Our child arrived! Little Sprig was a boy!
His name is Henry David Jenkins. Both he and his mother are healthy. And together we are enjoying our time at home as a little family. Below is an illustration I did for a thank-you card that we printed for the folks who hosted our baby shower.
Happy days!!
Roy Crane kept a detailed scrapbook for his assistant to follow, in order to maintain his high standards. Parts of this scrapbook were published in two magazines, Cartoonist Profiles and The Hairy Green Eyeball. A big thanks to The Temple of Seven Camels, where I found the jpg files of the scrapbook.
There are two short interviews with Crane and over thirty pages from his scrapbook, like the sample below. I keep this by my drawing table for quick and easy reference. It is a goldmine of solid principles for cartooning. All of the examples that he included are from his Buzz Sawyer strip. And, there are several unfinished examples, in pencil, of an unpublished strip he created called The Lost World.
So as a little holiday gift for you readers, I took the liberty of compiling all of these individual jpgs and converting them to a single PDF file. To my knowledge, this material is out of print, and is within the public domain.
Click the following link to download the complete file. Roy Crane Scrapbook
Look. Learn. And enjoy!!!!
Fall has arrived to Bartlesville. The trees are turning to nice autumn colors, in spite of our dry summer. Especially our neighbors’ tree, Mike and Laurie Watkins.
With the cooler weather comes SOUP! YAY!!
Butternut Squash is a favorite in our home. Here is a tasty recipe from the book The Soup Bible.
2 TBSP butter
2 small onions
3 cups peeled, seeded, and cubed butternut squash
1 1/4 quarts veggie stock (chicken stock will work as well)
1 1/2 cups cubed potatoes
1 TSP of paprika
1/2 cop whipping cream
1 1/2 TBSP snipped fresh chives, plus a few whole chives, to garnish
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. Melt butter in large pot, add onions and cook until soft
2. Add the squash, stock, potatoes, and paprika. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat to simmer for about 35 min. until all of the vegetables are soft.
3. Pour the soup into a blender and process until smooth. Return the soup to the pot and stir in the cream. Season with salt and pepper. Reheat slowly.
4. Stir in the chopped chives just before serving. Garnish each serving with a few whole chives. We ran out of fresh chives so we garnished ours with dried chives.
We like our soup with homemade honey wheat bread, some dill havarti cheese, and steamed broccoli.
And of course CoCo, ever helpful in the kitchen, offered to take dispose of the squash rinds for us.
Another picture of Mike and Laurie’s glorious tree. Enjoy the Autumn!!
Delivering a fiery speech, Joe continues his effort to convince the angry miners to strike peaceably.
This sequence had a lot of dialog, which is a challenge to illustrate in an interesting way. I decided to use Joe and his body language to accentuate the dialog. His acting would have to carry this scene. First, I figured out what the final extreme gesture was going to be for the final panel. Then I worked backwards, trying to show an escalation in his gesticulations and expressions as he builds up to his main argument. Having a prop in his hand, the hat, was also helpful.
I inked this page with my reliable Winsor- Newton Series 7 brush and Calli “Jet Black” calligraphy ink. For mechanical and architectural details, like the wooden beams in panel 2, I use a Sakura no. 5 Micron inking pen. The gray area in the final panel was achieved using a lithographer’s crayon. I have always loved the grainy textures that I can get from them.
I have a new article at the Teaching Artist Journal site “ALT/Space.” The first two of six parts are now up on the TAJ site.
The article is a reflection about my work in an inclusive classroom. My task was to teach 19 ELL (English Language Learners) and 3 Special Needs students, all of whom were in the same classroom.
I guided them through four art making activities; creating and illustrating fictional cartoon characters (like the one above), generating ideas and material for stories through two acting/improv activities, and a final story making activity.
It was challenging to teach such a wide range of students. Looking for ways to engage all of these students, I turned to UDL (Universal Design for Learning) This article gives a detailed description of UDL and how I applied it to my teaching.
Click here to read the first two parts of this six part article.
My wife and are expecting our first child in March! This week we had a sonogram.
We’ve elected to remain ignorant about the gender of our baby. This will be a fun surprise when “it” is born. But then we had the problem of just how to refer to our little gestating fetus.
So I am very excited and proud to introduce to you …….. Little Sprig!
Our Little Sprig!
My co-author Debra and I have a new site for our teacher’s book, CIYC.
Visit us here to find free resources for integrating comics and cartooning into your classroom; including classroom activities and samples of student comics and cartoons.
