Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ceiling.”
The most devastating in the entire thread, though, is the French saying, “go back home, your mother made you waffles.” If someone said this to me, they would need a dustpan to sweep up the dust of me. If someone said this to me, they’d have to put in the newspaper I wasn’t mad. If someone said this to me, I’d think about the time my 5th grade teacher goaded the entire class to laugh at me because she was wrong about Berlin being on the border between East and West Germany, but I was right! If someone said this to me, all the liquid in my body would heat to one thousand degrees and my skin would melt. If someone said this to me, I’d move away and change my name and miss my family. If someone said this to me, the yellowjackets inside my chest would chew their way out and then sting ME for making them chew through bones. If someone said this to me, all of the songs I’ve heard plus all of the songs I haven’t would play at once inside my brain resulting in a symphony of anguish. If someone said this to me, I would go into debt buying a yacht hoping a gang of orcas wearing dead salmon on their heads would sink it.
Seven benign words on their own collocated into a soul-destroying eviscerator punctuated by a normally pleasant breakfast item. I told the very tall Chris Piasick about this saying and he drew it.
I’m sure there are science or moral reasons I shouldn’t use Jason’s “World’s Best Pancake Recipe” in my waffle maker, but I don’t care, I’ve been doing it for years and the resulting waffles are fabulous.
Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes maps that show where the characters travel during movies — imagine Billy’s trail maps from Family Circus but for films like Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Honami is a skilled draughtswoman by trade, having obtained an MFA in architecture and working at a well-known Japanese architecture firm. But the grueling hours and workload eventually weighed on her physical and mental state and she fell ill, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Enya’s doctor advised her to take some time off, and find a place where she can relax and warm her body. That’s how she discovered Kosugiyu, her local sento in Koenji. She quickly fell in love with her local hotbath and not only started working there but also began employing her architectural rendering skills to create illustrations of the space. Soon, others began asking her to draw their hotbaths as well and her clientele expanded from sento and even spread to kissaten.
I haven’t watched too much of the Olympics this summer so maybe the announcers explain this every single time they show a medals ceremony, but in case you didn’t know, the long, thin boxes given to the medalists along with their medals contain the official poster of the Games (and a plushie).
The poster was created by illustrator Ugo Gattoni and is a sort of Where’s Waldo / Busy Busy Town representation of the Games and its venues.
The designer had total creative freedom. While working to a brief and respecting the look of the Games, he still managed to maintain his own playful and joyful style.
This is why eight mascots are hidden within the posters. In fact, whatever age you are, there is something within the artwork that you will be able to enjoy.
The biggest images of the poster I can find are here if you want to zoom in to see the details. There are also zoomed-in images and videos on Gattoni’s Instagram.
The Olympic poster is the twin of the poster for the Paralympic Games, also created by Gattoni:
This is wonderful: a collection of video clips of Charles Schulz drawing his iconic Peanuts comic strip — “everything I could find of Charles Schulz drawing his Peanuts characters” in the words of the compiler.
Unfortunately, I’m not highly educated. I’m merely a high school graduate. I studied art in a correspondence course because I was afraid to go to art school. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I and this way I was protected by drawing at home and simply mailing my drawings in and having them criticized.
I wish I had a better education but I think that my entire background made me well-suited for what I do. If I could write better than I can, perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist and I might have become a failure. If I could draw better than I can, I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist and would have failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist.
Charles Schulz: Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In his lane. Focused. Flourishing.
It’s fascinating to see his artistic sense grow and shift over the years, not only increasing in artistic skill as he gets older but also moving from simple depictions of holiday scenes to more conceptual creations.
Every so often on Instagram I come across Harry Clarke’s stringy, spooky illustrations for the 1919 Edgar Allan Poe collection Tales of Mystery & Imagination (above left) or the 1925 version of Goethe’s Faust. Poking around led me to this 2016 story in the Public Domain Review: “Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass.” As I learned, he once wrote to a friend that his publisher thought a set of his Faust illustrations were “full of stench and steaming horrors.”
50watts has more great images, and here’s a zoomable version of the “Sea Witch” (above right) from his illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
I’m taken with the style of Jun Kumaori’s illustrations — they look like drawings of (stay with me here) small JPEGs converted to GIFs and then clumsily enlarged, complete with all of the resultant digital artifacts. This makes me nostalgic for the late 90s web and Photoshop 3.0. (via the fox is black)
Meet the members of the Wellington Family, foods related in spirit and structure to Beef Wellington: pigs in a blanket, Hot Pockets, corn dogs, and Pop Tarts.
See also The Cube Rule of Food, which suggests that the Wellington Family actually belongs to the larger Calzone Clan but sadly that pigs in a blanket are actually sushi.
P.S. I found this illustration herebut couldn’t trace the original source. Happy to give credit is anyone knows where this is from…
Japanese trains are renowned for their punctuality, comfort and overall reliability. But part of what makes them so reliable is an “unseen” workforce of overnight trains. These trains will be unfamiliar to the everyday rider because they only show themselves after regular service has ended for the day. Working through the wee hours of night and early morning, they perform maintenance work on tracks and electrical wires that ensures a smooth and uninterrupted ride during the day.
The Tolkien Estate has built a new website dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and it includes dozens of hard-drawn maps, illustrations, paintings, and calligraphic works done by the author in the course of writing his books. Tolkien was a talented artist and his maps and visual art were an integral part of his work. From Artnet:
Tolkien’s art and writings went hand and hand, with illustrations serving as an an integral part of his creative process. Sometimes the words would inspire the artwork, and sometimes drawing a scene would move the narrative in new directions.
The author meticulously mapped out the world of Middle Earth to ensure the accurate movements of his large cast of characters.
In 1893, English marine biologist William Saville-Kent published his 550-page book, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities. Accompanying the text are more than a dozen full-color illustrations of the plants and animals of the reef, drawn from Saville-Kent’s watercolors painted on location. You can peruse the entire book at the Internet Archive or the Biodiversity Heritage Library or take a look at the illustrations at The Marginalian (where prints are also available).
The second cover down, by Katrina Catacutan, is probably my favorite (the body language of the woman answering the door is just perfect) but the last image by Amy Young hit me like a ton of bricks. The New Yorker should run all of these covers for an issue of the magazine in a few weeks — collect them all!
I began preparing for this project by revisiting news coverage of anti-Asian hate crimes committed during the pandemic. As I absorbed one account after another, they became increasingly difficult to read. So many mothers and grandmothers have been targeted. I imagined my own mom in that situation. I thought about my grandma and my aunt, who have been among my greatest sources of support. The mother in the drawing is made up of all these women.
So simple, so powerful. The way the shoes, eyes, and faces are positioned and angled. On Twitter, Jiayang Fan commented:
I can’t stop staring at this cover. I can’t stop wondering who would come to this mother-daughter pair’s aid if someone attacked them. I can’t stop thinking I was once the daughter and how helpless I still feel to protect my mother.
Over a period of a year and a half, Matt Kish created one illustration for each of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition of Herman Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick. He then turned those illustrations into a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.
In retrospect, Kish says he feels as foolhardy as Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, and as obsessed as Captain Ahab in his quest for the great white whale. “I see now that the project was an attempt to fully understand this magnificent novel, to walk through every sun-drenched word, to lift up all the hatches and open all the barrels, to smell, taste, hear, and see every seabird, every shark, every sailor, every harpooner, and every whale,” he says. “It was a hard thing, a very painful thing, but the novel now lives inside me in a away it never could have before.”
This guide to Covid-19 variants (SARS-CoV-2 viruses that have evolved changes to meaningfully alter their behavior) by Michaeleen Doucleff and Meredith Rizzo at NPR cleverly visualizes how mutations of the virus’s spike proteins help bind it more easily to ACE2 receptors on human cells. The key to the visualization is Meredith Miotke’s illustrations of the viruses using Lego pieces to represent the virus spikes and cell receptors. The usual SARS-CoV-2 has 1x1 Lego pieces that can bind with 1x2 pieces, like so:
But, as everyone who has ever worked with a Lego set knows, a 1x1 piece stuck to a 1x2 piece is not super stable. So when a version of the virus with a 1x2 piece shows up, it’s able to form a better connection to the 1x2 receptor:
The analogy breaks down if you look too hard at it1 but for many people, it can be a quick way to get the gist of the mechanism at work here. (via @EricTopol)
This is a huge pet peeve of mine when people try to poke holes in analogies: by definition, all analogies break down if you examine them too deeply. An analogy is a comparison of two different things that are similar in significant respects. If they were the same in every respect, it’s not an analogy…you’d just be describing one thing.↩
The rhetorical highlight of the Biden/Harris inauguration was Amanda Gorman reciting her poem, The Hill We Climb — I thought it was fantastic. It begins:
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
“I had this huge thing, probably one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my career,” she said in an interview. “It was like, if I try to climb this mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.”
Gorman managed to write a few lines a day and was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day.
Gorman is no stranger to having to change her work midstream. Like Biden, who has spoken openly about having stuttered as a child, Gorman grew up with a childhood speech impediment of her own. She had difficulty saying certain letters of the alphabet — the letter R was especially tough — which caused her to have to constantly “self-edit and self-police.”
Her delivery was amazing — powerful and lyrical. Brava!
Nicholas Rougeux has beautifully reproduced & remastered botanical illustrator Elizabeth Twining’s catalog of plants and flowers from 1868, Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants. Each of the 160 illustrations is accompanied by explanatory text from the original book and an interactive version of the image (click on the highlighted plant for more info).
Author and illustrator Edward Carey has been making a drawing a day since the beginning of the pandemic. He recently completed his 250th drawing, with “no end in sight, alas”. He’s posting each day’s drawing to Instagram; here are a few of my recent favorites:
Just enjoying Jo Brown’s illustrations today. Using a Moleskine notebook, she sketches plants and wildlife near her home in Devon, England. A replica of that nature journal called Secrets of a Devon Wood has been recently published in the UK (US edition is out soon — Amazon is the only place I could find it). You can check out more of her artwork on Instagram. (via colossal)
In the 1930s and 40s, artist Eric Godal drew some anti-fascist political cartoons that urged people not to listen to right-wing authoritarians who want to destroy and pillage society for their own ends. Godal, a German Jew, had escaped the clutches of Nazi Germany in the 30s and labored to warn America and the world about the fate of the Jews in Europe.1
Illustrator Chris Piascik has updated Godal’s drawings for 2020 to feature our own corrupt crackpot wannabe dictator. Calling Donald Trump a fascist is hardly controversial these days — he clearly is. What his supporters need to reckon with is: are they?
Godal’s mother was able to get out of Germany on a boat but was denied entry to the United States as a refugee by the Roosevelt administration. She was sent back and eventually murdered in a Nazi death camp.↩
British Mineralogy and Exotic Mineralogy comprise 718 illustrations by James Sowerby in an effort to illustrate the topographical mineralogy of Great Britain and minerals not then known to it. Sowerby’s plates are some of the finest examples of hand-drawn mineral illustrations ever created. The detail and care with which these illustrations were created is incredible and worthy of close examination. See the samples below.
For the cover of this week’s New Yorker, Chris Ware drew several vignettes of NYC arranged in his trademark grid as a companion to this incredible piece about a single day of the Covid-19 crisis in the city. About the cover, Ware wrote:
Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense — or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, “For a while, we get to just step back and look.” And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.
This is Chris Ware’s illustration for the cover of this week’s New Yorker, the magazine’s annual Health Issue. The pandemic had to be the topic for the cover, and Ware’s daughter suggested that the specific theme focus on the families of the healthcare workers on the front lines of the crisis.
“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about — not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.
“‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.
“Good idea. And a personal one: one of her friend’s parents are both doctors; that friend, now distilled into a rectangular puddle of light on my daughter’s nightstand, reported that her mom had temporarily stopped going to work, pending the results of a COVID-19 test.
Amber Share of Subpar Parks is producing illustrations of real one-star reviews of America’s National Parks from apparently dissatisfied park visitors. Zion National Park is a bit standoffish:
Newsflash: Sequoia National Park is outdoors and has insects:
From a bored Joshua Tree guest:
Follow along with the rest of these on Instagram — Share is doing one drawing for each National Park and she’s got many more still to go. Prints, postcards, stickers, and tshirts are available from her shop (or will be soon).
The Valdivia Expedition, led by German marine biologist Carl Chun in 1898-1899, was the first time humans had explored the ocean depths below 500 fathoms. What they found changed our conception of the oceans. The results, in the form of 24 volumes of text and illustrations, took decades to be published. Among the volumes was The Cephalopoda, published in 1910 and filled with colorful hand-illustrated drawings of octopuses and squid, courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
I found this on Brain Pickings, which identifies the illustrator as Friedrich Wilhelm Winter, a credit I couldn’t find in the actual book itself. They’re also selling some of the illustrations as prints, like this one of the octopus featured above.
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