It’s Earth Day today, and you know what that means. Yes, I put up another post mentioning Trouble on Earth Day, the children’s book by Kathy Stemke which I illustrated. It’s a sweet little story about a young squirrel who learns about conservation and recycling in school and who puts those lessons to use when she helps a new friend.
Share it with a friend of your own. And don’t forget to re-thing, re-use, and recycle!
Kathy Stemke, the children’s author whose book Trouble on Earth Day I illustrated, is holding a “Virtual Book Tour” to mark Earth Day and to promote her book. I call it a “Squirrel-A-Palooza”, but then that’s why she’s the writer and I’m a wacky cartoonist. As part of the book tour, I asked permission to run an interview she did with me, talking about doing the illustrations and about the glamorous life of a scruffy cartoonist.
Share and Enjoy.
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Where do you live? Tell us about your family.
I live in the Enchanted Land-O-Cheese, in the City of Sheboygan, roughly between Milwaukee and Green Bay. I met my wife, Lute, in junior high when she played bass clarinet and I played alto sax in band. When I learned she drew dragons and when she loaned me her paperback of the STAR WARS novelization, I should have known we were destined for each other. We have two daughters, Gamera Rose and Rodan.
Do you have any pets? Do you ever draw your pets?
We currently have two cats, two finches, a snake, several fish and about a half dozen ferrets. Yes, we have pets; and yes, I occasionally draw them. Drawing ferrets is a challenge, because except when they’re sleeping they rarely sit still.
What made you decide to become an artist?
I’ve always enjoyed drawing. I suppose if there is any single influence that inspired me in that direction it would have been the collection of POGO books my Dad had in our basement. Although I never really copied Walt Kelly’s style, his POGO cartoons taught me a lot about pacing and dialouge in comics.
Did you take art lessons?
I took Art in High School and studied Graphic Design at Iowa State University. But I also picked up a lot of my cartooning by osmosis from the comics I enjoyed reading, such as Walt Kelly’s POGO and Hergé’s TINTIN. I’m afraid my love of cartooning spoiled me for doing any kind of serious art.
What is the hardest part about illustrating a book?
In the case of Trouble on Earth Day, the hardest part was that I colored it entirely by computer, something I was teaching myself as I went along. I had to do a bit of trial and error to get things the way I wanted. I still haven’t mastered Photoshop yet; but I’m working at it.
Please describe the process you go through to illustrate a book.
The first step is the break the story up into pages, so that the text on each page forms a single thought or event that can be represented by a single image. I map out the book by drawing boxes on a sheet of paper and making a thumbnail sketch in each box representing a page.
About the same time, I’m also doing rough sketches of the characters to determine how I want them to look. I tried several looks for Shelby, before I settled on her final design. I send the character sketches and the page thumbnails to the Author for approval. When roughing out the pages, I try to make sure there’s enough space to accomodate the text for that page.
There are one or two pages in Trouble where I could have done better, On the page where Shelby goes out into the woods, I wound up with no blank space at all, and the text had to go over the trees in the background. In the end, I think it worked; but I had to tweak the background a lot to make sure the text would read clearly against it.
As I finish the pages, I send them to the Author for approval so that I can make any necessary alterations.
Why did you decide to illustrate Trouble on Earth Day?
Kathy’s editor put us in touch with each other and Kathy asked if I would be interested. I’ve been a long-time “furry†artist, and the story sounded like fun.
How long did it take for you to illustrate the book?
Longer than it should have. But that’s the way these projects always seem to go.
What materials and supplies did you use for the pictures? What is your favorite medium?
For Trouble on Earth Day I kept things pretty simple. I drew the original black & white line art on plain paper with Faber-Castell fine line markers in a variety of widths. I then scanned the line art and colored it on my computer using Adobe Photoshop.
I used to use a Crow-quill pen and India Ink exclusively for my cartooning, because I didn’t trust markers. But they tend to be tempremental and messy and the pen nibs became harder to find. More recently I’ve found some artist’s markers with waterproof inks that won’t pick up on my hands and give me a steady reliable line.
In the past I’ve liked to use watercolors to color my works. I haven’t done as much of that lately. Usually for color commissions I will use colored pencils. For my book illustrations, though, I’ve used Photoshop to give a more consistant color coverage.
How did you decide on the cover?
Early on I decided that the center of the story was the point where Shelby hears the crying in the woods and goes to investigate; so I wanted to capture the moment when she comes across the place where the trees were gone. I hoped to evoke a sense of mystery and a sense of what the “Trouble†of the title might be.
Which illustration in this book is your favorite and why?
I think my two favorites are the one I mentioned of Shelby venturing out into the woods. I tried to capture the atmosphere of the big silent forest and the little squirrel alone in it, following the sound of the crying.
My other favorite is the one at the end where Charlie the Bluebird is playing the guitar and Shelby is dancing. That one grew out of a sketch I made when I was trying to develop a design for Charlie. On a whim, I drew him jamming on an electric guitar. Kathy loved the sketch, and so I developed it into one of the pages.
Do you model your characters from real people?
Sometimes I do. In fact, my design for Shelby Squirrel was based on my youngest daughter, who was in kindergarten about the time I started work on the project.
Was there part of the story that was difficult to illustrate?
Charlie was the biggest challenge. Shelby and her family were essentially small humans wearing squirrel suits; I could fall back on my habits from years of drawing “furry†comics. But I haven’t drawn a lot of birds; so I actually had to do some research. I discussed with Kathy what kind of bird we wanted him to be and I did several reference sketches until I was comfortable drawing him.
Do you have a collection of your own artwork? Do you hang illustrations in your home as artwork?
I have a lot of my own artwork, but very little on the walls. I’ve always found framing the pieces to be a major hassle.
Do you have any wise words for students who like to draw?
Keep drawing. Keep a sketchbook that you can rip off doodles in. Use it to draw people you see; things in your room, scenes out the window; anything.
It’s okay to copy other people’s artwork; it’s how most artists learn to develop styles of their own. Copying from reference photos is good too. With enough practice, you can draw things out of your head, but even the most experienced artist still will work from reference photos.
Draw from the Inside Out. People have skeletons, but even a table lamp has a skeleton of sorts. If you understand the underlying structure of an object, it will be more believable when you draw it. I always start my drawings by roughing out the basic structure, and then drawing the form around it.
What artists/styles have influenced you the most?
I’ve mentioned Walt Kelly’s classic comic strip POGO, and also the adventures of TINTIN by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. I’m also a fan of Japanese animation and comics and have picked up a bit of the Manga style.
In addition to illustrating picture books, how do you use your art talents?
I’ve done a bit of drawing for a couple of small comic book companies in the past, chiefly “furry†comics, (comics featuring anthropomorphic animals) for Antarctic Press and Radio Comix. I do occasional commision artwork and I do cartoon portraits at a few local craft fairs and farmer’s markets. In addition I draw a webcomic entitled HANNIBAL TESLA ADVENTURE MAGAZINE, a Pulp Era adventure comic, which I post on my website at http://www.kurtoonsonline.com/
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For more about Kathy, Earth Day and squirrels, swing by the rest of the Squirrel-A-Palooza. Tell her I sent you.
Kathy Stemke
Award Winning Author/Educator/Freelance Writer
A couple days ago, our youngest daughter, Rodan, asked me about the game I played with Mommy in the evenings.
No, it’s not that kind of game, this one involves dice.
I knew that I’d be introducing Rodan, to gaming sooner or later. After all, she’s in second grade, which is about the time I started her big sister, Gamera Rose, in her first D&D campaign. I read stories to Rodan in the evening after supper (currently we’re going through George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin) and sometimes after that I play one of her board games with her.
A couple days ago, I told her I couldn’t do that because I needed to work on a plot for my game with Mommy. Little Rodan wanted to help, and so I wound up explaining the campaign as briefly as I could. She actually had a couple imaginative suggestions, which I couldn’t use, but decided to keep under consideration. Then Rodan wanted to know more about the game itself and why we used dice.
I explained to her that Role-Playing Games are much like the Pretend games she likes to play when we’re walking to school, where she’s a cat with super-powers and I’m Magneto or something, except that RPGs use rules and dice rolls to determine how things turn out. She really wanted to play one; in particular, she wanted to play GURPS, the game system my wife and I usually use.
As it happens, I have several copies of GURPS Lite, a condensed, simplified version of the GURPS rules that the publisher, Steve Jackson Games, puts out as a freebie. I gave her one and told her read through it. I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to understand all the rules, but figured it would be a beginning. Before she was halfway done, she was demanding a print off a character sheet for her, and soon she was working on her own character.
She needed a lot of help with the character sheet; it took her a bit to understand how the point cost for some things worked; but on the whole she had a good grasp on what she wanted for the character.
The character she came up with was a “Soccer Girl”, with a couple good advantages and disadvantages and a fair range of skills from the GURPS Lite booklet. She also told me that she wanted a game sort of like D&D with fighting monsters. I wasn’t sure offhand how soccer would fit with dragons, or the skills she had listed of Computer Operation, but not wanting to discourage her, I let her have what she wanted. I made a couple suggestion for a few monster-slaying skills that might come in handy, and we ran our first game.
I decided to set the game in a D&D-ish, sort-of-Medieval village with a few anachronisms near the edge of a dangerous forest. (Like anachronisms are anything new to D&D). I started off by having Rodan and her friends playing soccer in a large field on the edge of town, which gave her a chance to get the hang of Skill Rolls. A grown-up from the village scolded them and told them it was too dangerous to play in the field so close to dark because of the kobolds in the forest. (I like kobolds; they are my favorite nuisance monster in D&D; and since Rodan is staring off the equivalent of a 1st Level character, they are an appropriate threat for her).
When her character came home, she announced to her mother that she wanted to be a Dragon-slayer when she grew up and suggested that hunting the kobolds of the forest would be a good way to practice for it. Which is actually how it generally works in D&D. Her mother, although open-minded enough to entertain Dragon-slaying as a possible career option, told her that fighting kobolds was too dangerous and sent her to bed.
So, naturally, Rodan snuck out of her bedroom after dark with a sword, a bow & arrows, and a few other handy items.
Once outside, she spotted a small group of kobolds breaking into the family barn and stealing their cow. Rodan challenged the kobolds and we had a nice little fight. I pretty much ran the kobolds on the fly, making up their stats as I went along. Rodan kept on coming up with new pieces of equipment, such as a grappling line like the one Batman has, or a whip. I didn’t argue much. As I said, at this point I want to encourage her and we can discuss realistic limitations later.
She defeated the kobolds and saved the cow. Hooray!
And now she’s bugging me to run another game with her. I guess it serves me right.
Another project of mine is soon to rise out of the chthonic darkness:Â a gaming suppliment I illustrated titled Doomed Slayers.
The book is the work of my friend Jürgen Hubert and takes an interesting look at the classic Gygaxian Dungeon Fantasy that has long been the standard setting for role-playing games. He wondered in what kind of society would going into subterranean caverns to kill monsters and bring back treasure be considered a viable career option.
His answer was to define the Slayer as a vocation, and to imagine how these “Doomed Slayers” (so-called because of their low life-expectancy) would related to the rest of society.
Doomed Slayers describes the adventurer’s profession, the type of professional and ethical guidelines they are expected to operate by, and how they are regarded by the society they protect from encroaching evils. The material in the book can be easily adapted to any D&D or similar role-playing game, but it also contains an outline of a game world in which to set a “Doomed Slayers” campaign.
And the illustrations are pretty spiffy too, but then I am biased in that regard.
Doomed Slayers is published by Hell Creek Sanitarium and should be coming out around the end of this month or early next. I’ll have more information as it comes.
My good friend Alex Ness invited me to contribute a story to a short story collection he assembled. Hunt the Winterlands is a shared-world anthology of dark fantasy set in a world where an ancient curse has shrouded the land in eternal winter. Just the type of thing you’d expect a poet from Minnesota to come up with.
Or perhaps I should let Alex himself explain:
Long ago in distant lands, a great explosion struck the heart of the Daggar Mountain range, causing every race and city, as well as nearly all animal and plant life, to collapse.
Seven-hundred years later there are very few who dare venture to the Winterlands. The Elves massed a great evacuation going eastward across the ocean, and the dwarves tunneled their way underground in a ten-year mass effort called the great migration. The humans by and large tried to adapt but couldn’t. Some left, others starved, a scant few continue to persevere.
The main population of the Winterlands is now large clans of Orcs and Goblins who eat flesh of any they find, including other such races as themselves.
The Winterlands are a cold and desolate place, but those creatures and races with a keen mind and strong will are able to find a way to survive.
Hunt the Winterlands is a dark fantasy anthology featuring bone-chilling tales from Nichole Porter, Kurt Wilcken, Nate Barlow, Josh Brown, Gina Wood, Michael May, Alex Ness, Joe Monks, and Marc N. Kleinhenz. Cover by Scott P. Vaughn
Something to curl up by the fire with when snow is drifting over your driveway and the bitterkalt howls outside your window. Better bring an extra blanket.