Your Unnecessary Spot Illustration of the Day

Today (January 6th) Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves (in 1540), his fourth wife. I've got all these loose drawings lying around, like the above, and I might as well post them. I don't remember who I did this for, but there are a few more in the series with a similar theme, which might be called Royalty Misbehaving.

Happy Birthday, J.R.R.R.R.R.R.Tolkien

As today is the 118th birthday of John Rail Road Tolkien, we present this scarce item, a cartoon from around 2002. The original, which was in color, was given to our friend Ben, who got us tickets to the DC premier of the Two Towers at the fabled Uptown Theater (the last movie theater around here with a balcony). This was scanned off a copy, so it's not too high-grade.

My dad gave me The Hobbit when I was about 10 and sick in bed and I still remember reading it for the first time and having weird and intense dreams. It took me a few years to get through the Rings trilogy (or nonology, or whatever it is), and in high school I got in trouble in English class for laughing because I was reading Bored of the Rings (the teacher confiscated the book and gave it back two days later saying, jeez, that's hilarious). I didn't really reread it until the late 90s, when I heard they were making a movie (that I thought would be lousy). I've got several friends who read it every year or so, and one guy I knew years ago read it on a long cross-country motorcycle trip. That seems like the ideal way to make your way through it. Just imagine there are Black Riders on your tail, and watch those miles whiz by.

Fan Art Saturday Falls On A Saturday Every Week So Far This Year

This beautiful set of figures was sculpted by Caleb Giannini, who sent me these photos. He used Sculpey and air-drying clay, and I think he's captured them just perfectly. Thank you, Caleb, for starting off another year of Fan Art with such fine work! Take a bow!

Next up, the Uh-Oh Baby Dashboard Bobblehead, sure to make drivers everywhere more alert and aware and slightly more paranoid, leading to a nationwide decline in traffic accidents.

Things To Come

To begin the year we present the cover to the Cul de Sac Golden Treasury, A Keepsake Garland of Classics, due out this June. It'll feature extensive Author Commentary (and I'll get it finished early next week, Caty! Swear!), which will no doubt deepen and enrich the reader's Cul de Sac-reading experience and provide unique insights into the creative process, and pad the book out to a coupla thousand pages if I can gas on about the creative process long enough, and god knows I can.

For more on what this means, go here.

The Uninteresting Times

This may be a little out of date (the "local hoopster" was Michael Jordan) but the sentiment still holds. Here's to a widespread increase in uneventfulness for 2010. Not that it's too likely...

From All of Us to All of You

A very happy new year!

Christmas Continued Some More, But Just Barely

This here's from just about four years ago. I redid it a couple years ago as a series of dailies, maybe two or three, but this shows the antic confusion more succinctly. And antic confusion is my middle name.

Christmas Continued Some More

I've got all these Christmas cartoons lying around that I didn't get around to posting, so I'll take advantage of the Twelve Days of Christmas. This is an Almanac from around 2000, and it was printed in the Almanac collection (you can see the "Poor Almanac" crudely whited out by me for reproduction in the book). I like getting these Christmas newsletters, though I've never sent one out. Or even sent out a Christmas card in recent memory. So, here's this instead.

Christmas Continued

Here are two old bits appropriate for the season, which I hadn't gotten around to posting earlier because of all the #@!% Christmas stuff going on. The above is a cover for USN&WR, now no longer an actual magazine, though at one time one of my favorite clients (in short, they kept me busy every week and paid well). It's in alkyd and casein paint, with some layers of Krylon to force it to dry in time (Krylon has been the savior of many a deadline-crazed illustrator and probably the bane of the ozone layer for years; even Norman Rockwell used something like it). I haven't used that technique in years, abandoning it after I figured out watercolor well enough to fake some competency. In this case, I was trying for an Ashcan School type of painting, to make it look like a turn of the 20th century sweatshop.

The below image was for the American Diabetes Association magazine, another long-time client I haven't worked for recently. DC has associations of every description (there's even an Association of Association Executives) and all of them have or had a magazine or newsletter that used freelance illustrators. You could build a pretty good career working for them, and before I got more into purer (ha!) cartooning, I did a lot of work for them, almost as much as I did for the Post.

This is in alkyd too. Alkyds are somewhat like oils, though their texture is a little tarrier they thin with turpentine, but they use a resin instead of linseed oil as the vehicle for the pigment. They also dry faster than oil and you can use them on paper, which oil will eventual corrode. So they're well-suited for illustration work. The way I used them was this; I'd draw a rough in ink on a thin, semi-translucent layout paper called Ad Art, once made by Beinfang (but alas, no longer, I loved that paper), put another piece of Ad Art paper on top and draw a more finished (but still loose enough) final, then spray mount it on a piece of 2-ply Bristol board (it had to be pliable to fit on a drum for scanning). Then I'd put a first layer of alkyd using Winsor & Newton Liquin (a thixotropic alkyd gel medium) mixed with some warm tint, like an ochre or something, and work some details a little with colored pencil, which would somewhat liquify and mix with the Liquin. Then I'd let it dry, maybe spraying it with Krylon, and do another layer of color and another, etc, building up a bunch of glazes, which gave it a nice depth. And what did I use to put the alkyds on the paper? My favorite tool was a little wad of the spongy foam rubber they put under wall to wall carpeting; I had a giant roll of it and I'd just tear off a suitable piece. That and Q-tips. Silly as it sounds, it wasn't too different from what others have used over the years. Casein paint, a milk-based paint, would stick well to the Krylon (if it was matte Krylon) and was useful for detail work, like the red threads in the sewing machine in the image above. When it was finished I'd have a pretty snappy looking little painted art objet. But it was time-consuming and smelly and messy, none of which you want on a deadline. And when we suddenly had a baby around, I wanted something less toxic.

I'd been leery of watercolor for years as I thought they were difficult and unforgiving. So I started with them fairly slow and easy, using only a few colors, a couple of warm colors and a blue maybe. The first watercolor I did under a deadline was a little drawing of Colin Powell for the New Yorker; it had maybe 3 colors in it and looked just fine. I learned a few simple rules and tricks. All colors handle somewhat differently, especially in a medium with the immediacy of watercolor, and as you use them their personalities reveal themselves. I still don't know exactly what I'm doing, but nobody's caught on yet, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell them.

This has been your art lesson for today.

Winter Pageant

I'm posting this  just because I like it. My favorite part is the tangle of typography to show that Nara and Alice are not too well in sync, but I like the scrape of the snow shovel too. We just had 20.5 inches dumped on us in under 24 hours, so I've heard that scrape a lot without actually participating in it (my thanks to Amy and Lars and to Andy Hemmindinger, who showed up with a snow blower!). And, in case you missed it in the comments section, here's Paul's completion of the Winter Jewels ditty-

"We are Winter's jewels,
Dancing through the air,
We filter out pollution
To deposit everywhere.

Just stop what you are doing,
And admire our symmetry,
Our awesome shining whiteness and our
Hexagonality.

We muck around with traffic,
And disarrange your day,
We bring the gift of frostbite
And an exuse for kids to play

Games like "snowball down the collar,"
And "hit the passing cars."
And "decorate the snowman
With Dad's finest choice cigars."

We provide a chance to shovel:
There's no time for being bored.
Remember, Mother Nature
Doesn't like to be ignored."

Christmas Sweater Voting Now Open!

The finalists have been chosen and their photos posted! Now it's up to you, the Great Unwashed American Public, to choose a winner! Please go over to the Christmas Sweater Contest at GoComics and make your selection from the finalists, each of whom will win a Cul de Sac book signed by me (with a drawing too). But only the winner will receive the Complete Calvin & Hobbes (ooh!), which, besides being a collection of masterworks, is also the heaviest book ever to make the New York Times bestseller list.

Here's the schedule (I could've said "schedYULE' again)-

12/15 - Contest opens for submissions

12/18 - Submissions period closes at 11:59pm

12/21 - Five finalists announced, online voting begins

12/23 - Voting closes at 11:59pm

12/24 - The winner is announced!

So hurry! It's your duty as a patriot!

Saint Santa

Wouldn't this make a great all-purpose charming yet slightly offensive Christmas card? It's from a column by either Joel Achenbach, E J Dionne or Gene Weingarten, all of whom have had a column at some point in the Wash  Post Magazine that I got to illustrate. This one's probably from a Joel Achenbach piece. 

Ancient and Unrelated Almanack

This here's from Sunday, June 29, 1997. I know because I scanned it from a copy of the Wash Post Style section of that date, which I found in a drawer in my studio. This was about the third or fourth Poor Almanack I did, though it wasn't called Richard's Poor Almanac(k) then, or anything else. It changed names every time, which wasn't much use for building up a readership. I like this one just fine, though I'd forgotten all about it. I gave the original to Ms. Carolyn Hax, who liked it a lot too.

Winter's Jewels

Here are two completions of Alice's Snowflake Ditty, which I swiped from my brother's old kindergarten play. The first line was all that I remembered; my patchwork gloss on it is above, from tomorrow's strip, and it's pretty straight. The two below are much funnier. Thanks to Jennifer and Fritz for letting me post these!

This first one is by my friend Jennifer Hart, Arlington, who any close reader of the Washington Post will recognize as a master of the Washington Post Style Invitational entries.

We are winter's jewels 

dancing on the air
Melting on  your sweater 
but not your underwear.

We are winter's jewels
dancing on the air.
We taste like icy  diamonds, with
a hint of aged Gruyere.

We are winter's jewels
dancing on the air.
If we were REALLY jewels,
you'd be a zillionaire.

We are winter's jewels
dancing on the air.
On break, we go antiquing
and price Fiestaware.

We are winter's jewels
dancing on the air.
We tried to tell that golfer,
"Don't anger the au pair."

We are winter's jewels
dancing on the air.
Tax and tags  included,
except in Delaware!

This is by Fritzoid, who left it as a comment on the GoComics post under the holiday nom de  plume Fritzkringle. 

We are winter’s jewels, 
Dancing through the air. 
Crystal shards of starlight, 
Sticking in your hair.

Accumulating on the ground, 
A foot or two (or more). 
We hope the plow comes down your street, 
If you need to reach the store…

Traffic’s at a standstill! 
Cabin fever’s rife! 
Three months out of every year 
We paralyze your life!

Heart attacks from shoveling! 
Power lines that break! 
So much havoc wrought from 
Each tiny little flake!

But if by chance the sun comes out, 
And melts us all away, 
Remember Frosty’s vengeful vow: 
”I’LL BE BACK… on Christmas Day!”

Last Day! Christmas Sweater Contest! Prizes Prizes Prizes!

This is the last day to enter the Christmas Sweater Contest over at GoComics. Do you have a Christmas sweater so ridiculous that it's a sartorial slap in the face? Well, check your closet if you're not sure. You could win these great prizes- a Cul de Sac book signed by me (with a drawing too), the Complete Calvin & Hobbes (ooh!), and the admiration of your peers, if any.

Here's the schedule (I could've said "schedYULE' again)-

12/15 - Contest opens for submissions

12/18 - Submissions period closes at 11:59pm

12/21 - Five finalists announced, online voting begins

12/23 - Voting closes at 11:59pm

12/24 - The winner is announced!

So hurry! No time to lose! It'll make all those years of wearing a big ugly Christmas sweater finally pay off!

Some Popularity Contest

Hey, I'm not saying anything about that.

Today's Cul de Sac

This is a backhanded salute to my little brother, Tim. He appeared in a Winter Pageant in either kindergarten or first grade, portraying an icicle, and the first few lines of Alice's poem were his. He took his role very seriously. It involved a little sideways dance that the several icicles were to execute in unison while reciting the poem. He was told to project his lines. I attended the performance (I was in 6th or 7th grade), sitting with my folks near the back of the school auditorium. When the icicles took the stage they exhibited something more like Brownian motion than ensemble work, except for Tim, who slid back and forth in the correct way (I guess; it looked right to me). The other icicles mostly flubbed their lines or mumbled. But Tim projected with enough force that he practically blew the civilians out of the back of the theater (that's theater talk, I think). 

This became a Family Story, and it's still vivid enough I'll swear by it, though I only remember the beginning of the poem. Tim is now (ahem) the Master Sound Designer at Arena Stage in DC, a career that is obviously a direct outgrowth of his experience as an icicle in the Winter Pageant. The moral is: kids, pay attention in school, especially to the potentially embarrassing parts.

The Annual Beethoven Sing-Along

Happy Birthday

Beethoven!

Happy Birthday

Tom Spurgeon!