SO MUCH AWESOME!

(via Coudal)

I have been trying to hold back on the book purchases lately, since we have been moving around the country a bunch in the past few years. Let me tell you: boxes full of books are frickin’ heavy! It’s either that, or you have to pack a lot of smaller boxes, and then you just make more trips. Next time: movers.

Anyway, birthdays are good for a lot of things, but especially for getting things that you are not buying for yourself. I keep my Amazon wishlist(s) pretty full, though mostly as a reminder to myself of what I really want to buy or check out the next time I am at a bookstore. However, for my birthday last month I got a gift certificate to Amazon, and I could no longer hold myself back:

Not pictured is the copy of Graphic Design by Milton Glaser (which arrived earlier and has gotten its due lovin’), but in the photo are the contents of my big box of goodies:the latest edition of the Graphic Arts Guild Handbook, a contemporary drawing collection called Vitamin D, Charlie Harper’s Beguiled by the Wild, and Dave Cooper’s (aliased here as Hector Mumbly) Bagel’s Lucky Hat.

• Milton Glaser is an icon in the graphic design world. This book is a must-have for my library, and I love to see the mix of illustration-y with the design-y.
• Similarly, I’ve well-abused my old GAG Handbook, and it was time for the upgrade to this 2007 updated version. A must-have for the illustration professional.
• I’ve perused the Vitamin D book a couple times while I was in grad school, but I had to have my own copy. It’s really a great collection of where things have been going in the contemporary capital-A “Art World” drawing field. And it’s a beautifully-designed book, as you would expect from Phaidon.
• Beguiled by the Wild is even better than I expected. I fell in love with Harper’s beautifully designed creatures and illustrations a while ago after he started getting linked up around the web, but I didn’t realize the illustrations’ titles were going to tickle my inner word-nerd: “Jumbrella” shows the big elephants sheltering the baby elephant from the rain; “Owltercation” shows a murder of crows chasing an owl away. LOVE!
• And last but certainly not least: Bagel’s Lucky Hat is so beautifully illustrated, with lush colors, inventive perspectives and compositions, and lovely details embellishing the periphery. It is a high-caliber production, as we have grown to expect from Chronicle Books. I haven’t read the story yet, and while I would guess it is a great story, I wouldn’t care if it was lamer than Howard the Duck: the illustrations already make up for it.

While I’m sorry for the movers who will eventually have to move yet more books the next time we relocate, I’m not sorry to have these in my collection. The internet is great and all, but sometimes you just need more than 72 dots per inch to view the art.

Seeing the art in-person is better yet, but as we all know, money doesn’t grow on trees. At least not in Minnesota.

Today I’m prepping for the class I will begin teaching when the spring semester begins on Monday. It is entirely new to me, and only one semester old for MCAD, and it is called “Ideation & Process.” The general concept for the class is to train the students to think about their work in a fundamentally different way than what they are probably used to. The focus is not on the end product. The class instead turns our attention to the build up that should happen before we make that final product.

No, actually it is more abstract than that. Calling it a build-up suggests that there is an end goal. Really what we are trying to convey is that working as an artist or designer or in pretty much any other creative realm means just that: work. It is a steady perseverance that means generating a lot of bad ideas and bad drawings and bad work that will likely never see the light of day. You must keep at it in order to stumble over the really good ideas, the gems that end up at the front of your portfolio.

As a side benefit, while you are generating piles of ideas that don’t necessarily make sense in the current context of the work you are immediately focussed on, you inevitably spill a few unpolished thoughts that will seep into the back of your mind or get scribbled into your sketchbook or stashed in your web browser bookmarks, and you never know when they will leap forth again.

I’ve never taken a class that focuses exclusively on these types of ideas, but I’ve taken plenty of classes that suggest techniques or philosophies orbiting the concepts. I’m exited to compile and experiment and teach and learn from and along with my students. It is all about taking you out of your comfort zone so you can make some good mistakes and generate new experiences and create some new synapses in your crusty little brain. I am definitely out of my comfort zone, which by definition makes me uncomfortable. But the potential for discovery is huge, and much more than worth the discomfort.

Despite the fact that it is a pile of work and it takes discipline to come back to something day after day where you may not see the benefit for some time, I have a great job. I have a great teaching job that gives me access to other professors teaching these same ideas in their own ways, and I have the great job of putting these principles to work in my own studio.

And I pretty much get to draw every day. What job could be better?