HERE is a video from a book signing for ‘Here Comes The Garbage Barge!’ i did as a fund raiser at my favorite non profit organization Happen Inc.

a special thanks to everyone at Happen Inc for a fun event!

i wanted to post a little bit more behind the scenes info on the book. in particular about the hand lettering that was done for the cover and for all the location names throughout the book. initially everyone wanted to find a way to integrate the visual style of vintage site-seeing postcards of days past.

in the end we went with a solution that complemented the complex illustrations without competing with the body copy of the book or the openness of the images. i hand lettered the location names with a map pen and Higgins ink on vellum to create the line art that was passed onto the designer Emily S. who keenly dropped in color to allow the lettering to fall right onto the page and complement the images and keep things visually appealing. here are a few close ups of the ink work. and i must admit there is something very satisfying feeling and hearing that pen nib drag across the surface of the paper.

The book was officially released last week on Feb 9th! you can pick up a copy of it wherever books are sold. as well as amazon.

here are a few of my daughters favorite pages.

getting right down to it the tugboat was one of the most intimidating things i have had to build recently. it was going to have to look good from all angles and viewpoints because it was going to be the other half of the main character. most of what i build it only meant to be seen from one viewpoint for a single illustration, so for the tugboat i needed to build it in the round and with an even finish on all of its surfaces. once i had the schematic drawings down and i was ready to build i was determined to build the boat out of only materials i had on hand in the studio, found objects and random bits of stuff that i seem to continuously attract. being that the book is about controlling the garbage you create i decided that if the tugboat was built out of junk that i would be doing my part to live up to the moral of the book.

here are a few close up shots of some details of the stuff that the tug is built with.

old furniture caster and pulley that stands in as a rope handling system that ties to the barge

showing the engine housing with old rubber tubes for the exhaust and i thought that yellow fuse looked good there

the railing is from a found wire screen and the edging under the railing is from used windshield wiper blades, the lifesavers are made from old rubber washers

salt encrusted windows

a view of  the gauges inside the windows (one of those details never seen in the book)

an old Leviton light switch

here are the steps in the front of the ship. the bumpers on the tug are rubber tires kept from discarded toys, and they are hanging on old leather belts which were used to construct the sides of the ship.

the cables and ropes are made with old wiring i found while remolding my house a few years back.

as a bit of a side note: i was given a box of  junk that was found by my uncle Jim while cleaning out the garage of his father, my grandfather who was known as Rusty. the 15lb box of  bits of machinery, misc hardware that is always left over from projects and broken things that my grandfather was sure would come in handy someday sat in my garage for awhile because i wasnt sure how to sort all the pieces and parts. the day i started to build the tugboat i hauled the box up to the studio hoping to find some pieces that would ‘fit’ on the tug. once i started to really look at what was in there, it was clear as day to me that all of the stuff did, in fact, come in handy. here’s to you grandpa!

the next thing i needed to tackle was how to pull off an expressive Captain who goes from exuberant to angry to down right beaten up by countless rejections not to mention that it is just him and the garbage out on the open ocean. so i leaned on the old stop-motion animation technique of replacement animation. i created five heads that could be interchanged on one master body. i was able to categorize the captain’s many expressions into just five facial poses(expressions). first there is the neutral face which has a gentle smile/ smirk , second there is the open mouth exuberance, third is the jaw dropped expression of ‘oh no! it the mexican navy!’ forth is the teeth gritting scowl where he is about to blow his top and fifth is the face of a man that is beaten down and gasping for the last breath of fresh air. **(the ‘neutral’ face is not included in the following photo)

capt duffy's many faces

one little problem that arose in the midst of making the multiple heads was that his captain’s hat would need to fit each head and look good from any angle. after finding the right blue leather and about 3 hours of trial and error i got this little gem.

duffy's captain hat

another small detail throughout the book is the captain’s constantly changing t-shirt, my favorite being the one with Mr. Yuck from the green poison control phone number sticker that we had on the center of our rotary phone dial in my childhood home.

Mr. YUCK t-shirt cameo

after the landfill research, i dove into trying to figure out the color scheme for the book. keeping in mind that the story spans an entire summer and travels to several places, i wanted the color to help convey various times of day , attitudes, conflicts and most importantly to use color to show how the garbage gets worse and wears more heavily on the captain over time.

here is the colorstudy sheet with each spread being about 1.5″ tall. i like to keep all of them on the same page so i can see how the color flows thru the book as a whole as opposed to just working on each individual spread. i used watercolors and the small scale to help me work quickly and to hopefully not to overthink the color.

here are a few details of the colorstudy. with scribbles and notes in the margins. looking back at this i see that it was merely a starting point for the colors that as i worked on the finals, evolved into more complex color schemes but this initial study was constantly referred back to and use as the primary direction for the whole book.

now that i felt i had a visual solution for the main character and how he was going to live in this red nose world, i decided to jump into the visual storytelling and trying to find the right spot for the right image to help visually tell the story without just illustrating the authors words and trying to figure out the best way for the visuals to carry through all the various locations the garbage gets pulled to and all the people of those areas and how upset they are to see someone else’s garbage come into their ports.

even during the first couple reads of the manuscript i sketched thumbnails where it felt like visuals needed to be.

compared to the usual ‘one image that needs to say everything’ i found that organizing the sequence of visuals was a tough challenge. and turned to the handy post-it notes to be able to keep the thumbnails loose and ‘movable’

sometimes drawing several versions of one scene, trying to find the right composition that stood alone and still worked with the rest of the images as a whole.

here is a shot of the first draft of all the pages together. soome will make it through to the end and some will be drawn and revised several time to try to get it ‘right’

here are a couple of the spreads with the text laid on by the designer and we start to see the book in full scope.

next i head to a landfill to research the hidden beauty of trash and what its like to take care of all the crap we mostly aimlessly throw away every week…

not only was the tugboat going to play a BIG part in the picture book but more importantly was the character of the crusty old captain Duffy St. Pierre.

here is one of the few shots of his face i could find. not much to go on, which probably was a good thing and allowed me to take some artistic license with his character.

it was quite a challenge to figure out how he was going to function on this tugboat. how was he going to be a prominent character on this 90′ tugboat?

too superficial, too young..

a pretty watercolor study, but he still aint right…

now we are getting some ‘character’ in him

this says crusty old sailor to me

this sketch is what did it for me. once this came out, i knew how he would work with the tugboat. much like the Spanish soldiers on horseback in 1519 when the Aztecs only saw the soldier on the horse they were thought of as a type of mythical figure… well my thought was that you wouldnt see Duffy on his own, he would always be in the pilot house, one with the vessel.

this is the color sketch that really got the ball rolling…

in the summer of  2007 i was contacted by Schwarzt & Wade Books a division of Random House about the possibility of creating the illustrations for a new manuscript that was just being finished up. Anne Schwartz said she was familar with my work and thought my work would be perfect for book about garbage… although i was delighted she had called me, i wasnt sure how to take that statement. was she implying that my work was garbage??? not long after talking with her i realized she was very familiar with my stuff and how i used found objects and junk in my work.

here is a link: Here Comes the Garbage Barge! by Jonah Winter; illustrated by Red Nose Studio – Hardcover Library Binding – Random House

the summary of the book goes like this:

In the spring of 1987, the town of Islip, New York, with no place for its 3,168 tons of garbage, loads it on a barge that sets out on a 162-day journey along the east coast, around the Gulf of Mexico, down to Belize, and back again, in search of a place willing to accept and dispose of its very smelly cargo.

the second time i read through the manuscript i was hooked and once everything was official i dove headfirst into the absurd world of Captain Duffy St. Pierre, the tugboat the Break of Dawn and their abysmal 6000+ mile journey with the Mobro 4000 garbage barge.

although the book will not be out until in Feb 1010, i thought it would be interesting to post some of the visual development and how the characters and environments came about to help build some back story to the project.

here are some of the drawings of the tugboat based on news photographs from the time of the event. the tug is still in operation tugging oil barges in the Gulf of Mexico, although i was unable to make it down for a face to face visit with the vessel. but maybe one day…