Fontstruct

So I taught Typography last fall, and for a semester-long project, I had the four-credit students work out a font on the FontShop site, www.fontstruct.com. (If you haven't made it over there yet, it's a great site where you can create your own working typefaces.) One of the student's typefaces was even chosen as a "Featured Download."

Here are links to a few of the final products. I'm very proud...

Kimothy by Kim Franczak
Bloc by Lara Heinz
Hot Mess by Jon Stefaniak
Brickyard by Corey Perkins

Leave them a comment, and let them know what you think!

"Yikes!" featured on Storypockets

Check out the blog for the Children's Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh:

http://storypockets.blogspot.com/2008/09/
local-illustarator-nora-thompson.html

They've given a little "heads up" to our "Yikes! Wow! Yuck!" book.

Thanks, guys.

Em dashes and hyphens and editors—Oh my!

(Sorry in advance if I can't get the punctuation working properly on this blog!)

See, the thing I'm liking about editors—and this is coming from a Typography/Graphic Design instructor—is how they keep using em dashes properly.

I've received two emails from editors over the past two days, and both included the correct use of em dashes. The one I got today used two em-dashes and a hyphen properly in the same sentence! And on top of that, both editors used only one space after every period.

Oh, yeah. They get it.

Call me anal, but I'm thinking those are the people I want working on my books.

March 2008

Doodle-a-day...not so much.

Here's March:

Giraffe polo

Here's the latest.

Just finished the polo illustration getting ready for the conference next month. I'm hoping to get at least one more finished by then. It kind of looks like I'm obsessed with giraffes right now.

Not sure and too busy to weigh the consequences.

February 2008

My "Doodle a Day" pocket calendar has slowed a bit. I'll catch up eventually. Here's February:

Shop around

Well, I finally got a CafePress storefront put together with lots of stuff to show off all these kid's illos. Here it is:

www.cafepress.com/nora_thompson

Lots of clothes, of course, for big and traditionally-sized kids, a tote bag, teddy bear, pet accessories, journal, mouse pad, mugs, cards, stickers, magnets--whew! I culled the images from both my traditional and twisted styles, and tried especially hard to match up the images with the product I placed them on. Not an easy task!

My favorite? Hmmm. That would probably have to be the Jeeraffe journal (pictured above). I think he fits perfectly in the space.

Take a peek or a long look around, and don't forget, holidays are just around the corner...

Wall Arch

I was pretty startled to hear the news about the falling of Wall Arch at Arches National Park in Utah. Here's the National Park Service article. We made a trip out there two years ago, and that particular arch was one I remember well because of its proximity to the hiking trail. A stone wall blocked one side and the Wall Arch spanned along the opposite wall with the trail sandwiched between. The structure seemed very delicate at the time, but I got that same impression with most of the arches we saw there. It was a humbling feeling knowing those stones could topple on our heads at any moment.

I'm glad we took so many pictures.
(Arches National Park: Wall Arch 14 June 2006)

Total redesign!

Just wanted everyone to know I've totally redesigned both my graphic design/editorial illustration site: www.graphx.us and my fine art site: www.norathompson.us. I was hoping to make both of them a little more classy than they had been, so I created the pages in Flash and dropped them in a main page I created in Dreamweaver.

And, although it's been up for a little while already, I guess this would be the official announcement of my fine artwork online. I use many mediums including oil, acrylic, graphite (powdered and in pencil form), charcoal (powdered, vine and compressed), conte crayon and many natural materials, to name a few. I have also included several of my silver gelatin photographic prints on the site as well as previous show listings, my artist's statement and bio.

I'm hoping for feedback, especially if anyone encounters problems in the technical area.

And thanks to everyone who has already fed back!

Giraffe polo

Here's a sketch I did between teaching classes yesterday. I had the thumbnail for this drawn over a year ago, but was afraid it wouldn't work and never pursued the idea. Looking for more portfolio pieces for the fall SCBWI conference made me revisit some old sketchbook ideas, and after I came across this one again I decided to give it a shot.

Images 2008

Over at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts at State College, I had a painting accepted into their annual exhibit, this year called, "Images 2008." The painting is titled, "Scream Without Raising Your Voice," an acrylic and mixed media on canvas.

The show ran June 11-July 13.

New York at Night

When we arrived in NY in April, it was late on a Sunday evening.
We took a cab straight from Penn Station to our hotel,
and these were my first impressions of the city.

2008 Westmoreland Art Nationals

I had a Polaroid emulsion transfer accepted into this year's Westmoreland Art Nationals. It's actually four transfers together on one piece of watercolor paper. I didn't do many of these; at the time I was just experimenting with the process and had access to a Daylab Copy System. I had done direct Polaroid image transfers a few years back using film and photos straight out of my dad's old Polaroid that he had brought back from Korea when he was stationed there in the army (1959-ish). But this time I wanted to use copies of 35mm photos that I had already taken.

This is the piece that was accepted. It's called "Stephie's Hands." The show ran May 31 through June 13.

The Golden Penn

The nice people who write and edit the Western Pennsylvania Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators quarterly newsletter (called The Golden Penn) have chosen my artwork to fill the current issue. Sorry, no link directly to the newsletter, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it (you kind of have to pay for it, so they're not going to put it online). But I do have a link to their/our Web site: http://www.wpascbwi.com. And from there, here's the link to my page: http://www.wpascbwi.com/thompson_nora/thompsonn.htm. They used some of the ones with the "crazy" eyeballs (The Rots) that were mostly spring-related.

Thanks to ChrisAnn Goossen for helping me out on this one.

Ohiopyle Weddings

I've finished my first entirely Flash Web site for Ohiopyle Weddings. I still have way too many things I want to do, but don't know the ActionScript to do them, and don't know the correct terminology to be able to search for the scripting on the Internet. Still, it's functional and basically attractive, and best of all, approved by the clients!

Ben

This is Ben.

He's a quick pastel I did while visiting friends yesterday afternoon.

Westmoreland Biennial

This image was accepted into the Westmoreland Biennial which ran from May 11 through June 8. The exhibit included 83 works of art from 80 different artists who lived within a 125-mile radius of Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

The image is called "Murder of Crows," it's a 16"x20" acrylic on canvas. The handwritten text in the background is partially painted over, but only because my husband stopped me before I painted over all of it. He walked in at the point you see here, and made me promise to stop where I was (even though I said I wasn't finished) and look at it with fresh eyes the next day.

Thankfully, I took his advice.

Jeeraffe

So we did a SketchCrawl at the Pittsburgh Zoo a couple weeks back. I didn't get a lot of drawing done, but I did learn some things, mostly about myself.

Things I learned from the SketchCrawl at the zoo:

1. The animals at the zoo tend to turn their butts toward you when they realize you're trying to draw them.
2. It's hard to draw when the humidity is, like, 120%.
3. I can't draw so much when there are people everywhere. Screaming. And running.
   
4. By the time we got to the bears, all I could see were animals being forced to exist in confined spaces so humans could gawk.
5. If I owned the zoo, I would let all the animals go.

Anyway, I was inspired by the animals in spite of their situation (and mine), so I painted "Jeeraffe," the first of (hopefully) an extended series of "Rotty" animal paintings.

Up on eBay!

I've listed my first item on eBay. It's a small chalkboard, hand-built from stoneware clay with a fabric eraser and using hemp as hanging material. It's one of my fine art pieces, and is inspired by indigenous creations and natural materials.

The Raw Shark Texts

So. I know I'm late. I finally got around to reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, and if I'm writing about it on my blog, you should understand that means something. The book takes bites from The Matrix, Memento and Jaws. The DaVinci Code should probably be thrown in there as well, except that Hall doesn't telegraph his passes (as my high school basketball coach used to tell me I did with mine), and he certainly doesn't hold your hand throughout the plot.

Where to start?

First off, the reason I bought it was because I like novels that have visual thought somehow. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon come to mind. I'm a graphic artist; what can I say? These novels, however, didn't affect me like TRST.

Secondly, the novel is written in such a way that different readers can come to different conclusions. I know, I know. How is that possible? My best possible answer is that it just is. Hall, who is British, meant it to be that way, and he basically says so in the title. With a British accent, "The Raw Shark Texts" sounds an awful lot like "The Rorschach Tests."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The official Web site, www.rawsharktexts.com, has many discussions on what readers believe is going on. Look under the "Unspace Exploration Committee" link, and see for yourself. I would suggest not allowing yourself any spoilers (the "Crypto-Forensics" link) before you have a chance to read the book, but after you've finished, you'll probably be heading there for answers.

But guess what? There aren't any. And Mr. Hall is tight-lipped, as well he should be.

I also love how this book is still developing. New things are coming out in new editions, games have been played online about it and Hall has even developed Raw Shark Texts "negatives" (From the site: "For each chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there is, or will be, an un-chapter, a negative. If you look carefully at the novel you might be able to figure out why these un-chapters [are] called negatives.").

Please read the book. Then get back here and tell me what's going on.