Kriota Willberg teaches anatomy in the dance department of Marymount Manhattan College, pathology and massage at the Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences, has taught at Bard College and NYU, and teaches anatomy and injury prevention classes in New York and internationally. She has studied personal training and exercise, and is a licensed massage therapist. With encouragement from her husband, cartoonist R. Sikoryak, she has also become an anatomical illustration hobbyist.
Filed under Uncategorized
Visiting Artist Seminar on November 26th was cancelled due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Happy Thanksgiving, all! Â I hope you ate well.
– Robyn Chapman
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We were honored to have David Macaulay join CCS as core faculty this semester. He spent three weeks working with our senior class, critiquing their work-in-progress thesis projects. Macaulay also joined us for Visiting Artist Seminar, where he explained how he created award-winning books like Castle, Mosque, Black and White and The Way Things Work.
What impressed me about Macaulay’s book-making process is the way he uses drawing as a learning tool. As Macaulay put it, he can’t understand something unless he can draw it. Sketching isn’t Macaulay’s only learning he tool, however. He reads a lot, consults with experts and scholars, and uses reference photos when necessary.
Macaulay’s curiosity is the driving force behind all his books. He didn’t know anything about boats, so he created Ship. He didn’t understand the human body, so he created The Way We Work. After 9/11, he created Mosque to better understand the Muslim world. A future project on evolution (another topic Macaulay doesn’t fully understand) is in the works.
The students also got a sneak-peek at his new version of Castle. Macaulay is re-drawing the book and adding color. Macaulay described Castle as a book that “impressed with technique”, but the illustrations lacked a human presence. This revised version will focus on the people who inhabit the castle, and the city that grows around it.
– Robyn Chapman
Filed under Fall 2009
David Macaulay is the author of many books, including the architectural series, Cathedral, Pyramid, Castle, and Mosque. His celebrated book, The Way Things Work, not only shows the reader how things are made, but conveys complex technical information as to how and why they function. He has also produced many picture books, including Black and White. Macaulay has earned a host of awards including the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston GlobeâHorn Book Award, the Christopher Award, an American Institute of Architects Medal and the Washington Childrenâs Book Guild Nonfiction Award. In 2006 he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given âto encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.â
Filed under Fall 2009
During his visit John Stadler entertained us with anecdotes from his long career in the children’s book field. He also demonstrated a unique process he uses to generate stories. In this approach, he creates two plot lines: Plot A and Plot B. As we turn the page, these plots progress and finally meet at the story’s conclusion. Anticipation is built, and the conclusion is both surprising and rewarding. Stadler’s book Big and Little is the perfect example of this concept in motion. By using the device of a fold-out page, Plot A and Plot B are kept in separate worlds.
Plot A.
Plot B.
Plot A.
Plot B.
Big and Little is a very smart children’s book that uses a simple device to play with the reader’s expectations. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will tell you that this 31-year old was surprised and tickled by Stadler’s twist ending.
– Robyn Chapman
Filed under Fall 2009
John Stadler is the author of almost 30 childrenâs books, among them Hooray for Snail, The Ballad of Wilbur and the Moose, Big and Little, and Cat at Bat. Many of his titles have been selected as an ALA Editorâs Choice, a Childrenâs Choice, and by Reading Rainbow. His books have also been featured in The New York Times Best Books for Children.
Filed under Fall 2009
It was a great pleasure to have the celebrated cartoonist Seth visit CCS. Unlike most visiting artist, who lecture about their process and the cartooning profession, Seth read a number of short, personal stories about his life in comics. My favorite was his first piece, in which he recounts how Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Marvel Comics profoundly shaped his childhood. These comics taught him that cartooning could act as bridge between the inner world of his imagination and the outer reality he inhabited.
But don’t take my word for it – you can read this story yourself. Below I’ve posted this story in its completion, with the permission of the author (thanks, Seth!)
“My first real love in cartooning was Charles Schulz’s newspaper strip, Peanuts . Y’know, I can’t actually recall encountering it for the first time. It was always there in my life. I loved Charlie Brown in a personal manner–as if I knew him.
However, as a preteen I became enthralled with Marvel comics and their superheroes. In fact, those superheroes were so overpowering in effect that I soon relegated Schulz to the lesser position of a diversion. I almost forgot that what he did was cartooning too. From about grade 7 to late highschool those superheroes became a calling for me. I had once drawn imitations of snoopy strips for fun–now I could only be bothered to draw the superheroes.
I was a lonely teen and I immersed myself in this pursuit with real passion. In a few short years I built up an entire universe of my own superhero creations–mostly slightly altered imitations of existing characters. I drew hundreds of pages of their adventures.
This wasn’t a hobby. It was a full time pursuit. I lived and breathed these characters. My thoughts were never far from them and eventually they took on the quality of an inner world. I could not wait to get home from school and start drawing those comic pages and enter that secret life.
I’ve come to understand that this is one of the great powers of drawing. It is a bridge between that inner and outer reality. As much as I lived with these characters and their world inside my head it just wasn’t a satisfying way to interact with them. It’s simply no fun to sit and chair and imagine things. Drawing the comics created an actual portal to that inner world. It allowed me to nail down who they were and what their lives were all about. It shaped the vagueness of that interior landscape.
As childish and derivative as those teenage comic books of mine were I can still recognize in them the potency of that inner life.
I think that may still be my primary motivation in drawing comics–that desire to created a concrete link with an inner reality.
Eventually I outgrew the superheroes but I retained my interest in Peanuts. Still later, I realized that those superheroes and Charlie Brown had something in common–part of the reason I had liked them so much. They were both about the effect of powerlessness and of feeling small.” – Seth
Seth went on to explain his unique approach to book design. He described book design as the setting in which you place the diamond of the book, the content. This setting should reflect the emotional resonance of the work, and should lead the reader into the work (and back out again).
Before heading back to Ontario Seth offered a water color demo, and shared some helpful tricks of the trade with our students.
– Robyn Chapman
Filed under Fall 2009
The editors of The Comics Journal selected Sethâs work as one of the 100 best comics of the 20th century. His novels, which have been translated into 8 languages, include Itâs a Good Life if You Donât Weaken, Wimbledon Green, Clyde Fans Book One and the illustrated memoir of his father, Bannock, Beans and Black Tea. The first volume of Sethâs sketchbooks has appeared under the title Vernacular Drawings and another will present itself when time permits. He is also the designer of the best-selling Complete Peanuts by Charles Schulz. In 2007, Seth serialized the story George Sprott in the New York Times Magazine in 25 installments, which was expanded and published as a stand-alone book in 2009.
Filed under Fall 2009
CCS Visiting Faculty 