The Art Directors Club just interviewed me about how I began in advertising and what advice I might give people just starting out.
I tried to be amusing .
A conversation with Felix Scheinberger from “An Illustrated Journey”
Here’s the next interview with the contributors to my new book, An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers.
Felix Scheinberger is a German illustrator and teacher who loves to hit the road and see the world (and takes his students too!). I love the comic darkness of his work, the looseness of his line, and his debt to Tomi Ungerer who had long been one of my favorite illustrators too. I also love his passion for travelling and seeing the rawness of the world.
We had some technical problems at one point so our conversation comes in two servings:
Felix shares a lot more in my book. Here’s an excerpt:
“Travelling is an integral part of my work. But I don’t travel to illustrate, I illustrate to travel, and I travel to understand the world and my role in it. Spectacular journeys aren’t what I am looking for, I want to depict things that mean a lot to me, and sometimes journeys don’t evoke the feelings I am looking for. And I don’t travel on the look-out for beauty. I look for real images, real emotions. So a journey to the Toscana just to draw terra cotta paths seems like a waste of time. These images have been made a hundred times over….” (continued)
Please don’t forget to check out Felix’s blog.
Go, Trev!
My pal Trevor Romain (you may remember him from An Illustrated Life) is a huge-hearted and talented artist in Austin, Texas and I was so excited to get the following email from him:
Hi brother Danny –
I hope this e-mail finds you well and happy. My new book, ‘Random Kak‘, was just released in South Africa. I wanted to share this exciting news with you as one night in your flat in New York (many years ago), while pouring over your journals (and pouring vanilla vodka) you urged me to document growing up in South Africa as an illustrated memoir in my journal. Patti nagged me about it every time I spoke to her. Some time later, I finally posted some of my journal entries on various Facebook and blog pages and it went viral. Then I was approached by Penguin Books in South Africa to do a three-book series based on my little drawings and notes.
Your last blog post with Cynthia Morris was a wonderful validation and reminded me once more of how much you have inspired and supported me over the years. I am now using this illustrated memoir technique to help children in refugee camps in Africa and children who are terminally ill, share and express their feelings, and their story, even if it’s just in stick figure style. When I met Nelson Mandela a number of years ago he said, “When a person dies, their library of stories dies with them. So they must share their story so that it is not forgotten. Even the most simple story can teach and inspire other people.“
I can honestly say if it weren’t for you this book would still be an idea waiting to happen. Thank you again for unlocking the door and inspiring me to walk into my past where I gathered arm-fulls of great memories and turned them into my newest book.
Hope to see you soon,
Trev
Chatting. In my house. About stuff.
Recently Cynthia Morris came to visit me and we sat down for an interview because she wanted to know more about A Kiss Before You Go and the whole process of recording your life in a book. Cynthia has started drawing fairly recently but she is a life coach and deals with creative people all the time. She describes her job as helping “people enjoy their talents and create on their own terms”. I like that job description. She gave me some solid advice on the direction my life is taking and I offered my own thoughts on how she could create an illustrated memoir.
Here’s a video we shot of the chat in my living room.
Cynthia posted her notes from a conversation we had once the camera was off about my advice on “8 Ways to Live an Illustrated Life“. I hope it’s useful.
I believe
Because he made making art a pleasure to watch, because he inspired zillions of people to just start making stuff, and most of all because he was infectious with his belief that making art was something anyone could do and that it would transform the way you see the world around you, let’s remember Bob Ross today.
“I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, ‘Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy.’ That’s for sure. That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.”
Please watch and share the following loving tribute. And from all of us here, I’d like to wish you happy painting, and God bless, my friend.
Teaching my first workshop — a brief recap
All week-long, I had been running through the things that could go wrong. Rain was foremost on my mind. I imagined 45 of us sitting in a humid wooden dining hall, drawing each others’ feet, like a bunch of overgrown summer campers, praying for this blighted weekend to end. Then I worried about cicadas, crawling out from their 17-year hibernation to drown out my lectures with their screeching. Oh, and may flies are supposedly virulent this time of year in Northern Massachusetts. Them too.
I worried about my ‘students’ too, of course. When I set up a special Facebook group for us and invited them to start drawing in the weeks before the workshop, they began uploading amazingly good sketches which made me sure I had nothing left to teach them. I had been hoping for people who didn’t know how to uncap a pen and instead I had graphic designers and architects and art teachers and people who had been in the EDM community for a decade or more. Gulp.
JJ and I drove up from New York on Friday morning. The weather was perfect and the air smelled of freshly mown grass and late Spring. We parked, unpacked, and headed up to the large wooden building that was to be our HQ for the weekend. Then I discovered an obstacle I hadn’t been imaginative enough to dread — the projector didn’t work. I had several hundred Powerpoint slides and videos I’d made and now I might be reduced to just tap dancing and making stuff up. By dinner time, fortunately, a new projector was in place.
Before dinner we had a little mocktail party and I got to meet the folks who traveled in from all over, some from neighboring spots in Massachusetts, others from far way — Baltimore, Chicago, New Mexico, British Columbia and England.
We had dinner and then trooped up the hill to our classroom. We had arranged rows of chairs and cushions and fans (it was damnably humid and hot) and introduced ourselves. Everyone took a turn talking about their creative wishes and then I lit into my presentation, explaining what I hoped we’d accomplish this weekend, my view of art, my life story, the magic and power of illustrated journaling and more.
After breakfast on Saturday, we started to draw. I explained some basics, we did some exercises and people started to unwind. There were loads of great questions and I managed to choke out some sort of answer to most of them. Our group was wonderful— open minded and enthusiastic— and we struggled long together through contours drawings, negative space, measurements, plumb lines and the like.
We took a break after lunch and I collapsed under a tree. It was exhausting! Meanwhile everyone else seemed full of energy. They drew their sandwiches then hiked into the woods to draw frogs and trees and things.
Mid afternoon, we headed into the town center where the fire department and hauled out their fire engines so we could draw and paint them.
During a brief sunshower, some of us retreated into the fire station.The attic was full of old fire suits and extinguishers and musical instruments and piles of chairs from the local school — an endless treasure trove of stuff to draw.
Others drew the church, the gazebo, the hills and trees, or strolled back up to draw in the barn.
After dinner, I talked about composition and calligraphy and then hauled out my trunks of journals. I brought about fifty different books and we spend the rest of the evening talking and sharing our work.
On Sunday morning, I described what steps people could take next to further develop their creativity and then we shared what we had learned over the weekend. I was amazed and touched at what a profound effect it had on literally everyone as people shared emotional stories about the discoveries that they had made in these short few days.
It was a wonderful experience for me and I realized yet again what a profound effect drawing can have on one’s life, and how developing a creative habit is so important and rewarding.
This is just a brief description of what we experienced. I hope those who were there with me will leave their comments below to round it out further. Also, JJ and I are working on a little film about the weekend that we’ll share with you soon.
An experiment in teaching
Here’s a little video I made about how to approach drawing complex things. If you can’t make it to my workshop today, this may inspire you to do some drawing this weekend nonetheless.
What do you think?
Heading to Rowe
We’re driving up for my weekend drawing workshop. Hope to see you there!
The Lapins hop over.
I love Lapin’s work and was so excited when he agreed to contribute to An Illustrated Journey. We became pals over email, then got to know each other better over Skype. Maybe you remember this interview we did recently:
Last week Lapin, Lapinette and baby Louise came over from Barcelona to visit us in New York and brought Veronica Lawlor (another genius contributor to the book). We had a lovely evening of chatting, drawing, sharing sketchbooks and guzzling vin. Here are some of the highlights:
- A creative collaboration.
The Avidor’s Big Adventure.
A little video report on two artists who are hitting the road and drawing the world.
Danny Gregory 