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…