Hey people. For my birthday, my wife brought home a crab for me. Wasn't that nice? In case you're not sure, yes, it was nice. We named him Strad and put him in our tank along with our two Tinfoil Barbs, Carl and Spaulding, and our Tiger Barb, Eastwood. I'm not sure he's happy in there. It's hard to tell. He has found a home for himself in hole in a piece of driftwood. He occasionally brandishes a menacing claw from in there. The above is not a portrait of Strad, but rather a detail from my upcoming children's book Are You a Horse. Be sure to buy the book and read it to find out whether the cowboy hero (left) is talking to a horse in this picture.
Hey everybody. The trouble with this blog format is that wide images really get shrunk. That's too bad, because I've done a bunch of things to run across the top border of a page. Here's one of them. You'll have to click on it to see it at all. I don't remember exactly what the article was about, but it looked appropriate for Earth Day, what with the celebrations in China, Central America and Europe. They celebrate with balloons in Europe, right? I'm pretty sure about the other two things.
Hi, all you people. This is a poem from my first book The Robots Are Coming. It was a collection of poems about monsters and robots and things. Anyway, a guy emails me a while back and asks me if he would face any copyright infringement litigation from me or Scholastic should he go ahead with a plan he had formulated to get a tattoo of the voodoo doll from this page. I told him that he had my blessing (and I'd take care of the thugs at Scholastic) on the one condition that he send me a photo of the tattoo once the swelling has gone down. He agreed. Months passed. Then he emails me again and apologizes for having never sent a photo and that he'll send one soon. No photo has ever come. His second communication led me to believe that he had gone through with it. Perhaps the tattoo was on a private part of his body and he had second thoughts about photographing it. Perhaps he just forgot. If you see a guy with a tattoo that looks like this, do me a favor and get a photo of it. So long!
The art of wooing women with gifts of personalized alarm clocks is largely forgotten. It worked for me, though. Hi Jena.
Hi everybody. I'm in Hilton Head today visiting the mother in law. This photo was taken about 200 feet from where she lives. It's amazing to me that these things are perfectly content in a manicured, gated community. I really like alligators. Perhaps I'll write a book about one.
Hey you people. Here's another one for Time Magazine. It had something to do with Intelligent Design vs. evolution. That's all I've got today. Have a great weekend!
Happy Birthday, Mom! I decided to post this on today because it's one of my mom's favorites. I did this for the New York Times Book Review. It was a review of a novel called A Million Nightingales, which was about a young slave girl in the early 19th century. Assignments with a very somber tone or racial content can be tough, but I ended up satisfied with the way this came out. It also was selected for the Communication Arts Illustration Annual. And a woman asked me to alter it a little for her wedding invitations and programs. I had to take out the girl. So long!
Hey folks. A greeting card company called Peaceable Kingdom Press asked me to do a couple birthday cards for them. This is one of them, loosely based on the illustration I did for The Robots Are Coming. The inside of the card said "Have a devilishly great birthday!" I would have preferred something like "This is one hell of a party!" but since these cards are mostly sold in children's book stores, perhaps that wouldn't have been entirely appropriate. I'm working with Peaceable Kingdom again right now on a Game Time! dry-erase activity book based on Agent A to Agent Z. I'll let you know how that comes out. They tell me it will be available this summer. That's all I've got. Bye!
Hello? Is anyone receiving me? This is Andy Rash in my studio on Roebling Street. I fear some sort of apocalypse has occurred and no one told me. I am on the 4th floor of a former sewing factory. I know this because needles are trapped between the loose floorboards. My studio is one of thirteen units on the north side of the building, but I haven't seen anyone else here for days and days. Greenpeace occupied two units for about a year, but suddenly they are gone. No more activists, no more whale costumes. Over one of their doors is draped a scarf that says Sinners and Saints Menswear. No one goes in there now. The electricity bill has been stuck to the door of a film colorist for two weeks. He would have removed it had he come by. Paperplane Graphic design was in #1, but they left after just two months. I couldn't find any web presence for them, so maybe that was the problem. They've been replaced by something called Solarsilk, according to the business card taped to the door. The double unit right next to me is occupied by about four different businesses, none of which have turned on the lights in a month. I haven't even seen the guy who won't tell me what he is doing in his studio next to the bathrooms. Sometimes late at night I think I can hear the tink tink tink of the jewelry designer in #5, but I can't be sure. The photographer in #6 moved her stuff in the first day and never came back. The stylist in #13 put a hat rack by her door and several overlong screws straight through her wall and into the hallway, but that's the only evidence I've seen of her. The only person I know is coming in is the guy in the studio right next to me. I can hear him coughing and screening his calls. His caller ID announces by speaker who is calling. He never picks up. I'm unlocking the floor when I get here in the morning and locking up when I leave at night. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to get cabin fever in Brooklyn. But I can't worry about that now. I've just begun a novel and I've come up with what I think is a great first line: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Hi everybody. This is Barnaby, one of the villains in that TV pitch I did last year. The idea was that this guy is just an embarrassment to the evil mastermind community. In an age of genetic mutation and lasers, this guy is still tying ladies to railroad tracks. He is just hopelessly out of date. He is pictured here flying his steam-powered Velocithopter to his next villainous exploit.
Hi folks. As I look back over the editorial jobs I've done so far, I notice some recurring themes. For example, I draw a lot of thieves. Silent movie thieves, really. Like the Hamburglar. Striped shirt, lone ranger mask, etc. I could probably fill out a few weeks of blog entries with these guys. Thank goodness silent movies gave us all the common visual language to understand a thief when we see one. Also, thanks to Thomas Nast. He was an illustrator from the mid to late 1800's who really made everyone's job a lot easier by coming up with visual representations of abstract concepts. He came up with the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, our current ideas of what Santa Claus and Uncle Sam look like, and a bunch of other stuff. The word "nasty" comes from this guy. What we need these days is a modern Nast to come up with mascots for modern concepts like the Internet Spider, or the Mortgage Crisis Turtle. By the way, that thing up there was done for the Letters Page of the New York Times.
Here is a portrait of George W. Bush. It was created by arranging 324 colored salt crystals in a square grid and photographed through a microscope. The original was about 20% of the size you see here, but it disappeared from the Hodgeson Gallery in New York this past February. Please keep an eye out for this original, and also one depicting Grover Cleveland. If you find them, please contact me through this blog. I am offering a reward of $50,000 for the safe return of either of these portraits. Thanks!
