Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

William Bentley, quoted in Snowflake Bentley

Into December

It is time for the next postcard prompt, and, strangely, I can’t get past the snow of it. Winter is coming, but I don’t live somewhere where I will see snow. It has been many years since I’ve seen snow. For people who have never lived in an area that gets no snow, it may seem hard to comprehend going years and years without either the beauty or the inconvenience. I miss snow. I miss the idea of snow.

When my oldest was born, there was snow in surrounding areas. Snow is so unlikely here that even the hint of snow on that day more than twenty years ago was enough to create family lore. For years, we crafted, cradled, and repeated a story about a little boy who lived on a hill, and on the day he was born, there was snow in the mountains around the city. It is the kind of story that, as soon as you begin saying the words, feels imbued with the magic of a fairy tale.

I can’t remember the last time I saw snow.

I have grown into my appreciation of November as a gratitude-themed month and a month of intentionally looking for and tracking light, but December has a magic all its own.

My enjoyment of December is often rooted in light, sometimes catching the early sunset as the days shorten, but also artificial light. Some of my favorite things are related to Christmas lights. There are lights on the tree and on the bookcases. We used to have lights around the windows and across the shelves in the office.

Ornaments are my other favorite thing in December. Ornaments are often shiny and whimsical containers of memory, quiet little portals to the past. Drawing ornaments has often been a way to center myself and anchor creative habit in December. There are some ornaments I draw again and again, returning to them each year, using them as touchstones to the past.

Last year, I took a nutcracker diversion.

I think devising our own nutcrackers would be a lot of fun for illustrated postcards. I considered it, but I didn’t want to do a prompt for this month that is locked into Christmas. So I went to that thing which we don’t have, snow.

A Focus on Snow – Postcard No. 3

How do you do a postcard about snow?

How do you think about connecting the dots between years and people and memory and personal history and the passage of time…with snow?

You get really close.

You think about snowflakes. You think about individual snowflakes in their frozen latticework, in their fragility and beauty and singularity. You think about crystallization and symmetry.

You think back to when you were a kid, or to some point when you interacted with a child, or to when you were an adult and, on a lark, you grabbed paper and scissors and tried, once again, to make a snowflake. It really shouldn’t be so hard. It’s just the folding of paper and then cutting along the folded edge.

Making snowflakes…I don’t remember doing that as a kid. I’m sure I must have. I don’t specifically remember doing it with my children. I’m sure we must have. But I do remember doing it somewhere along the way, especially as an adult. I remember the anticipation of delicate, lacy, paper creations and the reality that they often come out large and clunky.

I remember that they came out more square than they should. I remember that my hand cut snowflakes don’t offer a lot in the way of whimsy. I remember paper snowflakes as a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe it’s been my technique. I think there’s a very good chance that I’ve never folded the paper correctly, that from the beginning, I had the wrong shape. In looking at directions today, because how hard can it be?, I see over and over again the foundation of a cone-shaped structure. I am fairly sure I’ve never used that kind of triangular base. Did we just fold the paper into rectangles and make block-shaped snowflakes? Surely not. Maybe we stopped one step short of the cone, cutting shapes from a larger, less refined triangle? No wonder they were disappointing. No wonder my memories of paper snowflakes are of something fairly square.)

I would say cutting a snowflake is worth a try again. I would say it’s probably worth using the scissors that shouldn’t be used to cut paper. I would say we should get past caring if we use our scissors to cut paper. I would say we should use smaller paper because we’re older and wiser, and we realize that the full sheet of printer paper is not going to yield a delicate snowflake. I would say we should be bold and use really sharp scissors that can make tiny cuts.

You may or may not be or aspire to be a delicate snowflake, and yet there is beauty in making a delicate snowflake. This is not Minecraft. We don’t need block-level snowflakes. We don’t need 8-bit images plotted out on graph paper. We can follow curves and dip in and out of spaces. We can play with the geometry of shape and form.

So what do you do on a postcard if a single snowflake is your objective? You think about symmetry. You think about branching and hexagonal designs. While it may be fun and intriguing to draw snowflakes with a large number of branches (or arms), the familiar snowflake has six branches that radiate from the center. It’s all about chemistry:

“The six-sided shape of a snowflake can be attributed to the molecular structure of water and the unique formation process of snow crystals. Snowflakes form when water vapour condenses on tiny ice nuclei in cold, supersaturated air. As the water vapour freezes, it arranges itself into a hexagonal lattice due to the hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” – IET

From each of the six arms, a unique symmetry evolves, each arm mirroring the others:

“…while different snow crystals follow different paths through the clouds, the six branches of a single crystal travel together. They all experience the same growth history, so they grow in synchrony. The end result is a snow crystal that is both complex and symmetrical… and often quite stunning.” – Kenneth Libbrecht, The Art of the Snowflake

It is often said that every snowflake is different, that no two are alike. The infinite scope of this singularity, the possibility of this lack of repetition in formation, is part of the magic of snowflakes. We may cling to this story of individuality, but there are actually a number of different types of snowflakes. The classification of snowflakes seems to be something on which scientists differ, but many use a system that includes 35 different types:

A Bit of Snowy History

Wilson A. Bentley, known as Snowflake Bentley, spent much of his life examining, documenting, and photographing snowflakes using a photomicrographic technique. (He succeeded in first photographing a single snow crystal in 1855.) Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes and, famously, never found two that were alike.

In 1931, Snow Crystals, a collection of his photographs, was published. (Bentley died shortly after the publication.)

Snowflake photos taken by Wilson Bentley. Source: Jericho Historical Society.

And here comes the snow,
A language in which no word is ever repeated.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow”

Send a Postcard

On your postcard this month do something related to snow. Draw a snowflake or two. Play with tessellation. Look up snowflake photography and draw something based on real snowflake structures, or play with the simplification of the snowflake as a symbol.

Drawing a snowflake is similar to the process of drawing a mandala. It can be symmetrical and mindful. It can be geometric. It can be precise and structured and measured and calculated, or it can be freeform.

I encourage you to cut a snowflake first. You can then use it as a model to draw, a visual aid as you think about the shape of snow. You might even use it as a stencil and play with negative space, adding a splash of color to a postcard and creating a mosaic from the spaces between.

I tried again before writing today’s prompt, and I still didn’t have much luck. After laughing at one of my attempts, my son suggested that solving part of the problem (the fact that it didn’t have distinct branches and was circular) required cutting off parts of the top at opposite angles. I did that, and as I opened it back up, I was enchanted to find I had unwittingly created rabbits. (I couldn’t not see rabbits.)

The additional cuts helped, giving the snowflake some semblance of branches rather than the appearance of a circular doily, but it still wasn’t satisfying. The rest of the snowflake is still disappointing.

(I had to laugh to see Martha Stewart talk about kids happily occupying themselves cutting dozens of snowflakes.)

The Challenge

This month, I am suggesting you cut one, or, really, draw one.

You don’t have time because December is busy? Really? That might be exactly why you need to slow down and cut or draw a snowflake. It can be a mindful practice.

This month, consider drawing your own snowflake or snowflakes, one or many, on a postcard. Snowflakes embody individuality and singularity, and something crisp and fragile, something icy and prismatic. Snowflakes are often said to represent hope.

Snowflakes are very quiet.
Be like a snowflake.

Related Resources

Here are some directions you can use to cut a snowflake. (These directions also include instructions for how to make a vertical mobile or “curtain” out of paper snowflakes.)

Video inspiration for drawing snowflakes:

• How to draw snowflakes (LethalChris Drawing)
• How to draw a snowflake (Crafty Nica)

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the third in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. The first two prompts involved Halloween memories and spirals of gratitude.

Feel free to jump in. Even if you don’t literally make a postcard and apply a stamp, you might at least think through your response to the prompt and do it in your illustrated journal or sketchbook.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author, except where otherwise noted.

The post Connecting Dots: Send a Snowflake appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Shatter

My wife and I were traveling in Japan when this word got assigned. I was seeing a lot of sake vessels and their silhouettes were always striking in simplicity—inspiration supplied. In order to know something is shattered, you have to know what it was whole.

Craig Frazier

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wind

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

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When your boss tells you to track down an amusing Steve Brodner factoid to open the podcast with, and one of the first things you find is a, uh, a “dick army,” welp, that’s what you’re going to go with.

Lest you judge me, I can explain. Brodner’s drawing of this army was inspired by a guy who was actually named Dick Armey (A-R-M-E-Y)! He was Newt Gingrich’s wingman back in the nineties. I thought to myself, The people need to know this.

However, with the election now a few days behind us, maybe the time for talking about men and their junk is over?

What you really want to learn about is this Society of Illustrators Hall of Famer’s career. Brodner’s work, which has been called “unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass, and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion,” has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and many others.

In this episode, Brodner talks about how the death of print has led to the current misinformation crisis. As it gets harder and harder to tell what’s true, the future becomes increasingly uncertain. Even his most biting drawings are rooted in truth.

Satire doesn’t work if you are irresponsibly unreasonably inventive. If satire doesn’t have truth in it, it’s not funny.

A production note: This episode was recorded exactly one week before the election. As our conversation began, we took turns telling stories about memorable election night parties, and our plans for November 5th. Here’s Steve, talking about his plans…

Check out the episode page for the full transcript and illustrations by Brodner.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a podcast about magazines and the people who made (and make) them. Magazines that combined thought-provoking attitudes and values with a distinctive look and feel, and cast a long and powerful shadow on American culture and public discourse. Hear stories and learn lessons from legendary designers, editors, writers, publishers, photographers, illustrators, photo editors, and more—stories and lessons that capture a magical history of innovation and inspiration, and that point the way forward. We’ll go deep into the lives and careers of this astonishingly talented group of creators, and tease out what these giants—past and present—have to teach the next generation of creators.

If you’re in the magazine business—if you’re in any business focused on content creation—this podcast is for you.

This episode is made possible by PIDLLP sponsors Commercial Type, Mountain Gazette, and Freeport Press.

The team behind Print is Dead (Long Live Print!) also produces The Full Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines and the magazines of the future.

The post What Makes Steve Brodner Happy appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Design creativity blooms in spaces where curiosity meets intention, where ideas are nurtured into forms that resonate and inspire. It’s a process marked by exploration, experimentation, and the willingness to challenge conventions to uncover new perspectives. In this fertile ground, creativity is more than a spark—it’s a cultivated journey, drawing from diverse influences and blending intuition with technique.

Celebrating our 45th year, the 2025 PRINT Awards honors design in every shape and form. And, as our industry continues to evolve and our practitioners continue to explore new mediums and methods to advance their creativity, the PRINT Awards have found new ways to recognize outstanding work.

2024 PRINT Awards First Place Winner in Self-Promotions. The Office of Ordinary Things and D&K Printing. D&K Printing also printed the beautiful 2024 PRINT Awards certificates.

Categories for 2025

The 2025 PRINT Awards offer 28 categories for entries, ranging from Illustration to Motion Design & Video. In recent years, we added In-House, Design for Social Impact, and Packaging and expanded our branding categories. We also expanded the awards to offer students a chance to enter work in each category instead of only one student category. And, this year, our jury will also consider entries in Social Media + Content Design, Title Sequence Design, and Graphic Novels.

Learn more about the 2025 PRINT Awards categories.

2024 PRINT Awards Third Place Winner in Packaging, CF Napa Brand Design; Second Place Winner in Logo Design, Onfire. Design.

Citizen Design Award

Each year, the PRINT Awards highlight a free-to-enter Citizen Design Award to celebrate design work focused on one annually chosen social issue. With societies facing global challenges like climate change, economic instability, and technological shifts, our Citizen Design Award this year will honor work that speaks to social justice.

Social Justice ensures that all people are entitled to human rights and societal respect regardless of race, gender, religion, health, and economic status. Discrimination in the form of economic and educational inequities, combined with enduring legacies of oppression continue to impact many communities, creating toxic cycles of privilege and disadvantage.

Design can profoundly influence social justice through graphic tools that amplify awareness and drive change. Design can make complex issues more accessible, spark debate, inform audiences, and motivate positive engagement. This year’s PRINT Citizen Design category recognizes and celebrates the most impactful work that fosters empathy and action. From social awareness campaigns to apps, community-centered design projects, infographics, posters, social media graphics, and interactive experiences, Citizen Design will honor work that strives to make our world more compassionate and just.

2024 PRINT Awards First Place Winner in Design for Social Impact, Clinton Carlson and Team.

Our 2025 Jury

With a global jury representing a wide range of disciplines, each entry will continue to be judged on four key criteria: Craft, Longevity, Innovation, and Originality. Top winners will be featured on PRINTmag.com and receive trophies, certificates, and social media promotion. We’ll be adding jury members in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we welcome a few here!

A few of the 2025 Jury Members: Marisa Sanchez-Dunning, Bennett Peji, Jennifer Rittner, Eleazar Ruiz, Lara McCormick, Mike Perry, and Miller McCormick. More jurors are to be announced soon!

The 2025 PRINT Awards Presenting Sponsor

The team at PepsiCo Design + Innovation believes that good design is a meaningful experience. A functional product. A rich story. A beautiful object. Design can be fun, convenient, precious, or fearless, but good design is always an act of respect, empathy, and love.

That’s why PepsiCo Design + Innovation has joined PRINT this year as our Presenting Sponsor—to recognize, honor and, above all, to celebrate the joy of design in all its forms. That’s why PepsiCo Design and Innovation has joined PRINT this year as our Presenting Sponsor—to recognize, honor, and, above all, celebrate the joy of design in all its forms!

Dates and Deadlines

As in years past, we’ve broken the deadline schedule for the awards into four simple tiers—Early Bird, Regular, Late, and Final Call. The earlier you enter, the more you save because it helps us plan judging schedules and other tasks in advance. Enter now for the best price! (And it’s worth noting that to enable students to enter, the pricing is consistent across the board no matter when they submit their work.)

Join us as we recognize the talent that colors our world and celebrate the beauty of fresh ideas, bold solutions, and impactful storytelling. From emerging talents to seasoned visionaries, each submission is a testament to the boundless growth of design.

Submit your work today, and let’s cultivate the next generation of creative vision!

The post Announcing The 2025 PRINT Awards Call For Entries appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I grew up with a New York Yankees super fan as a father, who listened to every inning of every game on a hand-held transistor radio pressed up against his ear. The soothing sound of legendary commentator Roger Sterling’s voice is central in the soundtrack of my childhood, crackling through our kitchen and living room airwaves, accompanied by my dad’s whoops and groans.

My dad normalized listening to sporting events on the radio, but I never thought much of it. Recently, however, I came upon the evocative work of the Spanish artist Cassandra Constant, who’s spent much of her art practice contemplating this very concept. In Constant’s hometown of Madrid, the sport they’re listening to on the radio isn’t baseball, but fútbol, which is a much faster-paced and frenetic sport. Constant began to consider how listeners to soccer games on the radio visualized what they were hearing, and took this questioning to her sketch pad.

Since this initial curiosity, Constant has illustrated over 250 soccer games she’s listened to in full. With just pencil and paper, she rapidly sketches the play-by-play relayed to her from the radio, creating a rich world of fútbol frenzy in her finished drawings. Enthralled by her work, I reached out to learn more about her action-packed process.

What’s your personal relationship to soccer? Have you always been a football fan? What team do you support?

I am, first and foremost, an artist who loves movement and color… and football! I was born and brought up in Spain, and here soccer is part of daily life— on the news, the teams, players, scores, watching games on television, or listening to them on the radio.

Growing up, we watched football as a family. My brother supported one team, Real Madrid CF, so of course I had to support the other main Madrid team. That was a long time ago. Following my first art show, a famous footballer (who plays on my brother’s team) bought a painting of mine through one of the chief curators of the Prado Museum. I instantly changed teams to support my new collector!

I would get into a taxi, and the driver would be listening to a match on the radio and I wondered: How does he know where the ball is? 

When and why did you first start drawing football games as you listened to them? What inspired that idea?

As an artist, you have to observe and ask questions and be curious. Often I would get into a taxi, and the driver would be listening to a match on the radio and I wondered: How does he know where the ball is? 

Many years later, I bumped into an old friend in Rio de Janeiro who was a technician for a Spanish radio station and they were covering Real Madrid CF in one of the international competitions. We talked about transmission, how the match was relayed back home, the importance of narrators and commentators, communication and imagination, and how radio illustrates the scene.

Very much an experimentalist, I started putting down some ideas to “illustrate” the radio, beginning with football matches! Drawing soccer players on large pieces of paper, trying soft-ground etching on metal plates and collages, cutting out footballers from newspapers, and also drawing straight onto smooth canvases. But the narration and commentary and the match go very fast! Each game is two 45-minute halves, and there was a lot to capture. So eventually, I settled for A3 size (approx. 11×16 inches), smooth, white paper, using all kinds of writing materials, from black ballpoint pens, Bic blue biros, and now a variety of graphite pencils. I continue to experiment!

How often do you draw games? How many have you drawn so far?

I used to only draw football matches occasionally, and closer to the final stages of competitions: national leagues, European football, and World Cups. Now I find myself drawing all sorts of matches, from those between big rival teams to lesser-known ones.

I now draw, on average, a match a week. I have drawn over 250 matches.

Can you describe your game drawing process? What’s your set-up like as you listen to them on the radio? How have you developed the visual language you use to interpret the games?

Once I know which game I want to draw, set up starts about an hour before the match begins. I usually listen to the top Spanish radio station for sports, but also Talksport and BBC5 Live. I find out who’s in the initial starting teams, and write the names on paper so I know who’s going to be running in which direction!

Then I get an A3 size paper and quickly note down the competition, stadium, teams, name of referee, roughly draw club emblems, an outline of the pitch, goalposts, and the benches. I turn the paper upside down, the match starts, and we’re off! It’s fast, there are passes from left to right, back towards the goals, long balls, players whose names I cannot grasp, the kits, and what colors the goalkeepers are wearing, and I am grateful when I hear it’s a throw-in, a corner, offside, foul, yellow card; that’s when I start getting an idea of what’s happening! 

There are goals, injuries, red cards (occasionally), players come off the pitch, and new ones come on. Depending on the radio station, this can be interspersed with advertisements, calling of winning lottery numbers, the number of people in the stadium, football gossip, transfer news, VIPS in the stands, what players have just had a baby, endless statistics, and records broken— you get the picture. I love it! There’s a rhythm and it’s all very intense!

I think playing football is really difficult! It involves so many components, organization, and strategies, from players, coaches, medical practitioners, nutritionists, PRs, designers, and more to plenty of staff to manage it all. There are many more aspects I have yet to explore!

Why have you decided to keep your interpretation of the games to just pencil and paper, only using a red marker to indicate goals? What does that sketchy style bring to the way you portray the games?

The sketchy style is the result of “illustrating” a game, which takes place in less than two hours: fast, speedy, energetic, dynamic, and intense, trying to capture as much as possible. I assure you, I end up exhausted!

I’m not sure whether I should continue to outline the goals scored in red. Maybe that’s one of those questions I can ask on social media: Better in red or not? What do you think?

I feel I am contributing something to art and to football. Sharing the experience means a lot to me.

Are you surprised by the public reception of your game sketches? How has the success of your work felt?

I’m not really sure how many people have seen my drawings. What I can tell you is that when people first see them, they seem perplexed and not too sure what they are looking at. But when they realize, or when I explain it to them, they love the concept. This makes me happy, as I feel I am contributing something to art and to football. Sharing the experience means a lot to me.

I have had many enquiries about the drawings and had conversations with fans from different clubs, which I find very enriching. I am interested in the histories and values of these clubs. 

At the moment, I am in the process of setting up a website offering a selection of matches which I hope will be ready later in November.

Header image: 2022 World Cup Final; Argentina vs. France

The post Cassandra Constant Visualizes Soccer Game Radio Broadcasts with Pencil and Paper appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wood

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 24/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

But, his political satire only scratches the surface of his full oeuvre.

Rodriguez’s work spans from painting and sculpture to film posters, portraiture, children’s book illustrations, and on and on. Steven Heller recently wrote about his illustrated book covers for two Cuban sci-fi titles in a recent The Daily Heller. He also wrote and illustrated his American experience in Worm, a graphic memoir that spans his fleeing from Castro’s Cuba as a young child on the Mariel boatlift to watching the insurrection unfold on January 6, 2021. If you missed our PRINT Book Club with Rodriguez about Worm, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Rodriguez is the subject of a new documentary, Freedom is a Verb, now screening at DOC NYC from Nov 13 through Dec 1, and airing on PBS in the coming months. Directed by Adrienne Hall and Mecky Creus, the film explores the reckless pursuit of freedom inherent in all of Rodriguez’s work. Watch the trailer here.

With the election decided, Rodriguez’s work takes on layers of prophetic meaning. We look forward to Edel Rodriguez’s truth-telling in the near future, reminding us of the power of artists and creatives in times of chaos and despair.

Below, we’ve highlighted some of his stellar work over the last few years.

Left: Latino voter engagement illustration for The Washington Post; Latino vote 2024 poster

Covers for Stern (Germany, two at top left), La Croix (France, top middle), and Time (US, top right and bottom two).

Imagery courtesy of Edel Rodriguez.

The post Four More Years! (…of Edel Rodriguez) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

For more, read PRINT’s interview with Hische about her latest children’s book, out Oct 2024, My First Book of Fancy Letters.

Welcome to the DesignThinkers Podcast! Join host and RGD President Nicola Hamilton as she digs into the archives of the DesignThinkers conference, reconnecting with past speakers about their talks and ideas that have shaped Canada’s largest graphic design conference. Follow the RGD on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit them at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

The post DesignThinkers Podcast: Jessica Hische appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Time …

after Time

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

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Our gratitude is individual. Like the lines and whorls on our fingers, our relationship with gratitude is unique.

Gratitude doesn’t have to be about big things. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Our gratitude can be most sustaining and most profound when things are falling apart. We can be grateful for things that are vast, things that are ineffable, but we can also be grateful for small things, for a favorite coffee cup, a soft pillow, the flash of a bird in the tree.

Finding gratitude in the quotidian can help center you, can help you find perspective, and can make a difference in how you experience the world around you.

Talking about gratitude is more commonplace now than it was a handful of years ago, or maybe it feels that way simply because I struggled with gratitude. I struggled to find my footing in gratitude as a mindset and a practice at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart.

I was a late-comer to the gratitude table, or, in my case, hilltop. I found my way there not as things got better but as things started to dissolve. When I first talked out loud about gratitude, I got emotional. I remember feeling like I was shedding my surface as I admitted that what I thought I needed was to focus on gratitude. It didn’t make sense to me, but my discomfort, and even my resistance, seemed important. I struggled with my sense that gratitude was a superficial practice, something that blurred or elided reality. I remember feeling silly. I might as well have been admitting I was going looking for unicorns in the park.

That was a beginning. I was struggling with fear and anxiety and worry over ongoing health issues in my house. I was feeling like there was no bottom to bottom, like I didn’t know where “bottom” was, but I recognized that something was increasingly hollow in me. Almost instinctively, I reached for something shiny, something I thought might be powerful. I reached for gratitude.

The next year, in November, I did 30 days of gratitude writing and recording. I found myself standing at the top of the hill, the literal hill on which I live, at sunset most days, and looking out, a point that lets me see the ocean and the bay, a point that puts the sky in motion overhead. I can turn in a circle and see the whole world. That’s how it feels, the moon over the bay, the sun dropping into the ocean, rose light warming the faces of the houses on the street. November has the best light.

That year, I gave myself over to the top of the hill, to my appreciation for all that was right then, for having that beauty within the distance of a short walk of our senior rescue. I noticed the colors of paint on houses after rain. I wrote about memory, about all that I don’t remember. I wrote about being present, being aware of things we take for granted, and appreciating things that are within reach.

I try to keep gratitude in mind all year long, but November is always a reset point, a month steeped in a gratitude mindset. I no longer cry when I talk about gratitude.3 Like most things, with practice, we get over our resistance, find our own patterns, move past the things that hurt, and find comfort in the routine.

I’ve done a number of November gratitude projects now, both written and drawn. I’ve tracked November light, the barest of diagrams showing the bands of the sky when I first walk into the kitchen and see the light over the bay in the distance. I’ve added gratitudes to daily planners and my Notion dashboard. There is really no wrong way to approach it. One year I did a series of portraits of people in one of my online communities. Two years in a row, I did large drawings to which I added a simple drawing each day of a concrete thing for which I was grateful. (Those projects are favorites.)

It may feel silly to focus on daily gratitude and on gratitude for small things, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite pencil, the familiar quilt, the cozy sweater from a loved one who has passed, but the practice is powerful. It is deceptively simple, but it can make a dramatic difference in how you feel. All that is wrong doesn’t go away. That remains the tension with gratitude. It isn’t an eraser. But something happens in the process of paying more attention, focusing, and looking around with intention and naming and recognizing our gratitude.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

John Greene, Turtles All The Way Down

Snail Mail – November Postcard Prompt

This month’s postcard prompt is gratitude-infused, but on the concrete level, the prompt is a spiral.

A spiral is a winding path, one that either moves in on itself or radiates from the center out. In walking, tracing, or drawing a spiral, literally or figuratively, there is mindfulness, the coiling or unfurling of thought, the chance to see what sits or stands or dances at other points of the spiral as you pass again and again.

Mathematically speaking, there are a number of different types of spirals, including: the Archimedean spiral, the hyperbolic spiral, Fermat’s spiral, the logarithmic spiral, the lituus spiral, the Cornu spiral, the spiral of Theodorus, the Fibonacci spiral (also called the golden spiral), conical spirals, whorls, and the involute of a circle.

These quick line drawings (not mathematically precise) show some of the spirals listed above.

This elongated spiral doesn’t show up in the list, but we know this model from the world around us:

To multiply the fun, consider the triskelion (or triskele):

We can think about spirals in terms of galaxies (look up “barred spiral”), snails, pinecones, succulents, pineapples, and the horn of a goat. The list goes on.

As a metaphor, we can use the spiral as a path for mindfulness. We can walk the spiral in or out. We can wind our way around and back like a labyrinth.

For this month’s postcard, integrate a spiral and, if you are bold, let gratitude be your guide.

You may want to simply play with the spiral as an image. You might think about cinnamon rolls or the Fibonacci sequence or snails. Or you may want to use the spiral as the form of the writing, starting from the center and writing your message in a spiral. Maybe you choose a special quote or poem. Maybe you express your gratitude to the recipient. Maybe you simply write a letter as a spiral, something the reader will have to slowly spin to read.

There is mindfulness in the reading, too.

Primary or secondary, either way, gratitude is part of the November prompt. If the spiral isn’t of interest, you might use your postcard to document daily gratitudes (one a day). You might draw a series of icons of things for which you are grateful.

Gratitude Quotes

Here are a few gratitude quotes to get you started thinking and appreciating in November:

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi

“Gratitude bestows reverence…changing forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” — A.A. Milne

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is the true prosperity.” — Eckhart Tolle

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you made and sent an October card, we would love to see what you did with the costume-themed prompt. If you share in social media, please tag me and use #PostcardPrompts.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author.

The post Connecting Dots: Tracking Gratitude in Snail Mail appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see their thought process as they translate each prompt through photography and illustration.

Hot

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The post Two Craigs: 22/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Now, however, I have another vision in my mind’s eye as I re-read the book. Igor Karash‘s illustrations for a forthcoming limited edition from Easton Press bring more nuanced darkness to Vonnegut’s shadows. Karash, known for his satiric depictions of Stalinist Soviet Union, brings into play dramatic shades of light and dark that illuminate Vonnegut’s personal feelings about the horror of war.

Below, Karash and I discuss the making of this emotionally tense, tactile rendition of a 20th-century classic, which is bound to become a 21st-century treasure.

I’ve read Slaughterhouse–Five at least five times over the past 20 years (and saw the film three times). I am very taken by your visual interpretation. How did this project begin?
In the fall of 2021 (about five months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) I was approached by the publishing company Easton Press in Connecticut. Honestly, I believe it was only the second or third time in my illustration career that a publisher contacted me directly with a commission. Easton Press is best known for deluxe editions of illustrated classics. When I heard they were interested in me illustrating Slaughterhouse–Five, a book I always admired, it only took me a few seconds to reply with a confirmation that I was fully on board.

My initial step was to formulate a few possible visual scenarios—concepts and mood boards consisting of sketches, previous work that could stylistically work for Kurt Vonnegut, and inspirational images, including war-time photography. One particular concept titled “SO IT GOES” was inspired by an event in the book when Billy Pilgrim watched a black-and-white newsreel backwards and how the Tralfamadorians viewed reality as a thousand images in one glance. The other two concepts involved integrating religious imagery from the early Renaissance, or, quite the opposite, visuals inspired by American sci-fi illustrations of the ’50s and early ’60s.

The “SO IT GOES” concept was chosen by the publisher and I began to develop the series.

You mentioned that you started working on it at the outset of the Ukraine-Russia war. How did it impact your work?
Not in the greatest way. When I started developing the visuals, I was predominantly moved by the idea of examining the “horrors of war,” bouncing on the borderline between the darkest side of human nature and the paradoxical presence of good (this is the main message of the book for me). And then, the first war on the European continent since WWII turned everything upside down. Ukraine for me isn’t just another country—this is where I went to art school, where I met my wife, and where both of my children were born. From day one of the Russian invasion I was closely watching and following all news from Ukraine, contacting my friends there, etc., and almost immediately my drawings of the “horrors of war” on the surface of my drawing tablet started to feel bleak, unimportant and fake compared to the tragic reality unfolding before me, and I more deeply sunk into the hole of “PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN FROM THEIR PAST. SO IT GOES.” It took me a while to find enough inner peace to continue the project.

When were you introduced to Vonnegut’s writing, and what was your initial impression?
I was first introduced to Kurt Vonnegut’s prose during my “previous life” in the Soviet Union. There were few translations of his novels published in the USSR—most notably Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Not a lot of American authors were lucky to be published in my country (I say this with sarcasm in my voice). I think the Soviets liked Kurt Vonnegut’s rebellious criticism of the West, satirical commentary of the system, and anti-war sentiment. For us, the then-young generation (in contrast to the official government’s stance), his books were a small window to the West and we mainly enjoyed Vonnegut for his dark humor, surreal settings, fantastic worlds, elements of eroticism, and the oftentimes unusual structures and timelines in his books.

I only read Slaughterhouse–Five in English when I started working on this project. I have read it in its entirety about 10 times during the illustration process, and would periodically revisit specific chapters and sections.

What I like most is that none of the images you’ve made conform to my vision of the book, which I think is dictated by the movie. What is your thinking behind the pictures?
Somehow, perhaps subconsciously, my experiences in the Soviet military (1979–1981) shaped my vision for this project. Let me explain: There was a very strict draft system, so everyone had to serve in some capacity. I was drafted into the army while I was a student taking evening classes at an architecture college in Baku, Azerbaijan. I was a young 19-year-old dreamy/artistic type, so even though they found a military uniform and a pair of boots for me, I was very unprepared and quite unfit, a Soviet-style Billy Pilgrim.

I think what came through in my drawings based on my personal experiences is the feeling of being a misfit and a deep loneliness. The places I was stationed shaped my vision—I found myself in the midst of former German lands in the Kaliningrad Region (the city of Kaliningrad was built on the remains of the German city of Königsberg). When the city was taken over by the Soviets at the end of WWII it was somehow rebuilt as a typical Soviet city, but the region as a whole looked like a “frozen in time” war zone. One of these places, a small village called Kornevo with a dying collective farm, was at some point a fairly prosperous German town called Zinten. Not a lot remained of Zinten except for a few ruins. Scars of war were everywhere—holes from artillery shells on the buildings, wild apple trees where blossoming apple orchards once were, and ruins of homes with swimming pools in their backyards. Our regiment was stationed in former German barracks—a really well-built former German Tank School. These buildings were the only well-kept structures in Kornevo. When I started working on Slaughterhouse-Five, all my memories of this place came back, and now looking at my drawings I see some resemblance and reflection of these experiences.

On a general note, I always think my primary goal (when illustrating classic literature or modern classics) is to formulate a fairly independent and novel visual experience for the reader. But it is also important to me to find some balance between audience expectations regarding the theme, characters, time period, etc., and my artistic freedom. In the end, I hope the work has contemporary relevance and presents a balance of three worlds: “the world of the book,” “the world of the author” and “the world of the artist.”

You’ve also focused more on the return to Dresden than the character’s life in the suburbs. Did you prefer to stick to the surreal aspect of the plot?
This book, despite its small size, has a very complex structure (like the time travel) and an exceptional number of characters, so I had to make a decision very early in the process to limit my choices and focus on a few primary themes, like the Dresden bombing/scars of the war and the time/space travel that is part of Billy’s mental state … or is it?

This is a full-throttle deluxe visual experience. Do you feel it enhances or complements the reading?
A well-produced illustrated edition of an important influential book is something that, in my mind, corresponds to seeing a great theater performance or watching a great film based on a well-known classic. Yes, the story is familiar, but a new production or fresh creative direction adds new relevance and surfaces overlooked nuances. I think the modern reader is less interested in seeing visually what is already well-described in the text and appreciates illustrations that are more atmospheric, conceptually sophisticated and enigmatic.

This special edition also reflects the full creative freedom endowed to me by Easton Press—not a single concept or image I proposed was dismissed—including the most bizarre and strange imagery. I hope Kurt Vonnegut would like that!

The post The Daily Heller: Kurt Vonnegut’s Time Traveler Reimagined appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see their thought process as they translate each prompt through photography and illustration.

Small

Something is only small in relation to something larger—scale. If I wanted the figure to be small, I needed to diminish it in relation to its environment.

Craig Frazier

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Brasher is, as The Washington Post recently wrote, the greatest nature painter you’ve probably never heard of. A self-taught artist and longtime resident of the Northwest Corner, at age 16 he made it his life’s work to paint every bird in North America—producing a 12-volume compendium in 1929–1933 featuring descriptions of nearly 1,300 species and subspecies, including 874 color prints. Unhappy with the quality of four-color printing at the time, Brasher had black-and-white versions of his paintings printed, and he then colored them himself with watercolor, totaling 87,400 individually hand-colored prints over four years. One hundred sets of The Birds and Trees of North America were produced and sold to collectors, schools and libraries. Twenty complete sets are known to exist today.

“We are thrilled to partner with the Rex Brasher Association to produce these books and help spread awareness of this singular talent,” said Jim Coudal, co-founder of Field Notes. “The Association is currently fundraising to build a museum on Brasher’s home in Kent, CT, and a portion of the proceeds from this edition will be donated to support the effort.”

The set is grouped into two three-packs. Pack A includes the Rocky Mountain and Mexican Screech Owls, the Blue Jay and the Brewer Sparrow; Pack B includes the Pine Grosbeak, the Baltimore Oriole and the Sulphurbelly Flycatcher. The covers are printed on Mohawk Via Felt 100#C in Pure White, a supple and toothsome stock that evokes watercolor paper.

“When you see a Brasher bird, you have seen the bird itself, lifelike and in a natural attitude,” said T. Gilbert Pearson, a conservationist and president of the National Audubon Society from 1920–1934.

The post The Daily Heller: Watch the Birdies, They’re Watching You appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Angle

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The post Two Craigs: 20/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“Letters are magic” is the watchword of Jessica Hische, one of the world’s leading lettering artists. “Letters are an amazing playground,” she says, “a playground for art and creativity. They’re an art form that gets kids — and everyone — believing they’re artists.” But it’s inaccurate to call Hische “just” a lettering artist. She’s a bestselling author, a graphic designer with an enviable client list, and an illustrator with a delightfully sophisticated style.

She’s also the mother of three school-age children, which gives her an insider advantage when it comes to creating books that kids will love and parents will want to buy (and read aloud and collect and display). It’s no accident that her books‚ which are one hundred percent Hische productions from the cover and spine to the acknowledgments page — have sold up to 200,000 copies each.

On October 22 — that’s next Tuesday — her fifth picture book, My First Book of Fancy Letters, will be released by Penguin Random House, and Hische is currently on tour.

What places does she most enjoy visiting? Elementary schools, of course, like the two pictured above, where she’s introducing her 2021 New York Times bestseller Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave. “Kids at first don’t know what a lettering artist is,” she explains. (For a detailed explanation yourself, please see her 2015 book In Progress: Inside a Lettering Artist’s Process from Pencil to Vector.)

To break the ice at a school visit, Hische might ask, “Who has letters on their shirt?” Many kids always raise their hands, so she explains, “An artist drew those letters and made them into what they wanted to express.”

She then demonstrates that letters can have all kinds of forms and meanings. As long as the basic shape of the alphabet letter is clear, it can be Athletic, Bubbly, Creepy … or whatever you, the artist, want it to be. I personally appreciate that each letter is shown as a grown-up capital and a baby lowercase because 95 percent of the letters we read in text are lowercase. Kids who start first grade only knowing the uppercase letters are at a big disadvantage.

Spreads ABC and DEF from My First Book of Fancy Letters, © Jessica Hische, 2024

Hische might then ask, “What’s your favorite thing?” If a student says, “a rainbow,” she might encourage them to draw an ‘R’ made from a rainbow, like the one in the spread below. If another student answers, “A rocket ship,” you can already visualize the kind of ‘R’ the child will draw. This game has only one rule: you must draw the alphabet letter that matches the concept or word. So, if the word is “Prickly,” like in My First Book of Fancy Letters, in which each letter illustrates an adjective, the ‘P’ is a prickly green cactus.” The ‘F’ is definitely Flowery. And the ‘Y’ is as Yummy as a cookie with pink icing and sprinkles.

Spreads PQR and XYZ from My First Book of Fancy Letters, © Jessica Hische, 2024

“I’m not there to sell books,” Hische says of her school visits. “I’m there to inspire the kids, especially when they’re still at the age when their brains are mushy sponges. Even if the book is not specifically about letters, they’ll walk away inspired to draw letters.” Her way of organizing a talk or pitch — totally involving the audience in a creative process — could be a model for all of us.

A quick stroll through Hische’s website tells you that “lettering artist-author-designer-illustrator-mom” is still an incomplete bio. Hische is a true entrepreneur. In addition to 20 years — and counting — as a design firm principal, creating logos, posters, book jackets, packaging, and all kinds of cool stuff like holiday cookie jars for A-list clients, she owns two retail stores in her adopted hometown of Oakland, California. She describes Drawling as a kids’ art supply store and Jessica Hische &Friends as a showcase for her books and lots of flourish-y things she’s designed: limited-edition prints, posters, apparel, jewelry, and note cards. Many of the products are on the ‘shop’ section of her website, where font packages of her six original typefaces are available for sale and download — so that you, too, can design with very fancy letters.

A few examples from the extensive Jessica Hische portfolio. (l-r) Top row: Spread from the book Tomorrow You’ll Be Brave; Popcorn can from the Neiman Marcus 2022 holiday packaging suite; Poster for all-star Scott Rudin film. Center: Neiman Marcus Christmas cookie jar, based on a ceramic tree that Hische’s grandmother put out every holiday season; Promotion for a master class she teaches for Skillshare featuring her hands refining the Mailchimp logo. Bottom: Poster for the American Red Cross encouraging vaccination; Main title design and poster for Lionsgate film; Poster for Comcast used as set decoration in a film in which E.T. reunites with Elliott’s earth family; Limited-edition print.

Hische is the first to admit that from kindergarten on, she was the one whose art was most often displayed on school bulletin boards. After attending public schools in the small town in Pennsylvania where she grew up, she became “a design major who did illustration on the side” at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating in 2006 with a BFA. In 2007 she came to New York to be a junior designer at Louise Fili LTD, bringing her own historically-based swashes and ligatures to the firm’s work in logo, book, and postage stamp design. Not surprisingly, the job soon became a full-time senior designer position.

“When I’m looking to hire a designer,” Fili says, “I want to see at least one portfolio piece that I wish I’d done. Jessica’s was a set of postcards for the Twelve Days of Christmas, a showcase of her skills. From day one here, she was fearless. To anything I asked of her — Can you make this type look like spaghetti? Like embroidery? Oatmeal? Ribbons? — I received an affirmative response. And the lettering was always, of course, perfect.” 

In 2009, Hische began freelancing in New York, making a name for herself and winning just about every award and accolade in the business. In 2011, her husband, the musician and web designer, now Meta design director Russ Maschmeyer, was hired by Facebook, and they moved to the Bay Area.

Hische and Maschmeyer began growing their family in 2015, now with kids aged nine, seven, and five. “I have a complicated life,” she admits, “but I could never miss one of my kids’ first steps or birthday parties. We’ll even make the cake together. Part of the reason I’ve kept my businesses small — mostly just me — is to have a ton of flexibility around family stuff. I love going to their school plays, volunteering at the school, and bringing them to sports. I’m even taking karate with my middle son!”

Letters are an amazing playground.

Jessica Hische

Portrait of the family, © Rasmus Andersson

What are the most important things Jessica Hische wants everyone to know? One: that every letter in her books is hand-drawn, first in pencil, then in Illustrator or Procreate. Other than the glyphs in the font packages, each letter is a unique work of art. Two: that she hopes that the kids (and grown-ups) on your gift list will make their own fancy letters. And have lots of fun doing it.

With Hische, even an interview can be lots of fun.

Images courtesy of Jessica Hische, except where noted.

The post Letters are Magic in Jessica Hische’s New Children’s Book appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Spin

I couldn’t resist riffing on Craig’s spinning top in his ‘balance’ photo. After drawing the little graphic top, I realized that it felt static—not spinning. So I made it into a diagram by adding a little cut paper arrow.

Craig Frazier

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We talked about the backstory, the current impact, and the making of this personal and political family saga.

How long have you been working on Amalgam?
It was 12 years in the making, beginning in 2009.

I don’t recall seeing any long-form narrative work from you before. Was this story just waiting to bubble up?
After 25 years of illustrating political articles with linocut prints often completed overnight (which I loved), I wanted to make pictures in series with larger, labor-intensive images.

Still about politics, they increasingly focused on individuals caught up in history.

Amalgam initially started as another artist’s book. Without a set deadline, each 18” x 24” linoleum block, etched with a small cutter, could take several weeks to finish. I’d edition a small number of handmade books with original prints for special collections libraries in universities, the NYPL, and the Library of Congress.

The story involves your grandfather’s escape from Poland and the politics that brought him here.
It begins with my grandfather’s 1911 departure from Poland to escape the Russian draft. His job as a pocket maker in a NYC factory precipitated his role as a foot soldier in America’s “Armies of Labor.” The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, established in 1914, put an end to the 70–80-hour workweek. The union, derived from the word “Amalgam” was a mixture, a blend –“a curious amalgam of the individual and the group” – “a curious amalgam of the pragmatic and the visionary.” The new country, the union, and the family were all “curious amalgams” — mixtures; blends that were sometimes made up of contradictory elements. So my story grew in length and in time. My grandfather was an unyielding patriarch, who believed in freedom in the workplace but never at home. The children weren’t allowed to have toys – books were their only playthings. These images increasingly mixed the personal with the political.

The span of the book reminds me of my own grandparents . . .
The first part of the book ends with the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, factory workers, including those in my family, made the clothing worn by all of America, and because of unions, they became part of an emerging middle class (or as Orwell might have put it, the upper-lower middle class).

This is more than a memoir or family history . . .
That this book is, in part, a memoir was not something I initially considered, but as it kept expanding, this eventually happened — history and aspects of personality are both handed down.

The Epilogue is about the demise of the union, what happened to the family (so many deaths), and to my grandfather’s houses — what continues and what’s changed.

Did you share your work with your grandfather? Given your political leanings, he must’ve been proud.
In 1979, on a visit back to Brooklyn, I showed my grandfather an illustration I’d done for The Nation, about the anti-union tactics of the misleadingly named “National Right to Work Lobby.” He talked proudly of his days as a renegade, climbing up fire escapes, and breaking into shops where workers toiled seven days a week without a living wage.

Several years ago, my cousin and I visited the brownstone on Putnam Avenue where my mother, his father, and our aunt grew up. The house looks much the same as it did when they were children. The cross street, which was called Sumner, is now Marcus Garvey Boulevard. As we stood in front of the house, I imagined my mother as a young girl descending the stairs.

The union was dissolved in 1976. New unions are emerging. The fight for a living wage continues.

What did the research process entail?
Books lent by my cousin, who taught labor history helped with early research, as did the New York Public Library’s picture collection, the Kheel Center at Cornell, family photo albums, a search of Ellis Island records, and later, online searches.

With a Cullman Center Fellowship for Scholars and Writers at the NYPL, research for Amalgam expanded in directions I hadn’t anticipated. A fellow in history directed me to books and documents, and a Soviet propaganda poster of a religious Jew wearing a yarmulke and cradling a pig. The Dorot Division added information about Jews in Russia. Elsewhere, at the library, there were books about Frances Perkins and Sidney Hillman, both of whom were responsible for humane legislation.

In the Map Division, there was a document that showed Poland’s changing occupiers over a few hundred years. Every day at the library, I passed a vitrine honoring Andrew Carnegie for the millions he had given to build libraries, while I simultaneously read about the massacre, years earlier, at his company, the Homestead Steel Mill, that his manager, Henry Clay Frick, had instigated, and which he approved. He was a man of great contradictions who grew to deeply regret these deaths. When they were old men who hadn’t spoken in 20 years, Carnegie sent Frick a letter asking to meet, and to let “bygones be bygones.” To which Frick replied, “You can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him. I’ll see him in hell where we are both going.” A new section about labor history was added to Amalgam, with other “Meetings in Hell.”

I love the way you’ve blended and contrasted different graphic/visual approaches. For instance, your line is looser than your editorial work. What was your thinking, doing the book in this manner?
These pieces began as small drawings that were blown up (as did most of my earlier editorial work). The drawn line that expresses both meaning and human feeling has always been my starting point—if that isn’t working, the time-consuming finish is just technique. Occasionally, I’ve cut faces out of the lino block and glued in replacement cuts that felt truer to the person. Some of the people are drawn more realistically, while the scribbly lines in others, sometimes within the same picture, describe the character. It’s not usually a conscious choice — the larger scale and self-imposed deadline probably allow for more attention to variation and experimentation.

As far as different visual approaches, many with collage elements, without a deadline I had time to pick out Zabar’s most beautiful challah that became my grandmother’s many-breasted torso. And to get vintage candy from Economy Candy for the outfit of an uncle who owned a candy store underneath the EL on Kings Highway.

An actual girdle that had belonged to someone in the family (it was a relief not to have to buy one on eBay) became the bungalow where my grandfather had packed in so many of us.

I am also impressed by the design of the book. It falls into the graphic novel/memoir genre, but it goes beyond the conventions. What was your intention in avoiding the comic strip format?
This book is a hybrid, with both single-page images, several running overspreads, and others composed of multiple parts. My only considerations were whatever made sense for a particular part of the story, along with how everything would work together. I’d initially thought of this book as an artist’s book, a concertina with attached small accordion fold books in a numbered edition of 15. But it became increasingly important to me to have Amalgam out in the world- published as a graphic non-fiction. And I’m extremely excited that it was produced with a foldout that gives the book so much added meaning.

What is the significance of the keyhole (and other metal door parts)?
Doors, and their parts — hinges and keyholes — reoccur throughout Amalgam. The gilding on the cover’s Golden Door is wearing away. Parts are rusty. The peephole is ominous. Walt Whitman said, “Unscrew the locks from the doors. Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs,” which meant quite a different thing to my grandfather. With always open doors in the 4-family house, three generations were hinged to each other.

Everyone could look inside everyone else’s life as if people were composed of keyholes.

Factory workers were Locked Out and Locked In, disastrously. The book ends with my grandfather’s departure, outside a small screen door.

Was there any part of the actual history that you left out? Or left to the imagination?
The foreman’s son, who worked in the factory stole war relief funds, probably to pay his gambling debts. He was found out, escaped by joining the army, and was killed in the war. He left behind his wife and child, along with his father. With so many tragic stories about wartime, I don’t know why I find this one so haunting.

(Unions contributed donations to the war effort that were sometimes deducted from paychecks. But there was no clear image to work with and nothing I could find to document this.)

I never completed a story about my mother and her friend Pauline’s visits to the USO in New York City. They would go there to talk and dance with soldiers. Pauline would always remove her wedding ring. My lovely mother was not chosen to be a USO hostess. I couldn’t find photos of the interior of the NYC USO to flesh this out, despite the wonderful title at the library, a book called Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun.

What would you like the reader to take away from this story?
Someone once remarked about this book’s focus on an “ordinary” person. I never thought that my grandfather was ordinary despite a lack of fame. He believed in something truly extraordinary: fairness in an unfair world, and he fought a good fight.

When I first told my beloved mother (who, contrary to everyone’s opinion was occasionally not sweet) about what I was working on, she had said, “Who’s going to be interested in our family?” After which she added, somewhat more kindly, “But I was wrong about the other one” (artist’s book on torture.) I hope that she would have liked this book.

A woman wrote to me that the depiction of my grandfather conjured up her father’s character (although my grandfather was employed by Howard Clothes and her father by the World Health Organization).

So I guess that is what I would like someone to take away, that in the images of this very specific family, they could recognize their own.

The post The Daily Heller: They All Came to Look for America appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Why a book about a salmon?
My stories always arise from an intriguing visual idea that I use as a starting point for a philosophical or poetic story with social and human relevance, for a wide audience. This time was no different: the story of ROSA originated initially from the image of a salmon swimming up a stream of tears.

My illustrations are almost systematically meaningful juxtapositions. Salmon only swim up rivers. Exchanging the river for a spouting fire hose or a waterfall of sweat drops is not only visually funny and intriguing, but it is also a conflict that triggers my mind. After all, creativity emerges only from friction.

So, ROSA is not only a story about a salmon in an unusual situation but also a story about the broader meaning that arises from this unusual journey. This context is an inspiration for a picture book about being bold and courageous.

Have you become some kind of naturalist?
Regardless of the broader context around ROSA, I am particularly fascinated by salmon swimming against the current to spawn and eventually die. It is an astonishingly tragic story of the force of nature and unavoidable consequences of the instinctive urge. Climate change is the major threat of our time. The only solution lies in changing our way of life. The more we are willing to question all that we are used to, reversing the routines, if necessary, the better for our planet. The more ‘salmons’ and ‘ROSAs,’ the better for our future. In this sense, ROSA is a naturalistic story, yes.

The fragility of our existence was also present in my previous book The King’s Golden Beard. Anyone who denies the truth and imagines himself above the laws and forces of nature will sooner or later be presented with the bill. And if you look closely, you will notice the the penguins also suffer from climate change.

Vulnerability, however, does not mean hopelessness. As human beings, however insignificant, we are capable of finding solutions and offering hope as long as we are willing to break our thinking patterns by learning, listening, putting aside our prejudices, and facing our fears.

What is Rosa’s story? And what influenced Rosa’s strength?
ROSA is a story about tenacity, about leaving your comfort zone, jumping into the unknown, and going your way against the flow, an act of courage and guts in these times When people are caught in the stream of polarisation and algorithms. A meaningful wake-up call for young and old.

In a broader sense is ROSA is a story about dealing with the struggles and challenges of life. Rosa doesn’t swim in a river but through “currents” from human emotions and feelings.

Sadness, tension, effort, pleasure, trust, helpfulness, … A human life is never static. Every life course has highs and lows, curves and twists, slow moments, waterfalls and rapids. We speak of ‘a stream of consciousness’ for a reason, Water is a source of life, vital or at the same time deadly powerful as we see with climate change. Rivers are the lifeblood of cities, an indispensable link for our economy.

The motivation to cross our shadow is different for everyone. It can be hubris, or necessity, curiosity, impatience, … or a combination of these. Every reason is valid and should be regarded with the utmost respect and admiration. That’s why I don’t specify ROSA’s inner drive here.

Your style is a bit more representational. Did you change?
I don’t feel like I’m making a sudden turnaround. I have always used recognizable and accessible images as a stylistic feature. They are easily accessible to viewers. Once the images acquire their attention, a slightly more complex story can begin that is created by the interaction between the visual elements.

The simple, daily setting in this story is essential. First and foremost to enhance the visual juxtaposition effect, but also to highlight the theme of daring. For what seems ordinary to us is extraordinary to a salmon. What is routine for some is a threshold to be overcome for others.

The first illustrations for this book were made 8 years ago. I was then in the phase where I was trying out new brushes, filters, and grains in Photoshop that you can still see in the images.

All these years after, I searched for a suitable publisher for this project. The singularity in content and form was a stumbling block. Many publishers work with rigid formats, and my whimsical spirit did not fit into that. When the project finally did start rolling toward publication, I went back to those original designs. I technically refined the original artworks and made them more homogenized in colors, textures, and lines.

The biggest difference from the original manuscript was that the salmon turned from an anonymous fish into Rosa, a character, with thoughts and feelings. This elaboration is where I ended up putting most of my energy. A fish’s body language is fairly limited. So it was quite a job to get enough movement and variation in ROSA’s movement and facial expressions. It helped me a lot to see a documentary about migrating animals, with the legendary Sir Richard Attenborough as the voice-over. I learned that salmon turn red when they start their final journey. That color inspired me for the naming, and it helped me to make Rosa stand out, even in a small size, in every picture.

I deliberately worked out and combined two styles. ROSA is worked out more plastically and detailed, like the painting she jumps in and out of, whereas the illustrations through which she swims are digitally evenly colored and drawn a little more loosely.

The intent of this was to create a kind of alienation from ROSA’s point of view. All in all, it is an adventure, and I wanted to reinforce just that aspect by making a stylistic difference as if she is diving into a new world to be discovered when she jumps out of the painting.

I cannot ignore the shape and size of the book. Tell me how this came to be?
The painting [on the cover] plays a crucial role in this book. When I saw it with friends who had bought it at a flea market, I knew immediately that it was the key to my idea. Therefore, it plays a central role in this story. It is a work from 1920, but I have not yet been able to find out the painter. This is the original:

I saw the somewhat kitschy naturalism as an engaging counterpoint to a sketchy illustration style and digital coloring, the swirling river became ROSAs home, and the elongated shape was the perfect match for my idea regarding the specific design of the book. Right from the start, I knew I wanted to create a very long format, tall book where you have to flip the pages up on the short side, almost literally making ROSA swim up against the current (and gravity).

The book and the reader become an active part of the story. Which I already did in my previous picture book, The King’s Golden Beard, where, at one point, you literally have to flip the book over to follow the story.

In the future, I want to explore further how I can further align form, interaction and content.

Do you eat salmon? Especially wild salmon? After this book can you ever eat salmon again?
Haha, good question. I never considered that before. But listen, I drew hundreds of pizzas and ice creams and I still eat them. And I take extra good care of that goldfish in my pond.

Do you have any other books about nature or natural things in the works?
One could say that The King’s Golden Beard is a picture book about the nature of things, and especially about those who ignore and disrespect it. The second book I wrote (Wortels/Roots, published in 2005) was about the friendship between a tree and a lonely man on a hill. And the wind, the rain, the sun and the moon play a crucial in many of my other writings.

But, in the end, it’s always about human nature.

The post The Daily Heller: Learning to Live With Salmon appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Coffee

It wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t explore the cup. I love drawing a cup. But what says coffee first thing in the morning is our Bialetti coffee maker—and the smell. It’s a gorgeous object and gorgeous to draw.

Craig Frazier

One of my favorite books showcases the commercial work of the great Czech photographer Josef Sudek. He created this work between 1920 – 1930 and was inspirational for this week’s word. It was important for me to create this image in one shot.

Craig Cutler

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 18/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Here James discusses the most recent edition (#14) devoted to Dale Messick, the creator of the comics page heroine, Brenda Starr, the first adult professional woman to star in her own strip. The text was written by Connie Ziegler and Debbie Millman. As Sholly notes in an introduction to this superb body of research and reflection, “Commercial Article continues to serve as a resource for anyone looking closely at the many varieties of notable design associated with the state of Indiana.”

What triggered your interest in Dale Messick’s “Brenda Star, Reporter?”
I think that my interest was really in Dale Messick. I was intrigued to learn that she was from a small city in Indiana and had become a renowned cartoonist at a time when there were very few women in that profession. As our writer Connie Zeigler uncovered more about her, the more fascinated I became. She was truly a pioneer and navigated sexism and all of its associated ugliness, to create a profitable career and a comfortable life for herself and her family. Learning about “Brenda Starr, Reporter” came later, but was so much fun! I had known about the comic strip as a kid but dismissed it as too grown-up and serious to be any good. But now I can see that I was really missing out. Dale Messick created amazing characters, wild adventures, and some seriously wacky humor. It’s been a blast to catch up on it now!

The Brenda Starr comic strip was in the New York papers and I recall it was popular. Did you know about the character prior to working on this issue?
At the height of its popularity, “Brenda Starr, Reporter” was actually syndicated in about 250 newspapers across the country! I first heard the name Brenda Starr in the Blondie song “Rip Her to Shreds,” but had no idea who that was. I later made the connection that Brenda was that woman from the funny pages. Brooke Shields also starred in a not-great Brenda Starr movie in the early 1990s, at a time when I was really into comics. But even Debbie Harry and Brooke Shields weren’t able to get me interested in the character. It was only in researching Dale Messick’s story that I finally became interested in her creation.

Who Was Brenda Frazier?
Rita Hayworth served as Dale Messick’s model for Brenda Starr’s beautiful appearance, but Brenda Frazier was the inspiration for her name. Brenda Frazier was the Kim Kardashian of her time. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she was the “it girl” — a beautiful debutante who appeared on magazine covers, in gossip columns, and in ads for prestige products like Studebaker automobiles. The columnist Walter Winchell regularly reported on her love life, which never seemed all that stable. She was married two times, but neither relationship was lasting, and she lamented her inability to choose someone who wasn’t a cad.

Was “Brenda Starr” Dale Messick’s full-time gig?
It was! She wrote and drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” for over 40 years! At times, she worked in a mobile studio that allowed her and her family to take long road trips across the country. She would frequently weave aspects of her own story into the plot lines. In real life, Dale had a daughter named Starr, which was the same name that Brenda gave her daughter after giving birth in a storyline from the 1970s. In the early 1960s, Brenda traveled to the Canal Zone in Panama shortly after Dale Messick took a trip there to visit friends. I was also impressed to learn that Dale drew “Brenda Starr, Reporter” using a brush and ink, which must have been incredibly difficult. I looked at some of the original art at the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University and was blown away by the control and expressiveness of her line work. 

Why was Brenda Starr such a popular strip?
People I’ve spoken with say that particularly for young women, Brenda was a role model. Even in a fantastical sense, Brenda was a smart, savvy, career woman who went after what she wanted and didn’t let obstacles or expectations of what she should be slow her down (still a novel concept in the 1940s and 50s). She was unafraid of adventure and unbowed by people trying to get in her way. I think this kind of symbolism is really powerful to a young person with aspirations to achieve great things. Dale Messick had similar qualities in that she left the stability of her family life in Indiana, and came to New York on her own for a promising job (drawing greeting cards) and life in the big city. Messick was also savvy in presenting Brenda in the latest designer fashions, so she always looked incredible! She was able to build connections with readers by drawing their suggestions for Brenda’s clothes and including them as paper dolls in the Sunday editions of the strip. These sorts of gestures helped to create a loyal and dedicated readership.

Do you see any relevance today for Ms. Starr?
“Brenda Starr, Reporter” ran in newspapers for over 70 years. The characters and scenarios definitely evolved with the times. But at her core, Brenda remained a stalwart seeker of the truth and a character that always followed her heart and her instincts (despite sometimes leading her to the undersea lairs of nefarious villains or other exotic and dangerous places). Brenda always knew what she wanted and worked hard to achieve it. She loved her family and friends and would do anything to help them. Those characteristics never go out of style. 

The post The Daily Heller: Brenda Starr, Comics Star appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When was the last time you sent a postcard? When was the last time you carried up a stack of mail and found a small card, glossy photo on one side, handwritten note on the other, tucked in among the circulars and bills? Wish you were here!

There is something unique about a postcard. It is small and compact. It may be thin, bordering on flimsy, and yet with a corner stamp in place, it is designed to make it through the system.

How many words can you fit in the split panel on the back? Do you need words? What happens to the narrative if you send drawings? Portraits? A selfie? A sketch of your morning coffee, your pet, or from your favorite cafe? What happens if you swatch your palette (ink or paint or colored pencils) each month on a postcard and mail it to someone?

What if you record thumbnails of morning light every day for a week? What happens if you write how you really feel in that blank space and send it off?

If I look out my window and draw the shape of the tree and write the colors of the sky and, later, drop it in the mail, how will you reply? If I do it once a month for a year, what will I capture? What record will the postcards hold? What will it mean to the recipient?

Intimate and Exposed

A postcard feels intimate, a whisper in the wind, and yet its intimacy is undone by the fact that its contents are not hidden. It is not concealed. It is a message that is out there for anyone to read. Saying just enough is part of the allure, part of the puzzle, part of the dance. Maybe your words are cryptic or abbreviated or written in a shorthand that will only make sense to the recipient. Or, maybe you write plainly, hold nothing back. Maybe you have nothing to hide.

An Unassuming Substrate

As a surface, a postcard is a simple and beautiful container, a glorified index card, often with a photograph or art on one side, that we intentionally compose, address, stamp, and send on a journey to connect.

Other than the annual jury duty summons, very little real or important mail arrives as a postcard. Postcards, for the most part, are personal. They are from or to someone you know. They have been selected with specificity.

Maybe we are somewhere special, or on vacation, and are sending a note to someone to let them know that we are thinking of them. Maybe it’s a bit of a flex, a throwback to days before social media: “Look where I am.”

Maybe we simply have to share that bridge or that view of sunset or that hillside in the mist. Maybe we are enjoying ourselves so much that the desire to send someone evidence of our adventure is irresistible. We don’t really mean to brag, but we want someone to know, someone to witness our journey.

Or maybe our postcards are more humble. Maybe we are sending words from home, a note carefully tucked into the small space and a favorite art series on the other side. Maybe we have the Pantone postcards. Maybe we’ve selected a specific color. Does it reflect our mood? The sky? The color we think of when we think of the recipient?

Will you send national monuments or falling leaves, paint brushes or sunsets or roosters or cats or photos of chairs or bridges or lighthouses or quilts or children’s book illustrations? Will you send photos of works by favorite artists (like Hopper, Matisse, Van Gogh)? Will you send photos of hot sauces or birds or rainbows, stacks of books or spine art, Studio Ghibli scenes, New Yorker covers, national parks, or coffee cups?

The art is part of the equation, and then there is the flip side. You only have a small space in which to write (or illustrate) your note. What will you say?

Postcard Prompts

In a series of monthly prompts, we will create a set of postcards, each one responding to a simple nudge. You can use existing postcards, focusing on filling the blank side. This is the easiest approach. Or, you can use blank cards, your responses filling both sides.

Month by month, you will develop a set of postcards, a series of epistolary art. You might choose to work in the same medium or style or palette each month or work with repeated elements that help tie the cards together. Or you may view each postcard as a standalone piece, disconnected from others, and let the prompt guide your choices.

Simple and Mindful

The prompts will not be difficult. 

These are prompts you may have done before. But we will do them in this monthly format together as the world changes over the next year, as our lives change, and as we process whatever we are going through, highs and lows, celebrations and milestones, personal journeys, and the quest for meaning.

Who will you have in mind as you create your postcards? Will you mail them?

A Postcard from Your Journal

One of the projects that I run and that I encourage others to consider is the keeping of an illustrated journal that documents life with a combination of art and words. I use a weekly format because I particularly enjoy the ways in which taking things a week at a time allows for fluidity across a span of days. There is no pressure to finish pages or drawings every day. Instead, I work on spreads that can be built and shaped and filled in over the course of a week. It’s mindful. It’s flexible. Every Sunday, I start a new week.

Many of the postcard series prompts could easily be done in an illustrated journal or sketchbook or in the margins of a bullet journal or planner, but I hope you will consider the postcard as a format. The postcard presupposes a recipient, a reader, a viewer.

Postcard Logistics

To qualify for the postcard stamp, a postcard needs to be roughly 4×6 or smaller. The USPS lists the following specifications:

• Rectangular in shape (not square)
• At least 3-1/2 x 5 inches and at least 0.007 inch thick
• No more than 4-1/4 x 6 inches and no more than 0.016 inches thick

If using traditional, preprinted postcards, you will want to make sure the cards meet the size requirements (or plan to use a letter stamp for oversized postcards). If you are going to DIY your postcards, you can buy readymade blank postcards (plain or watercolor), use heavyweight index cards, or cut your cards from heavy cardstock, Bristol board, or watercolor paper.

Using preprinted cards minimizes the work. You’ll be sharing a photograph or piece of art you like and your own art and/or writing on the other. This is also a great way to use up postcards you may already have.

If it’s been a really long time since you saw a postcard in person, remember that on one side, you’ll need to put the address on the right and the stamp in the upper right corner. Also, be aware that the postal bar code will be added along the bottom edge. If you write or draw in that space, just know it will most likely be obscured during the mailing process.

Postcard stamps are slightly less expensive than letter stamps, but there aren’t a lot of options. Currently, postcard stamps feature sailboat art by illustrator Libby VanderPloeg. If you have old stamps floating around that aren’t enough for current first-class mail (and aren’t Forever stamps), using them on your postcards can be a good option. Just make sure they meet or exceed the postcard stamp in value.

Slowing Down

A postcard series almost sounds quaint, other than the fact that there are thousands of people writing postcards these days to encourage people to vote. Beyond that, sending almost anything with a stamp might feel just a bit old-fashioned.

As a creative project, thinking about a postcard series is exciting. I imagine postcards filled with lists, or data visualization (a la the Dear Data project), with drawings, portraits, quotes, poems, and more. I am hoping that we can push the envelope on this envelopeless space to create personal series that are unique, bold, quiet, honest, authentic, and visually awesome.

I hope we create postcards that, through their line and composition, through their art as much as their words, have something to say. I hope we send our postcards and reach someone.

An October Postcard

Not every postcard (or every piece of art) has to be deep or soul-baring or complicated. A lot of postcards just say something like “Wish you were here!” or “Wanted to let you know you’re on my mind.”

To kick off this postcard series, let’s focus on something that is relatively simple and can be tied to memory or not. It’s October, and Halloween will be coming around.

Your challenge for this month is to create a postcard (with a recipient in mind) and document a costume.

Maybe it is a costume that you remember from when you were a kid. Maybe it is a costume from your children’s Halloween years. Or maybe Halloween isn’t something that was ever a big deal for you, and you think about what kind of costume you might choose now or wish you had chosen then.

You don’t have to particularly like Halloween or be a dress-up person to do this prompt. I don’t, and I’m not. But I still find it interesting to think about my history with Halloween, most of which I don’t remember, and some of the characters that stand out for me from my parenting years, from comic books, and the world of cosplay.

You may want to separate the prompt from Halloween and think about the whole concept of dressing up (whether you do or don’t), the performative aspect of that, and even the ways in which dressing up can be used to flaunt or conceal. Maybe you are a fan of Chappell Roan and sometimes think about what it might be like to wear costumes like that. Maybe you loved Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the Joker. Maybe you love theater or anime. Or maybe you just have a soft spot for clever costumes, sewn at home or made from cardboard boxes.

So what will you put on a postcard?

I don’t dress up, but one of my favorite costumes that I’ve seen in the last few years, something that seems really “doable,” is Waldo (from Where’s Waldo), with his round glasses, red and white striped shirt, and striped hat with a red pompom. It’s an incredibly simple costume. It’s cute and clever. It looks like it would be fun. (The corresponding Wenda costume tends to involve a very short blue skirt. I would opt for Waldo. No question.)

I am also a fan of the Pantone color swatch costume. I love this idea even though it’s potentially an overthinker’s nightmare. What color would you choose?

Crayon. Alice. Rabbit. Harry Potter. Obi-Wan. Dorothy. The Tin Man. Banana. No. 2 Pencil.

Commemorate a costume on a postcard. You can draw your costume, or diagram it, or make a collage, or write it out in words. You might write the memory of a specific costume, a specific Halloween, or turn it into a poem. What does the costume say? Why this costume?

Have fun!

Notes: links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links. You can find postcards at your local souvenir stands, museums, and other shops. You can find postcard-making materials at your favorite art store or by scavenging paper products you already have.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Header image: Assorted postcards. A. Cowen 2024

The post Connecting Dots: A Creative Postcard Challenge appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Chair

You can draw a chair with three lines—the challenge is making the lines interesting.

Craig Frazier

The only thing that could make a Hans Wegner Papa Bear chair look even better would be a Vizsla.

Craig Cutler

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 17/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(Side note: I did not (NOT) name myself after Oliver Jeffers. Or at least, not consciously.)

Many years ago, when my children were but wee bairns, the hours between 6 am and 6 pm were lawless, uncontrolled, anarchistic mayhem. There were four of them and only one of me, and they were all very young at the same time having all been born within three and a half years of each other, and anyone who’s ever had kids will have some idea of what this was like. Anyone who hasn’t… well… may you forever remain in ignorant bliss.

At 6 pm every day I got all four kids upstairs and into the bath, and from then on it was all soap and bubbles and running up and down the hallway playing superheroes to get dry, and then finally the best time of day when my baby-anarchists turned into four exhausted, sweet-smelling lambs, curled up under the covers, waiting for their bedtime stories.

I say stories (plural) because we’d usually get through four or five books a night. In those days, kid’s picture books were pretty much almost all I read, so they needed to be good ones. This was how we found Oliver Jeffers.

Oliver’s first book, How to Catch a Star, came out a few months before my first son was born, so there was never a time in my children’s life when there wasn’t an Oliver Jeffers book lying somewhere around the house. Between 2005 and 2015, when I reluctantly had to admit my children had outgrown picture books, we bought every book he published.

Disappearing into the magical, whimsical dream world of his illustrations every evening was our escape. As a family, we were going through a lot of changes, and many of them were very painful for my kids. If I could have waved a magic wand and made it all go away I would have, but I couldn’t. We weren’t living in that sort of story.

Luckily, Oliver Jeffers didn’t write those kinds of stories either. The characters in his books experienced fear, loss, and hopelessness, but it was their sense of curiosity and adventure that drove them forward, and it was always through some sort of collaborative teamwork that they managed to make it through. Whether it was helping a lost penguin, rescuing a stranded martian, releasing a bottled-up heart, indulging a passion for paper airplanes, or learning to read books rather than eat them, each story was a subtle reminder that the best way forward was to ask for help, trust in the power of friendship, and accept the small acts of kindness offered by those around you.

Book illustrations by Oliver Jeffers; featured with the artist’s permission

When I was writing Frighten the Horses I occasionally daydreamed about what it would be like if someone actually published my story. Given that I had no formal education in creative writing, no MFA, and no contacts in the publishing industry, this seemed like an elaborate dream, but while I was elaborately dreaming, why not go all the way? Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

After the first part of my dream had come true—when the book had been acquired by Grove, edited by Roxane Gay, and had moved into production—I got an email from Roxane asking me if I had any thoughts about the cover. I assumed this was a formality since I’d been told with good authority that the author usually doesn’t get much say in the matter, particularly if he’s an unknown writer and the book is a debut. But I figured since she’d asked, I might as well give her an honest answer, however embarrassingly self-indulgent it might seem. When I didn’t hear anything back, I assumed the art department was going to ignore my suggestion and just produce whatever they wanted, which was fine by me since I was pretty sure the team at Grove knew what they were doing.

About a month later, I got an email update from Roxane, in which she casually mentioned that she’d “contracted Oliver Jeffers” for the cover.

For a moment I couldn’t work out whether the “r” in that word was a typo. Had she contacted Oliver Jeffers, or contracted him? Tentatively I reached out and asked. When she told me it was the latter, I nearly fell off my chair.

It turned out that Roxane knew Oliver. When she asked him if he’d be interested in doing the cover, Oliver politely declined, saying he was too busy with his own work to take on anything for anybody else. Roxane suggested he at least read the book before making a decision. Oliver continued to resist, putting it off like it was “forgotten homework,” until on a delayed international flight he reluctantly pulled it out of his bag. “Before the seatbelt sign had been switched off,” he wrote to me afterward, “I was hooked.”

I’m not going to repeat the rest of what he said because I’m bashful and it’s private, but I will share that he finished by saying, “Many, many things may have changed for you, but one thing is clear: you’ve always been a writer.”

Reader, I wept.

If you had told me when I first started falling in love with Oliver’s illustrations twenty years ago that I would have ended up with a cover as gorgeous as this, I would never have believed you. The minute he sent it through I emailed it to my best friend, and when she called me back moments later, all we could do was laugh. Really, it seemed like the only sane response to how utterly, preposterously perfect it was: just to laugh and laugh and laugh. The horse hoofs, the motorbike, the trans colors, the Louboutin shoe! Who could pick up this book and not want to know what the hell was going on inside its pages? What other picture could so accurately and engagingly introduce the story of my life?

Which leads us to why I think this story has such an Oliver Jeffers ending. His books don’t have morals, but they do have messages, and if there’s anything I’ve learned while working towards the publication of Frighten the Horses, it’s to overcome my fear of asking people for favors. Creating a book is an intensely collaborative process, and I’ve been frankly astonished by how many people have been willing to get involved or offer help when asked.

It’s also the message of the memoir itself. My children and I would never have made it through without leaning on the people who were there for us when we needed them, and without accepting help from all the therapists, support centers, peer groups, and resources that queer people have worked so hard to build so that people like us would have somewhere to turn. We couldn’t have done it alone, and I’m very glad we didn’t have to.

What I’ve come to believe through it all is that the most valuable human trait is kindness, which is something I may have first started to learn all those years ago, tucked up under the covers with my children, reading Oliver Jeffers books.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and Them. His monograph, Adult Human Male, was published by Unbound Edition in 2023. His memoir, Frighten the Horses is out now with Roxane Gay Books.

Listen to Debbie Millman’s conversation with Oliver Jeffers on Design Matters.

The post My Book Cover Has Its Own Story appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

This rare booklet published by the International Workers Order excerpts portions of a 1942 speech by FDR’s vice president, Henry A. Wallace. As the poet Carl Sandburg wrote in the foreword, “His speech transcends partisan causes and petty ambitions. As a speech, it deals with living history and may long be remembered.”

What’s interesting about Wallace’s arguments (which can be heard here), each highlighted by illustrations produced by the social realist-idealist Hugo Gellert, is that they attempt to tie the United States more closely to the Soviet Union in the face of a common enemy, Nazi Germany. “It is no accident that Americans and Russians like each other when they get acquainted,” Wallace said. “Both people were molded by the vast sweep of a rich continent.” He further noted that “thanks to the hunger of the Russian people for progress, they were able to learn in 25 years that which had taken us in the United States a hundred years to develop.” The quintessence of liberal thinking.

The speech further addressed the issue of “ethnic democracy,” which Wallace insisted was vital to the “new democracy, the democracy of the common man … the different races and minority groups must be given equality of economic opportunity.” And he continued, “President Roosevelt was guided by principles of ethnic democracy when in June 1941 he issued an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in the employment of workers by the national defense industry.”

An additional point: “From the Russians we can learn much, for unfortunately the Anglo-Saxons have had an attitude toward other races which has made them exceedingly unpopular in many parts of the world. … We have not sunk to the lunatic level of the Nazi myth of racial superiority, but we have sinned enough to cost us already the blood of tens of thousands of precious lives.”

Gellert (1892–1985), who was born in Hungary, underscored Wallace’s theme through graphics that echoed other lithographic work he did for progressive causes. (I had the pleasure of being on a panel about political art with Gellert a year before his passing—he was committed to “ethnic democracy” until the end.)

The images here are selected from the 1943 booklet Century of the Common Man, with points in Wallace’s speech illustrated and titled by Gellert.

The post Social Ideals and Social Realism, Gellert Style appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Light

No two matches create the same flame pattern when ignited. I thought a four panel grid would be a great way to show just how unique each flame really was. I used the frame burst mode on my Leica SL2 to capture that split second moment.

Craig Cutler

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 16/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Over 40 years have passed since I worked with Feiffer on a collection of his weekly Village Voice comic strips. He was among the best political satirists. Around age 50, he turned his passion toward children’s books and graphic novels for adults. Now, he has almost completed his graphic autobiography. I can’t wait for it.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Feiffer about the work he is doing right now—and his surprisingly infectious optimism, despite suffering from an incurable degenerative macula disease that is stealing his eyesight and that of many other illustrators of his generation.

I finished Amazing Grapes, and I must tell you, I dreamed about it last night before this interview.
Yeah, what do you think?

I think it’s wonderfully absurd.
… And it was a lot of fun to do, too. My method of working has changed over the years since you and I [worked] together.

How so?
I don’t want to know what I’m going to do until I start doing it, and a voice says, “Do this, and do that.” I take instructions from some unknown voice that basically directs me. I don’t know what the story is going to be until the voice tells me what it’s going to be. I like to be ignorant of what’s about to happen—the book, in a sense, instructs me on how to write and draw it.

This is not your first graphic novel. How did this book come about?
I did a series of three noir graphic novels, and I felt it was time for me to write a story for children that was a little more complicated and a little more mysterious than the usual. I didn’t know quite what it was going to be. So, I started with the mother looking out a window, but I didn’t have a clue why she was doing that. Then the story started to tell itself. I had not planned on the interstellar travels or going from planet to planet. I just took instructions from the book and it told me where to go.

Did any of your editors have any input into the book?
Not really. The essential editor on these books of mine is my longtime editor, Michael Di Capua; Michael and I have had this lovely relationship since Sendak sent me to him 100 years ago, and so we trust each other implicitly. He knows how my mind works and how I think, and so he went along for the ride just as I was going along for the ride.

In the beginning of the book, you introduce the father, who simply leaves his wife and kids without any money.
The only thing I was sure of in terms of all of the characters, is that he was a bad guy. I didn’t know anything about the mother, other than she liked to look out the window and stare into space. Another thing I knew throughout is that there are a brother and two sisters and it’s their competitiveness and rivalry with each other that dominates over everything. So, they can be in the middle of space travel and awful things going on, but they’re concerned with what goes on in the relationship, mostly.

I thought that would be a lot of fun, and it was. And they seem to be looking for some sort of anchor with their mother, who doesn’t seem to want to be the anchor (we find out why later—she’s actually a creature from outer space and didn’t know it). At the end of the book, she has found her proper place, which is not to be with her children, but to be back in the planet that she fled from when she was little. But I didn’t know any of that was going to happen.

How did you decide on the title Amazing Grapes?
I was so affected when President Obama got up in the 2015 memorial for the Charleston church shooting, where the children were killed, and out of nowhere he started singing “Amazing Grace.” I mean, everybody in the country’s jaw dropped. I still have tears from that; I found it one of the most moving memories in my bank of memories, and it became a key signifier of the book. It’s what allows the characters to be free, and it’s a sign of hopefulness. It’s a sign of survival amidst all the perils that face you. It’s a sign about hope.

Why did you make such a sharp pivot from politics to doing children’s books?
I still deal with politics now and again. I’ve gone through so many shifts, changes and alterations and a sense of despair and discouragement—none of which I feel right now, by the way. Then there was my personal life, which was in repeated states of cataclysm. My work, whether it’s a cartoon, children’s book, play, a story that combines all of the above, is, in some ways, disguised as autobiography. I take what is on my mind and let all the things just happen, and they come out, and I try to structure them into a work of art and a work of amusement.

… And a work of exorcism?
Absolutely … a work of exorcism. But everything I’ve ever done is to get me out of the trouble I did. From the time I was a kid, cartoons [were] my own psychotherapy. You know, I’d be working through … well, I didn’t know what my problem was that I was working through. There’d be these aha moments over the years, and whether it was a children’s book or whether it was a play or whether it was a Village Voice comic, the older I’ve become over the years, knowing this self-analysis and feeling this way, the more playful my work has been to me and has become. And now, as much as anything else, it is a continual round robin of play. And when I made that discovery some years ago, it opened doors I didn’t even know were there, and I’m very grateful for that. And the doors will continue to continue to be open. I mean, I’m 95-and-a-half, and I’m still a 7-year-old boy.

One of your characters is a dog who is really a cat. In his dog guise, is it Virgil, the guide who takes us through your version of Dante’s Inferno?
I stole the dog from Walt Kelly [the creator of Pogo]. In his version, “man’s best friend” is leading people down the wrong path, and was always speechifying. And Kelly, who never had a nice word to say to me in my entire career, I decided to pay back by using his dog in my book. The dog is named Kelly.

Walt Kelly was also a strong voice against McCarthyism, wasn’t he?
Kelly taught me a lot about the cartooning world that I was finding myself moving into at the same time he was doing Pogo. He was the editorial cartoonist for the New York Star, which was the successor to the newspaper PM, and he was doing some of the toughest, most radical and imaginative cartoons on McCarthyism and the whole spirit of McCarthyism. He was much tougher than [Washington Post cartoonist] Herblock—and meaner. He just knocked me for a loop and strongly influenced the kind of politics that I moved toward as I was getting older and coming of age. Kelly was a great hero of mine.

Is it accurate to say that Amazing Grapes is a kind of coming-of-age book for the 95-year-old you?
You know, Steve, they’re all coming-of-age books. To me, they are all books of self-discovery. They all were stories I was telling, none of which I understood as I was telling them, that explained themselves to me as they, in a sense, wrote themselves and instructed me how to write. And that process is still going on. That is one of the things that I’ve learned over the years.

How has the macular degeneration changed the way you draw?
It doesn’t so much in some ways; as it always has been with my craft, the limitation becomes a plus. Instead of thinking of it as something that prevents me from doing what I want to do, I change it into something that frees me into doing something I’ve never done before, which is in many ways more innovative and fun—and fun is an important word in all my life. I’m out to surprise myself. I found a way to make them work for me, and I’m still doing it with the blindness. I had macular degeneration when I did Amazing Grapes but I hadn’t developed to a point where I thought I might lose my eyesight.

I was taking shots in the eye and stabilized during that period, and then it destabilized for a while, and I stopped taking the injections, because they stopped doing any good. But at the same time they allow me to do some of the best work I’ve ever done. So screw it.

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Stretch

I could not help myself. I had a childhood flashback on this word. I like Gumby damn it! I received a few disturbing stares from passengers on my plane while retouching the image.

Craig Cutler, photographer

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Layered

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It’s no surprise that graphic designers are getting in on the fun.

Art of Play, a maker of artful amusements, just launched “Tarot of Oxalia: A Guide for Storytelling & Self-Discovery,” a unique tarot deck that combines the allure of Greek mythology with the wonder of science fiction. Designed by renowned art director and illustrator Kelly Thorn (Young Jerks), this modern tarot interpretation promises to evoke a new kind of creative play.

The Tarot of Oxalia takes the classic imagery of the iconic Rider-Waite tarot deck and sprinkles in a little cosmic fantasy. Folding science fiction, mythology, and elemental astrology into one vibrant deck, Thorn invites us to explore the outer limits of imagination and harness personal intuition through tarot.

Thorn describes her influences throughout her creative process on the Art of Play blog: traditional tarot symbology to 20th-century occult mystics like Hilma af Klint and personal experience, like a walk in the Memphis heat.

Whether you are a tarot newbie or a seasoned reader, you will find something to love in the 80 works of art in The Tarot of Oxalia deck.

People often believe tarot is about predicting the future, but it can also help tremendously to understand the present and the past. Once you let yourself be led by the cards, a conversation between you and the tarot begins, and you can fully understand where you’re coming from and where you might go.

Kelly Thorn, the artist behind Tarot of Oxalia

The Tarot of Oxalia has blown through its Kickstarter fundraising goal on Kickstarter. Check out the campaign, running through Thursday, September 12.

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I don’t know, Steven, if you would be as sad as I about Lou [Brooks’] passing [in 2021]. He was a friend and neighbor back in the times of madcap Graphic Artists Guild Halloween galas and such. We were occasional correspondents in the years after Lou and Clare left NYC; happily, launching his brilliant online museum allowed better opportunity for kibbitzing cross-country.

Inadequate to the task of eulogizing my friend here (Lou Brooks lived some high-octane lives), I write to share my concern that one of Lou’s great contributions to mankind (well, aged bullpen-folk, anyway) may soon be lost. The lights seem to be flickering over at The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, and I don’t know what to do about it.

If it’s a matter of money, concerned citizens should raise it. I will be at the front of that line. We warn our kids that what they put on the internet is forever, but it seems that’s true only if somebody’s paying the hosting bill. 

I wonder if exposing this situation via any of your industry channels might raise consciousness to a) celebrate Lou’s estimable body of work, and 2) unblock whatever’s in the way and save the museum!

I too was a fan of Brooks’ work and his part in the all-artist band Ben Day and the Zipatones, which included Elwood H. Smith and Mark Alan Stamaty. Stark’s email inspired the following interview …

For the purposes of those who did not know him or his work, who was Lou Brooks?
“Lou was the sociologic instrument through which ‘junk-art’ in print from the 1920s thru ’60s was elevated and concentrated into an idiomatic style exemplifying ironic/nostalgic American Pulp-Culture.” (Says me.)

How did you meet him?
As a very fortunate ’76 SVA grad, I was hired by Russ D’Anna to design magazines at Scholastic. My cubicle at 50 W. 44 was directly opposite the suite where Bob Feldgus and Bob Stein were doing the legendary pubs Bananas and Dynamite. I got to know all the regulars who came calling, not least of whom were the illustration team of Todd Schorr and Lou Brooks.

What was special about him as a person and an artist?
Lou was an erudite man wrapped in a larger-than-life performer’s sensibility—an illustration assignment was a stage call, a chance to wow the public, while his self-directed projects, ever-knowing, quietly dismember the Midcentury ad-speak and show-biz bombast from which they’re made. 

Lou’s exaltation of the cheap and lowbrow—his ability to elevate it through an ironic lens and painstaking draughtsmanship—gave focus to the ubiquitous, anonymous, back-of-the-book “commercial art” that was part of life for most of the 20th century. Lou wrote his own material. He was a meticulous craftsman and had no objection to being a public figure. Was he a Warhol-like synthesizer of his surroundings? Was he Bob Fosse with a Sharpie? Should we anoint Lou Brooks the father of “Pulp Art”?  He would’ve expected that.

I always recall his madcap sensibility. He was one of a group of young tricksters and retro illustrators. What were his times like?
Lou created his times. 

While outings with close friends are nothing we’d want to publicize, Lou was an engine of community-building with the early Graphic Artists Guild, staging, with others, legendary galas at Limelight and Irving Plaza in the early ’80s. “Madcap” describes the mood perfectly … the fancy-dress Artist’s and Model’s Ball at Irving Plaza featured Lou fronting the all-cartoonist Zipatones band, plus Kid Creole or some similar August Darnell–like enterprise. Through a haze, I recall foam tombstones rollerskating past me on the dance floor, and from a balcony, an excellent Princess Grace, late of her auto mishap, waving as elegantly as the steering wheel around her neck permitted. Amid a sea of ambitious art student/lingerie models, we danced and drank and went home very pleased with ourselves. The times were good. For benefit of clients, friends and scores more, Lou rented out the third floor of Danceteria one winter Wednesday night, mostly, I think, just to celebrate … Lou. It was a time when drawing funny paid well.

By the late ’70s the National Lampoon and Playboy four-color guys and guys from the comics pages were getting mainstream work and could afford to have some fun and take chances. There was no better time to be an art director with a fat rolodex, no budget and a grand idea.

I use to mistake him for Bill Murray, it was uncanny. Was it my eyes?

In those days, in a certain light, it was easy to mistake Lou for Bill Murray. Lots of people around New York did, which became a thing. I was never sure if Lou loved or hated it. It did permit him plenty of room to improvise, and I know Lou loved that.

How did his website, “The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies”, come about?
My detective skills brought me to “ZIMM” (Robert Zimmerman). Says he knows all and holds the keys.

I know you want to see it continue. What will it take to do so?
I would like the museum to become an asset of the SVA library, with plenty of attendant hoopla. 

“ZIMM” says it’ll take $15 a month, though [it’s] likely not nearly that simple. Lawyers, probably.

How do you want Lou Brooks to be remembered?
He must be recognized on his own merits. Perhaps someday.

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Fork

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Glass

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Paper

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What inspired you to launch Peace Post?
I wanted to bring some of what I learned from doing BBCx365 to this project—that investing energy in something that expands your understanding and empathy for the world around us is a great use of time.

Was it entirely your motivation and leadership that moved this from idea to finished form?
I led the project with executive producer Christopher Schroeder and with support from our producers Jennie Soccio, Megan Greig and Nicole Motta.

It was an enormous effort by the team to: 1) research potential human rights, environmental and peace advocates for every country in the world, and 2) research the artistic traditions of each of those countries.

We would pick an advocate from that research and create a document encompassing the advocate’s bio and information about the country and its art. We would then commission an illustrator to create the portrait. 

At the beginning of the project, these portraits were mostly done by designers who worked at Selman. As the project progressed, we began to commission portraits from illustrators in the countries where the advocate was from, which added a wonderful authenticity. 

Why did you choose the postage stamp motif?
Stamps have a rich history of recognizing notable people through portraiture. 

The stamp is a unifying visual element where historical heavyweights like MLK are represented within the same simple frame as lesser-known advocates like Asma Khalifa, a Libyan women’s rights and peace activist

It’s an inclusive way to catalog the entire set on the website as a single sheet of stamps. 

How did you get 102 artists from the world over to agree to provide their work on time?
It took twice as long as we expected. The original idea was to post one a week, which would have taken us about four years. Now, eight years later, the project is complete and represents 198 portraits from 102 illustrators. We commissioned and posted the portraits in reverse alphabetical order from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, and there were bottlenecks along the way, for sure.

Are any of these self-portraits?
While these aren’t self-portraits, there were many special connections between the artist and the advocate. For example, advocate Martial Pa’nucci, an African rapper-activist, writer, and co-founder of the citizen movement Ras-le-Bol in Congo, recommended Graphik’noir, an artist connected with the movement, to create his portrait.

All of the portraits are commissioned illustrations of peace advocates that we’d selected. 

How do you plan on distributing them?
We have a large traveling exhibit of the project that is opening at the International Peace Museum in Dayton, OH, on Sept. 6. We are looking for other museums, libraries and schools to host the exhibit. Interested organizations can reach out to peace@selman.nyc.

A limited run of a large-format book has been printed and will be donated to select libraries.

The website is a wonderful resource to experience the project and learn more about each advocate.

What’s your hope for the end result?
I hope it lives on as an educational resource and inspires the next generation to see these countries around the world not only for their challenges but for their champions of peace.

The Saigon South International School in Vietnam recently studied Peace Post in their IB Literature and Language course. Students learned how to critique and speak about art, as well as about authorial/artist choice and how it conveys meaning. 

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Wavy

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Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain, 1835–1910) and Seymour Chwast (pronounced Kwast, b. 1931) have more in common than their initials. They share a profound antipathy for war, and each has employed his talents for acerbic commentary in waging war on war—Twain through his writing and stagecraft, Chwast through his illustration, drawing and painting. Now, these two maestros of wit and satire come together for the first time in the book Mark Twain: The War Prayer (Fantagraphics), illustrated and designed by Chwast.

As massive numbers of people are killed, maimed and displaced in too many strife-torn regions of this already fragile planet, The War Prayer, Twain’s tour de coeur, is more resonant than ever. This prose poem—written in 1905, rejected by his publisher and unpublished until many years after his death—is as relevant as ever. Chwast’s startling imagery shares the same human poignancy of this mocking, though heartfelt, prayer.

In 1898, Twain was despairing over the hypocrisy of the manufactured Spanish-American War, which was started by the U.S. to wrest valuable territories (and notably the Philippines) from Spain. Using gunboat diplomacy, under the pretext of helping Filipinos win their independence from Spain, the U.S. forced the Spanish crown to sell the Pacific islands to the American victors. Once accomplished, the U.S. turned against and bitterly fought Filipino insurgents who resumed their fight for independence. Twain believed that U.S. war policy abridged American principles and decried this expansion of “manifest destiny” (a precursor of American exceptionalism) as bald-faced imperialism. During the bloody counter-insurgency, Twain joined the Anti-Imperialist league.

Twain was incensed when American soldiers slaughtered a group of 600 Filipino men, women and children who had taken refuge and were trapped in a volcano. In his autobiography, he wrote scathingly of the hypocrisy and brutality of America’s actions. From this evolved his anti-war stance and his only means of retaliation: the caustic solemnity and wit of The War Prayer.

Chwast’s take on the poem adds another dimension to this timely work. He has introduced varied styles to telegraph Twain’s uncompromising commentary targeting one war as emblematic of the horror of all war.

In “The Lowest Animal,” a separate essay used as a foreword to contextualize this new edition, Twain writes, “I have been scientifically studying the traits and disposition of the ‘lower animals’ (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one … one to be named the Descent of Man from Higher Animals.”

More than half a century before the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement it spawned—a movement that Chwast marched in and made protest art for—Mark Twain protested American aggression overseas. The Philippines was America’s first step toward an international policy of controlling foreign lands. The Philippine-American War was an affront to Twain’s American beliefs, just as Vietnam was to Chwast’s.

The spreads below comprise the first part of The War Prayer, where Twain exposes the “holy fire of patriotism” to ignite firestorm in the American people for the “great and exalting excitement” of the nation up in arms. A rousing newspaper headline style, typical of the era, is Chwast’s leitmotif.

Chwast will be reading a passage from The War Prayer and talking about the book with me on Aug. 14 at the Society of Illustrators, New York. Please join us.

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