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April 9th, 2010

4 for the Times

As I mentioned in my Ode, I love working for the Book Review.  This assignment though was particularly good – an essay about bad parents (think Coraline) replacing the classic absent or dead parent (think Cinderella) in kids’ books and young adult lit.  Most of my sketches were satires of children’s literary images, but since the article also covered young adult books, I included sketches like the DWI minivan colliding with the book:

BR_SKECTHES

The art director and editors unanimously came back with this decision:

3_BEARS_ALT

My first ongoing assignment for the Times came from Paul Jean when he was the AD at Circuits.  He has since landed at Arts & Leisure and called me to do a piece on downloading classical music.  Here are the sketches:

AL_SKETCHES

I had sketches due that week for 5 assignments and all of them went for the one I wanted most to finish, including Paul:

DOWNLOADS

So that was Sunday’s Times, and here are the two regulars from Tuesday – the Road column was about jetlag:

LAGGED

And the Science story was about how copper can repair its molecular structure after prolonged exposure to radiation:

COPPER

February 11th, 2010

Ode to the Book Review

This is the most recent illustration I did for The New York Times Book Review, from last month:

1

For illustration, the Book Review is an institution.   Every Sunday when I was a student, I would get the paper and check there first to see who was working – Niemann, Mirko, Richard McGuire, Boris Kulikov, Robert Grossman’s color spots on the back page; it was a ritual.  In addition to (and on occasion, instead of) whatever academic tasks I had on my desk, I would take selections each week from the Book Review to illustrate, my own extracurricular job training.  It seemed so mysterious to me then, as if it had its own esoteric style, not illustration style per se, but a methodology, and one that seemed more abstract in terms of the relationship between word and image.  Whether that assessment was an accurate one or not, it is how I have approached the assignments, and why I’ve enjoyed working for them so much over the past ten years.

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