Category: Books by Me

Art Before Breakfast: drawing with a friend

dannygregory19 Comments

My friend Koosje Koene has been staying with us this week. Koosje is a wonderful artist and teacher so we spent a lot of time talking about drawing and sharing our sketchbooks. The weather was great so I showed her around the Village and then we sat down to draw the Jefferson Market Library.

We decided to do a fun exercise— working on a single drawing together. We sat side by side with a sketchbook on our laps and worked back and forth across the spread. As you’ll hear in the video, we strategized a bit before we began, discussing how to lay out the building across both pages. Then we put our pens together and worked out from the center. Throughout, we jumped back and forth across the drawing, adding to each other’s lines, and discussing the drawing as we went.

It was a blast and the whole exercise took us less than twenty minutes. Get a friend and give it a try this weekend!

Every Friday I work through an idea from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from the Art Before Breakfast Workbook, to be published by Chronicle Books early next year. If you decide to do it too, please share with me how how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my comments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).

PS Sorry if the video is a little noisy — we shot it on a busy morning in New York City!

Good news on the foreign front

dannygregory12 Comments

“I just got an update from my foreign sales guy that we now have a whopping FIVE foreign editions of Art Before Breakfast in the works! Chinese, Korean, Russian, Taiwanese, and now Spanish. This is very excellent. Woo!”

— Bridget, my lovely editor at Chronicle Books

Art Before Breakfast: couch potato

dannygregory6 Comments

I usually listen to the radio while I potter around in the kitchen of a morning. Today I put on the TV instead and watched talkingheads discuss the last Republican debate. While they kvetched, I sketched.

I approached it like a doodly collage, capturing moments in boxes that approximate the shape of the screen without being too slavish to reality, and augmenting them with decorative bits.  I kept moving around the page, adding bits to earlier parts, making the whole thing denser and more detailed. It’s a fairly mindless way of drawing, half paying attention to the screen, half to the page.

One trade secret: the pause button on my remote control. I can freeze the action for a couple of minutes and catch a gesture. Other bits I just drew while they were happening or from memory. Or from my imagination.

I used a manga pen and a brush pen in my trusty Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook.

Every Friday I work through an idea from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from p.51. If you decide to do it too, please share how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my comments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).

Art Before Breakfast: Toast

dannygregory30 Comments

Instead of hitting the POST button at 7 am as per usual, I sat down to draw my breakfast.

This particular slice comes from a loaf baked by our pal, Michael. He brought it to a wine tasting we hosted last weekend and it was so delicious I managed  to stretch the loaf out all week. Today I hit the heel.

Drawing toast is an adventure. It’s an opportunity to slow way down and delve deep. I begin by slowly driving my pen around the perimeter and then, quadrant by quadrant, I work my way through every nook, crumb, divot, pit and hole. It’s not difficult work but it’s absorbing and clears the mind.

I have gone into this in more depth here on the blog,  in Art Before Breakfast and in Seeing at SBS but all you really need is a pen, a piece of paper, some toast, and about 10 spare minutes.

Every Friday I work through an idea from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from p.38. If you decide to do it too, please share how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my snows-bread-recipecomments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).

And if you’d like to draw the same bread I did, here’s Michael’s recipe:

Hungry Tim and other news

dannygregory9 Comments

I know I promised to eschew advertising on my blog but, come on, people, it’s in my blood! I can’t help it. So here’re a few announcements, updates and, yes, ads about things I’m doing that you might like. to know about.

• First, a mini film about an innovation at Sketchbook Skool.

The gist: Sketchbook Skool kourses are now available on-demand rather than by semester. Sign up and plunge in any day of the year. We’re like Orange is the New Black — but with a full palette of colors.

open-monkey-books
Coming in late fall.

• Next, an exciting announcement: we have just completed the final nips and tucks to the design of Shut Your Monkey: How to control your inner critic and get more done and it heads to the printer next Tuesday! You can preorder your copy today, however.

 

inside-abbworkbook
Coming next year!

• My other new book, the Art Before Breakfast Workbook has just come back from my editor and I am ready to continue work on the design phase of the book. It looks quite gorgeous already, I must say.

• On Saturday night, I will strap myself into a Lufthansa flight to Switzerland to  work with the students, teachers and parents of the International School of Basel. I have been working on lots of little films and projects to inspire them and can’t wait to see the art we make together during my artist-in-residency.

TobleroneI am also excited to see Basel which I hear is brimming with dozens of amazing museums. I also plan to eat chocolate. I’ll post news of my trip here, maybe even before I get back.

Jack draws in rome
A younger, beardless Jack Tea draws the Colliseum.

• Next, I will RyanAir to Rome to spend a few days with Jack who has just begun his semester abroad (he’s in Abruzzo today). He has promised he will take me to his favorite places to draw. We also plan to eat pasta.

 

Ciao!

Covering the monkey

dannygregory6 Comments

After three years of thinking and writing, Shut Your Monkey is finally complete. The words are written, the illustrations are completed and the layout is stunning. We just sent the final files to my editors this week and the book will soon head to the printer and be in your hands before Thanksgiving.

The hardest part of creating a new book is working out the cover design.  No matter how many fancy adjectives I’ve used, no matter how many revisions I’ve written, in the end, we know the book will be judged by the cover.

While I have designed most of my books, I wanted to make sure that we pulled out all the stops for Shut Your Monkey. I was lucky enough to enlist the help of one of the top book designers in New York.  Rachel Willey and I batted ideas around for most of the spring and summer and she produced through dozens and dozens of designs. Finally, we and my publishers agreed on a winner. It is fantastic and if you’d like to have a copy of your own, you can preorder it (and the book inside it) right now.

Here is a small selection from the design process.

El niño dibuja cada día

dannygregory26 Comments

My French, Latin, Urdu and Hebrew are rusty and dim but I kinda have an itch to learn a new language. So I downloaded a free app called Duolingo.

Each day it emails me to remind me to do my lesson. The email has a picture of a little green owl who says, “Hi Danny, keep the owl happy! Learning a language requires practice every day.”

I diligently open my app and spend a few minutes going through my lessons. I might be waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting for the F train, waiting for the elevator, and I fill the pause by repeating “naranja, naranja“. When I am done, the app goes bing-bong and rewards me with some pointless points. It’s painless and fun and soon I am sure I will be able to order a burrito from the food truck on the corner.

Now we just need a genius to come up with a drawing app that’ll do the same thing. Bing-bong! Time to draw a bagel. Ding-dong! Sketch your shoe. Ting-tong! Get out your gouache. Five or ten minutes a day of gentle prodding to keep me in tiptop drawing shape.

Any coders out there?¡vámonos!

Monkey break

dannygregory2 Comments

I am taking off from my blog today — to work on illustrations for “Shut Your Monkey.”

See you on Saturday.

Spine-tingling

dannygregory11 Comments

My uncle Michael published half a dozen books. Everyone in our family prominently displayed their set. A foot-long row of familiar spines standing proudly together — his books, his name repeated across them. I envied the pleasure I imagined that gave him, that cube of honored real estate.

I made my first book when I was six. A stack of deliciously thick paper. The smell of library paste, a smell I can taste (probably because I did). A clear plastic sleeve filled with a rainbow of markers. Brass paper fasteners.

I treasured the pleasures of bookmaking. Carefully lettering my name on the title page. Alternating pages of drawings with pages filled with large, neatly penciled letters. Numbering all the pages. Making up the front matter: the publisher, the copyright, the dedication. Conjuring up blurbs from my favorite authors to put on the back.

My biggest regret: my books never had a proper spine. I couldn’t run my name and title and the Dewy Decimal number down the edge. It didn’t look right on the shelf.
But that was a minor blunt to my pleasure. I was still “an author”.

A half century later, whenever I visit a book store or a library, I always, eventually, wind up looking for my books on the shelf. I can spot them from across the room, familiar faces in a sea of stripes, like spotting my son on a crowded playground.

No matter how many books I publish or sketchbooks I fill, that boyhood thrill is still there. I love the shelves of books I’ve made, all together, spines aligned like little soldiers.

Oh, BTW, I am soon gonna add a new spine to my collection. Shut Your Monkey: How  to control your inner critic and get more done is in the design/illustration phase and will soon head to the printer.  It’ll be on the shelves of your local bookstore this fall.

在创牌

dannygregory11 Comments

My book, The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are  just showed up in Simplified Chinese!