American Girl: Saige Paints the Sky


"Due to budget cuts we will not be having art class this year."
The latest American Girl Doll movie, "Saige Paints the Sky" starts with the depressing announcement that art class has been cancelled for 9-year-old Saige's school. In protest she stages a "beige day" to show the world the importance of creativity in our everyday lives. She works with her grandmother, played by Jane Seymour, to revive the arts in her school and bring some color to the world. The DVD comes out this July 2nd and I'm sure it will be viewed many times by my daughters.

Talking Games for TEDx Jersey City

I'll be auditioning this weekend for the upcoming TEDx conference in Jersey City. Saturday, June 29th from 2:30-5PM the Jersey City Art School will be hosting 2 minute presentations by artists, creative thinkers and educators. I plan to explain the game design curriculum I developed last year and the results of my classes. If accepted I'll be creating a longer presentation for the TEDx Jersey City conference coming up in October. More →

Shooting Vines


Vine is a sweet little smart-phone app that allows you to shoot short video clips and post them immediately. What makes Vine unique is how short the clips are and how it records video. It only records when you press the screen and stops recording when you remove your finger, up to six seconds. You can start recording on the same clip by touching it again, creating loops of images. Jump cuts condense time, as you can see in the Vine I shot of skaters in our studio building. A tap of the screen will get you one frame and with multiple taps you can start making frame-by-frame animation. You can go Benny Hill-style with sped up reality or more painstaking hand-drawn cartoons. There are some fun, new video makers out there, such as the pencil sketcher Pinot and the wooden man adjusting Ian Padgham. The Vine app is free so try it out! The check out these tips from Mashable to make your Vines even better.

EJ Keats: Mancala Game


The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation just launched the new Mancala game I designed. It's a simple, leisurely paced counting game with elements loosely based on the Keats book "Dreams". I had fun creating little bottle caps and bolts for the pieces and, after playing the game over and over again, have learned Mancala strategy. Play it now!

Creating the Taxi Trailer Painting

This post documents the creation of a watercolor painting based on a double trailer I saw wheeling naked Ford Escape taxis through Hoboken. This will be the largest painting to date in my Trucks series. Updates are in reverse chronological order. June 14, 2013 I've got most of the vector art in place, including the taxis.
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Mancala Games

Mancala is an ancient counting game based on the agricultural practice of sowing seeds. It is traditionally played with stones and wooden cups but here are a few digital versions:


Awele/Oware- Mancala uses a photo-realistic background of a large wooden Mancala board. This iOS game allows one or two players to compete.


Mancala FS5 is an iOS game with different skins for the game board, including the jewelry box seen here.


Mancala Snails: This version includes instructional levels to help understand the mechanics of the game. Unfortunately the stones are rendered as yellow snails and the uniform color across the board makes it difficult to count how many pieces are in each cup.


Novel Games Mancala has a rainbow colored set of stones, making things a bit easier to count. But turn down the volume. The music loop will have you pulling your hair out.


UPDATE: Play the new Mancala game I designed for the Keats Foundation here.

The Animated Doodles of Dan Berry

Here's a cute music video for Jim Guthrie's "The Rest is Yet to Come". Artist Dan Berry made a panoramic background with simple animations of watercolor drawings. The result is a slow pan across a landscape of musicians, leaves and fire. He provides a peek at his process by posting pictures of the video in various stages of production. His main software tools are Photoshop and After Effects, along with a good scanner and watercolor paper. Dan Berry hosts a podcast where he speaks with cartoonists and others about their creative process. It's called "Make It Then Tell Everybody" and is available on iTunes.

Drawing in Hoboken

The Impala in front of Carlo's Bake Shop I've drawn Carlo's Bakery in Hoboken a couple of times. The "Cake Boss" is right across from City Hall and there are benches facing into the street. Usually my pictures will include the crowd of people waiting to get into the little bake shop, but on this day I found an old Impala much more interesting.

The Labyrinth in the Tube

Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian


In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, artist Mark Wallinger was commissioned to create artwork for all 270 stations of the Tube. He developed a series of enamel painted labyrinths, bringing together many classic circular labyrinths into a common visual language of solid black and white, with a red "X" as a start and end point. This video contains an interview with Wallinger as well as a glimpse of the production process. A labyrinth differes from a maze in that there are no dead ends and there is just one way in and one way out. I have been exploring the form, drawing both labyrinths and mazes in sketchbooks over the past couple years. It is a relaxing meditative practice, and encourages seeing of the entire page as an overall space, with the path traveling across every inch of the page. It's encouraging seeing this often disregarded art form taking center stage in a public space.