Hi all!

I got an email today announcing that the ICON6 Illustration Conference is open for registration. There is an early bird special of $425 through the month of April. So don’t miss that and pay more! To make it even more affordable to go, it might be a good idea to find another illustrator or two who are going and split hotel and traveling costs with them. Plus, going with friends would be more fun anyway.

Find out more about all the goodies on the agenda for the conference here.

p.s. One of our new IF Bloggers: Fernanda Cohen is the Vice-President/Events Chair of ICON6! Super cool.

I produced a lecture with SooJin and Chris Buzelli last night at the Society of Illustrators of NY (SI). They’re close friends of mine, we often go out to dinner, movies, house parties and such, and we inevitably talk about work every single time. Chris puts up with my jokes about his taking baths every day, wearing way too much brown and being all sweaty because of social heat, and I always hope he knows I only joke about it because I like him so much (AND he’s such a big sport about it!). SooJin also definitely feeds my jokes with insider’s stories, which obviously helps keep them coming.

Yet, last night, I learned more about Chris and his work than I’d heard in dozens of dinners we’ve spent together talking about it. He was insightful, generous, informative, humble, charming and 100% down to earth, as opposed to being a me-me-me kind of talk. These are all the qualities I always hope my speakers understand, so I was beyond thrilled afterwards.

SooJin, one of the most active- if not the most- art directors when it comes to hiring illustrators, did her part as well. I’ve worked with her quite a few times, so I knew a lot of what she shared with the audience almost by heart. She opened her vault so much- including how much her publications pay, deadlines, spelled-out job requests, sketches and such- I was shocked, in a pleasant way, of course. My only fear was that illustrator wannabes would ‘attack’ her after the lecture. But they didn’t, fortunately.

The combination of the two was a great balance of role models for both art directors and illustrators. Talent is great to have, but passion and the right attitude really do the trick.

The lecture was filmed and will be posted at www.societyillustrators.org within the next month. I hope you can check it out- Fernanda

Chris Buzelli, Fernanda Cohen, Anelle Miller & SooJin Buzelli

Rama Hughes

Two truths and a lie about Rama Hughes:

Rama Hughes is an art teacher and an illustrator.
He lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles, CA.
He was the star of the 1980 cinema flop, Pumaman.

You can see Rama’s work at ramahughes.com, visit flickr to peek in on his classes, or trade portraits through his ongoing portrait party!

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Mati Rose McDonough

Mati Rose McDonough lives in San Francisco where unlike her hipster counterparts she regularly encounters elephants, talking birds and a mysterious girl who always wears feathers in her hair. These creatures of mystery and grace remind Mati daily that no one is too old for magic or too young for beauty, so she paints their stories with paint, fabric and found paper.

After a persistent dream to become an artist and illustrator, Mati went back to school 5 years ago at age 29 to the California College of the Arts (CCA). Since then, Mati has had numerous shows and illustrations on cds, board games, shirts and necklaces. Mati is newly repped by Lilla Rogers Studio in illustration and surface design. In addition to illustration work she’s inspired by teaching painting classes in far away lands like Italy and Utah and close to home in Santa Cruz. On a daily basis Mati can be found painting in her studio behind her home in the sunny Mission district shared with 8 other artists and her talented illustrator husband Hugh D’Andrade. When she’s not covered in paint you can find her biking to the ocean, drinking tea and searching for colorful baubles of inspiration to share with you here.

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Fernanda Cohen & Manolo M.

Fernanda is a NY-based illustrator, she teaches at SVA, runs a lecture series at the Society of Illustrators of NY, writes for American Illustration’s Dart and Argentine magazine 90+10, art directs Terrorismo Grafico, is the vice president of the illustration conference ICON6, an advisor to 3×3 magazine and works on commercial and personal art projects, including mostly advertising, fashion, merchandising, windows and some editorial.

Manolo is a self taught painter, musician, animator, video artist, writer and comic artist. He designed and animated a short film that screened at the Sundance and TriBeCa Film Festivals, has exhibited his paintings in quite a few NY indie group shows and has blogged and written Web content for longer he can remember.

Fernanda is a workaholic who speaks her mind loud and clear, whereas Manolo is a soft-spoken, patient listener whose hard work, passion and loyalty are hard to match. This is how and why they complement each other and manage not to clash while working together on restaurant murals, Fernanda’s studio projects and such.

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Susan Schwake

Susan Schwake has been a full time artist and instructor for the past 20 years. She is co owner of artstream studios and gallery with her creative husband Rainer and good friend Mary-Jo. Her own work has been exhibited and sold around the world and some of her illustrations have appeared in ON magazine and in United Airlines inflight pulications as well as a book cover for Boreal Editions, Quebec. She draws every day and enjoys curating engaging exhibits at artstream for the past 7 years. Her home is in New Hampshire, but her heart loves to travel the world. She shares her life with two creative children and her husband Rainer.

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Steve Mack

Steve Mack grew up a prairie boy on Canada’s Great Plains and has drawn for as long as he can remember. His first lessons in art were taught to him by watching his grandfather do paint-by-numbers at the summer cottage. Later on in life his mother would bring home reams of dot matrix printout paper from her job as a data processor. Steve would then flip over onto the unprinted side and draw for hours upon hours. He took every drawing class he could find at the local community center and spent every hour of math class sharpening his drawing skills.

After graduating from college as a Visual Communications know-it-all, he instead turned from graphic design back to his roots as an illustrator. Steve started freelancing in the year 2000 and has had a steady climb upwards since that time. Steve has worked with major clients such as Target, Walgreens, Hallmark, Sterling Publishing, Scholastic, Harcourt, Chronicle Books, and recently spent a year in Ohio working directly with American Greetings illustrating greeting cards.

Steve has made a return to Canada where he lives peacefully on a lake with his wife and two small children. Steve still loves to illustrate, but now thinks fishing holds a close second place.

Visit Steve’s personal art blog here.

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Melanie Ford Wilson

Melanie Ford Wilson is a designer and illustrator with a passion for pencils and paintbrushes, words and stories, blooms and beasties. When not toiling behind her Mac or her drawing board, she can be found wandering the Canadian wilds with her floppy-eared, dog-shaped shadow, Finnegan Jane. Not surprisingly, Melanie counts nature as her biggest inspiration (closely followed by music and chocolate). Her personal art attempts to explore the emotional connection between mind and nature within a kind of fairy tale context where anything is possible.  She is besotted with fancy adjectives, Phthalo blue, the color green, Klimt, and all things arty and unexpected.

She has illustrated several children’s books, including two books about dinosaurs for the world renown Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. Design clients include Target, Aveeno, Loreal, and Johnson & Johnson.

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Amanda Woodward

Amanda Woodward is a Canadian designer, illustrator, and artist. She heads her own design studio, Woodward Design, with her husband, Dana.

While she has worked on everything from ad campaigns to visual identities, her passion for illustration often touches her work. Her illustration client list includes Alberta Milk, Cricket Magazine, Miami Children’s Museum, Scholastic, Target, among others. She has exhibited her art in both Canada and the United States. Her paintings are informed by simple life experiences and personal relationships. The sometimes small and seemingly insignificant moments, like growing tomato plants, feeling sand between the toes, laughing, and loving.

When she isn’t drawing she can be found happily snapping photographs, knitting scarves or baking a pie.

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Colin Dullaghan

Colin has been writing words to accompany art and design for more than ten years now, for clients around the U.S., in print, online and broadcast media.

His other connection to the visual arts is that he is married to a fairly prominent illustrator (you may be familiar with her work), so that helps too.

He is a new dad, a big dork and endlessly curious. He has a weakness for typography and infographics and takes extremely hit-or-miss pictures with a borrowed Holga camera.

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Brianna Privett

Brianna is the lead developer for Utopian.net. She maintains about a million URLs, foremost among them her personal playground Brianna.org.

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Penelope Dullaghan

Penelope Dullaghan is a co-founder of Illustration Friday along with her partner Brianna Privett. Penelope is an award-winning illustrator and fine artist who began her freelance career after a five-year stint as an art director. She chronicles her artistic development at her website, penelopeillustration.com. Clients include Starbucks, Target, United Airlines, New York Times, LA Times Book Review, SF Chronicle, and the Oprah Magazine.

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This is the best browser-based drawing tool I’ve played with. I’m having a lot of fun with it.
Harmony

Mary Blair was an American artist best known for the striking concept art that she produced for the Walt Disney Company.

Born in Oklahoma, the inherently gifted artist won a scholarship to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. She graduated in 1933, at the height of the Depression. It was very difficult to find work then. So, Mary took a job as an animator for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a fine artist. In 1934, she married another artist, Lee Everett Blair.

Lee went to work for Walt Disney and, a few years later, Mary Blair join him. She worked on several cartoons that were never produced and contributed artwork to the animated films Dumbo and The Lady and the Tramp.

In 1941, Mary traveled to various South American countries as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. During those trips, Mary and her husband worked on concept art for the animated feature films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Animator Marc Davis put Mary’s exciting use of color on a par with the master artist, Henri Matisse. He said of Mary Blair, “She brought modern art to Walt (Disney) in a way that no one else did. He was so excited about her work.” Disney enjoyed her work so much that he made her art supervisor on those films.

After that she helped Walt Disney produce a new film almost every year. Blair worked as a concept artist. Her color styling can be seen in Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). The influence of her concept art is strongly felt in those films as well as several animated shorts she designed during that period. Animation historian John Canemaker wrote “The way she (Mary) painted – in a lot of ways she was still a little girl. Walt was like that… You could see he could relate to children – she was the same way.”

After the completion of Peter Pan, Mary resigned from Disney and worked as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. She created advertising campaigns for Nabisco, Maxwell House, and other companies. She designed sets for Radio City Music Hall. She also illustrated several Golden Books including I Can Fly and the New Golden Song Book. Those books have never gone out of print.

Walt Disney was such a fan of Mary Blair’s artwork. He asked her to assist in the design of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World attraction. The ride is pure Mary Blair. Over the years, she contributed to the design of many exhibits, attractions, and murals at the theme parks in California and Florida, including the fanciful murals in the Grand Canyon Concourse at the Contemporary Hotel at the Walt Disney World Resort.

After her death in 1978, Mary Blair was recognized as a Disney Legend. She also received the Winslow McKay award for animation. While the fine art she created is not widely known, her groundbreaking designs for Walt Disney still serve as an inspiration to contemporary designers and animators. You can learn more about her in the recent biography, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair by John Canemaker.

Portrait drawn by yours truly

Do yourself a favor and check out this super cute ABC book by Richard A. Goldberg over at Drawger.

This Saturday in Los Angeles, Secret Headquarters will present COVERED, an art show curated by Robert Goodin, the editor of the Covered Blog. The site invites artists to reinterpret their favorite comic book covers and the show celebrates some of their best work. The details can be found here:

To help raise money for his friends’ art project, Stuart Immonen -notoriously opposed to commissioned work- has offered to draw YOU as one of his Flickr People. The portraits are incredible. The opportunity is extremely rare. The cause is good. The auction is here!