So, I’ve been meaning to participate in Illustration Friday for a while now. There is a weekly theme that anyone can illustrate and post an image for, and you can use existing illustrations or you can do a new one. Simple, right?

Instead of doing a doodle and posting it for Illustration Friday, my first community art project post in a long time is for Month of Softies: there is a monthly theme for which you can make some sort of soft somthing-or-other to illustrate the theme. You have to sew things and glue things and cut things out and it takes a lot of time. Yeah, I do things the hard way.

When I was a kid, I LOVED Superman. So much so that I had a Superman lunchbox, a Superman towel, and, yes, Superman Underoos. There is even a photo of me and one of my oldest friends, Becca, wearing our Superman Underoos together in our high school yearbook. And since she came up, she is also the source of the Batman cape. I think it was originally made for her older brother, but we all wore it eventually. It was awesome.

My mom is a quilter. She has made quilts for as long as I can remember. At one point when I was a kid, she made a quilt that was like a portrait of me and my two brothers, though we were Amish doll style, with no faces. When I saw the Month of Softies theme for this month, “Self-portrait of the artist as a young child”, this quilt was the first thing that came to mind, and the outfit I am wearing in this doll I made is the same outfit I am wearing in the quilt my mom made.

It was a lot of fun to make this. I got to think about the Superman Underoos (I even rented the 1978 Superman movie) and the cool costume box at Becca’s house. And I got to use my mom’s old sewing machine to put the little guy together– probably the same machine that made the original quilt that inspired this guy. And best of all, this was all extremely valuable practice for a show that I am going to have some work in in August (hint: I have to make more soft toys).

If my experiences of the last few weeks (and year) are a representative sample, then I can offer this advice: if you ever get the chance to meet one of your idols, go for it. A little over a year ago I met the first in a growing string of people who have the coolest jobs ever. It started with Eric Rohmann, the 2003 Caldecott winner for his book, My Friend Rabbit, whom I met when he gave a talk on the UW campus. Then last week I met three cartoonists from the New Yorker: Roz Chast, Matt Diffee, and the cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. They were here as part of the New Yorker College Tour, and I actually got to sit down with Matt Diffee to talk about my own drawings.

And most recently, this past Thursday, I got to spend some time with one of my all-time favorite artists, Tim Biskup. His work is a unique blend of pop and Art-with-a-capital-A. One of my friends and I decided that he is the natural continuation of Warhol’s legacy: Warhol took pop culture and made it Art; Tim Biskup takes Art and makes it pop culture.

I don’t remember when I first saw his work– it was either a link from K10K, or it was some of his work in Juxtapoz magazine– but I know that the first thing of his that I bought was the Space Totem. Since then, I have also bought a Stack Pack toy, his 100 Paintings book, and the complete set of Neo Kaiju, which includes two of his creations as well as two toys by his wife, Seonna Hong (and two each by Gary Baseman, Todd Schorr, and Kathy Staico-Schorr). And that is a testament to Biskup’s genius: he makes things that you want to buy. Well, I do anyway, and the fact that he has an entire (successful!) storefront filled with his work means that others want to buy his stuff, too.

Biskup was here to deliver a talk for a local organization of designers, Design Madison, and in that talk he discussed the ways that he has intentionally steered his offerings to be even more desirable. The vast majority of his work is created as limited-edition multiples: serigraph prints, posters, and toys, primarily. But to raise their “I must have that” quotient, he takes smaller sets of the multiples and bundles them in creative ways to make even more exclusive options (and therefore more expensive). For a collector, that kind of thing is just irresistable.

So aside from all the awe that I have for his work and his marketing savvy, I was most impressed by Tim the person. He deserves to have an ego the size of Godzilla, but if it is there, it doesn’t show. He was real, he was personable, he was generous and friendly, and he was just a really nice guy. One of the things he talked about during his talk was how he got started: I hung on every word, of course. He came into the art world by way of the animation industry, and while he was trying to break in, he was taking the advice of (someone I can’t remember), who said that we all have 100,000 bad drawings in us. Once you get past those, you’ll be in business.

So while I don’t want to be another Tim Biskup (though there are worse things!), I do want to be THE David Huyck, and if it is going to take 100,000 drawings to get there, I’m going to have to keep busy.

My oldest friend, Becca Deysach, knows more embarassing things about me than I care to acknowledge. If my memory were more potent, I might be able to drag up more dirt on her, but it’s really more fun letting the balance tip this way.

The memories that I do have of being small and in her house are mixes of cooking smells and the musty porch with the old, worn elk head on the wall, a colorful fabric ceiling in the livingroom, zipping across the backyard on the cable-and-pulley, Christmas parties with Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP on the record player. Later on, in the next chapter of memories, I am sitting on the couch with Becca and other childhood friends remembering Becca’s dad Larry after his funeral. They are snippets mostly, all of them wonderful, happy memories.

I don’t keep up very regularly with Becca, but our moms are good friends, and we hear about each others’ exploits through our communication with our own mothers. Through that grapevine, I just read this wonderful article that Becca wrote. In it, she introduces me to another side of her family that I have always known was there, but I had never seen it so well articulated. Beautiful.