the final drawing, the editor caught that in the story it lands on the roof of the house, so they didn't need a ladder.

We were working on a map for the article as well, so here we have final art for the full page illustration and the final map. Always fun to work on something that feels new and strange- thanks to Tim Luddy for the great project.

Media Blitz

It is going to be a busy season for my google reader, as the reviews of John Brown: His Fight for Freedom are starting to come in. The book is officially released today (though if you bought it through amazon you won't see it till october 1st) and I wanted to share a few links to some good reviews.

The Journal-World, of Lawrence, Kansas has a nice commentary and review of the book here. A highlight:

The facts pass the test, as far as Jonathan Earle is concerned.Earle is an associate professor of history at KU who studied the Civil War and who himself has authored a book on Brown. He admits he was skeptical when he first heard of Hendrix’s book. But after reading it, he says it works ... And he was surprised at how directly the book dealt with the controversial periods of Brown’s life. "There’s difficult stuff,” Earle says. “He doesn’t avoid the difficult parts of the biography, such as John Brown and his sons murdering the settlers in Pottawatomie. He doesn’t airbrush him.”

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has a look at the book as well. From the review:

I love that spread. On many levels. (And not just ’cause I think John Brown here weirdly resembles Bruce Campbell just a wee little bit, which is neither here nor there, so let’s move on.) I don’t think we’re ever going to see John Hendrix do dainty, and that’s a-okay with me.

100 Scope Notes has a small blurb about the book in their Fall Preview:

Cover look a bit familiar? John Hendrix illustrated last year’s outstanding Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek (100 Scope Notes review) and the man’s style has a way of jumping out at you. Looking forward to him taking on another historical figure. You can see the evolution of this cover at designer Chad W. Beckerman’s blog Mishaps and Adventures – interesting stuff.

Plus, in a perfect storm of media strategy, Communication Arts has a profile on my work and the book that just came out today as well. I've heard from a few people that it is out there though I haven't seen it yet. No link to that on the website- you've got to see it in print.

Hopefully more to come...

Drawing in Church 8/30 + 8/23

Here are a few images from the last two weeks in the pew.

A Thorny Cover- Part 1

I've spent most of the summer cranking out a sketch dummy of my next book for children, about the remarkable story of Civil War hero Sarah Edmonds. In between I've done a few editorial jobs, only a few worth noting- including this cover package for the new redesign of Christianity Today. The story is about "Spiritual Formation" which is, for those you who don't speak Christianese, the process of deepening and growing your faith. But the conversation gets sticky with this question: Does the act of spiritual growth start with man or with God himself? You can guess where the various denominations fall in this conversation... but this magazine is aimed at a very ecumenical audience.

What makes this a difficult illustration is addressing both sides of this conversation without drawing a complete visual cliche. I proposed three ideas initially, with two of the three pushing a visual style that is much more at home in my sketchbook... but I thought this might be the right opportunity for a challenging pictorial metaphor.



After I sent three ideas- we selected B because it seemed to address the question of God-Authored or Man-Authored growth most clearly. But, in order to be a bit more even-handed we shifted the guy in the vine from reclined, carried upward to the top, to standing/sort-of climbing.


Here are a few color ideas I tried out, and this never happens, but the first one I did was the winner.




I also drew a spot that went with the cover package and two smaller spots that were in a sidebar article, not attached to the cover. The visual language of the little spots shifted a bit to set them apart from the larger story.

Cover work is always exciting, especially with magazines that end up on the bookstore rack. The thrill of seeing it with all the other magazines never gets old for me.

Drawing In Church 8/9

Two recent drawings from the pew...

John Brown Show

The show about the creation of my book, John Brown: His Fight for Freedom, is now up at Subterranean Books, 6275 Delmar, in the U. City Loop. I've got a bunch of sketches, original drawings, a full color proof of the book as well as a display of my process for the cover design.

The show will be up through the end of September, but I'll be having an opening and book signing on September 10th, 2009 at 6pm.As usual, the front window is my favorite part- with a giant JB cover suspended behind an open Bible and bowie knife- slicing a lock and chain in two! I opted not to use the stage blood.

Harry Potter Exhibition!

I was in Chicago over the weekend, for the American Library Association Conference, talking with librarians about my John Brown book. Had a great time and met some amazing artists and writers. Just as great was the trip I took to see the Harry Potter exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry. I spent almost two hours in there, loving the chance to be around such amazing props, costumes and creatures.

Though no less than three guards gave me the stink eye and one asked rather loudly to no one in particular "Can he be drawing in here?" I managed to do a few drawings. When are you going to get a chance to draw Buckbeak and Kreacher from life?

Sketchbook Show at NYT

I've been invited to be in a show with some amazing people called SKETCHBOOK OBSESSIONS-

Sketchbooks from:
Peter Arkle, Karen Barbour, George Bates, Nicholas Blechman, Blex Bolex, Loren Capelli, Josh Cochran, Matt Dorfman, Sara Fanelli, Nicholas Gazin, Steven Guarnaccia, Eric Hanson, John Hendrix, Matthew Hollister, Emma Houlston, Erik T. Johnson, Nora Krug, Pascal Lemaitre, Jason Logan, Ted McGrath, Rick Meyerowitz, Chris Silas Neal, Kate O'Connor, Mike Perry, Leif Parsons, Alain Pilon, Emilano Ponzi, Jason Polan, Brian Rea, Edel Rodriguez, Jonathon Rosen, Leanne Shapton, Seth, Shoboshobo, Rachel Solomon, Tamara Shopsin, Ward Schumaker, Holly Stevenson, Jillian Tamaki, Mark Todd, Aude Van Ryn, Andrea Ventura, Henning Wagenbreth, Esther Pearl Watson, Jeremy Zilar

Thursday July 16, 2009, 7:00-9:00 PM
The New York Times, 620 8th Avenue, 7th FL

RSVP required to: galleryseven@nytimes.com

Someone in the NYC area go and take pictures for me!

It's All Too Much!

You may not know Peter Walsh by name, but I bet your recognize him as the guy on Oprah who counsels chronic pack-rats to get rid of all the junk in their lives. The kind of foul muck he finds under beds and in forgotten closets is astonishing.

I've spend the better part of the last month crashing a book project he wrote for kids about managing their physical space and belongings called "It's All Too Much!" (That there is a need for a book like this is, by itself, a reflection on the problem.) The assignment from Simon and Schuster was to create 93 black and white spot illustrations to go with this text, in four weeks! Wait, how many?

Working in black and white is a kind of rarity in the publishing world these days, outside of the Op-Ed pages and the Progressive. Those of you who Tivo Oprah, (read: andrea) let me know if you see it on the show anytime soon.

Book (Jacket) Review

Thanks to Kevin Gosa for alerting me to this review at The New Yorker's website of my Cooking Dirty jacket. I've never seen a book jacket reviewed without an actual review of the content inside. Thanks for noticing, New Yorker!

Canoes and Maps

A small map for Scouting Magazine about canoeing in the Adirondack Mountains. I also just finished a larger project I'm going to post later today as well.