In Which I Give You A Tour of My Bookshelves!

For my birthday this year, I cleaned my bookshelves!  This is a Big Deal!

Seriously, I follow a lot of blogs by other illustrators and the one thing we all seem to have in common is breaking out in chronic literature, as in the above wonderful Arnold Lobel poster.  Now that my books are as organized as they are probably ever going to get (which means that they are actually in bookshelves; I really did have piles of books all over the place), it seems like a good time to give you, dear readers, a tour.  This is going to take a couple of posts and table-breaking photos.



Going from left to right (this shelf refused to photograph well thanks to the light seeping in from the adjacent window):

Jim Henson: The Works, Christopher Finch - This is one of the first art books I owned and it has spoiled me rotten ever since.  Loaded with concept art and history, this is a must-have.

Sesame Street Unpaved, David Borgenicht - Nice companion to The Works and very similar in format.  Plus you can currently find it for dirt cheap on Amazon.

Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks, Chuck Jones - Even if I wasn't such a Chuck Jones maniac, I'd consider these books essential. They're packed with concept art, anecdotes, and drawing tips.

Imaginative Realism and Color and Light, James Gurney - These books together have a wealth of information for painters. I don't paint very often, so I appreciate them more as a collection of Gurney's artwork.

Various Anatomy for Artists Books - Hey, remember these guys from the very earliest days of this blog? Wow, that takes me back.  Specifically, I've kept Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy, Ken Hultgren's The Art of Animal Drawing, Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists, and a little later we'll be seeing Eadweard Muybridge's essential Animals in Motion, Ellenberger and Davis' Atlas Of Animal Anatomy For Artists, Eliot Goldfinger's Animal Anatomy For Artists: the Elements of Form (it was on sale), and Katrina Van Grouw's The Unfeathered Bird.

Character Animation Crash Course, Eric Goldberg - I've been referencing it more than I thought I would when I first reviewed it.

Paleoart Galore! - OK, let's see here. We've got The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of DINOSAURS and Prehistoric Animals, at least until an updated reference of every known prehistoric animal comes along, Mark Witton's beautiful Pterosaurs, Henry Gee and Louis V. Rey's beautiful beautiful Field Guide to Dinosaurs: The Essential Handbook for Travelers in the Mesozoic, Gregory S. Paul's Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, William Stout's awesome The (New) Dinosaurs, the two Dinosaurs: Past and Present exhibit catalog books (I haven't read them but my succinct review of this wealth of classic paleoart is awesome), and Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart. And there's more on other shelves...

The Art of Maurice Sendak, Selma Lanes - I haven't been able to properly read this yet but it's an excellent collection of Sendak's art and since you can find copies for under ten dollars, it is a must-have.

Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo, Chris McDonnell - Here's the first series-specific art book I've found that's as good as the two aforementioned Jim Henson art books. It's a must-have for fans of "Adventure Time" and is packed to the gills with concept art, interviews, and trivia.

Next, more animation, comics, and children's books.

-----

Sketch of the Day!  The first "Final Fantasy" is a little strange, it turns out.

I can walk like a penguin in 3-effin'-D!

As always, click for big and for more drawings from the Aquarium.
I went to the New England Aquarium with my aunt and cousin who were both suffering a mean case of Bermuda withdrawal. The sketches I did pretty much speak for themselves, so do look at them please. We had a fantastic time.
Although I would like to talk about the Simon's IMAX 3-Effin'-D Theatre, since I'd never experienced the fury of a three-effin'-d (it will never stop being funny) IMAX film before.
It was... different.
The film we saw was something called "Under the Sea 3D", in which you look at beautiful footage of the Coral Triangle as Jim Carrey explains what's going on. (This is one of those documentaries that suffers from too much narration. So you start wondering if whomever was in charge of the narration hired Jim Carrey and asked him, early on, "Dude, could you tone it down a little?") It's nice. It also probably would have been just as entertaining as a conventional IMAX movie.
Now, the 3D glasses were comfortable on me, so that wasn't a problem (I've seen enough people complain about this that it felt worth mentioning). And the 3D itself wasn't too much of a distraction either -- not for the first half-hour anyway, but more on that later. It felt, oddly, like looking through a really big window. I'm used to 3D films where the fish and the sea serpents and the seals and all the little squid would appear to be floating out into the theater. Here it looked like all the animals were just about to break the fourth wall, but ultimately did not.
Then my eyes started to adjust to the effects and everything looked foggy and out of focus. It's a good thing this movie was only about forty-five minutes long, but it made me wary of seeing a full-length feature in this format.
For more on this, listen to this Onion AV Club podcast.
It's worth noting that, with me sketching everyone that caught my eye, we managed to see closing time. I have a talent for that.

(Man, it's funny to write about something you did a month ago. Am I up to date? I think I may finally be up to date! Woo! Did you know X-Entertainment has finally picked up the Advent Calender thread?)

I just got off the Norwegian Spirit a few hours ago.

She took me and my family to Bermuda and back, in case you were wondering where I was this past week. Right now, I'm just reading the thirty-something emails in my inbox.
Now, I already have the Chronological Animated Disney Canon set to be posted (kind of a dumb move on my part, I'll admit), but that's going to give me time to decompress after this adventure and get all the photos and drawings ready to share. I'll probably end up writing about the cruise somewhere in the middle of the Disney movies.