Calef Brown

Soup for Breakfast
Posted by Calef Brown at 3:14 pm on October 28th

The cover. When i think of soup i think of soup cans and Warhol, so I tried to do a bold can. My skills at painting anything 3D are negligible,so I had a hard time with the can in pseudo-perspective.

My fifth kid's book just came out. A volume of nonsense verse published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.It's a companion volume to my book Flamingos on the Roof from '06.

The title page.The Mondrian on toast refers to a poem called... uh, Painting on Toast, which is an homage to Bob Ross.

Contents. The stacked builing blocks refer to one of the poems.I was thinking of Mary Blair when I painted them,but in a purely platonic way.

Sketch for the painting.

This is a doodle from a sketchbook that inspired the poem The Egret. Birds figure in to all my kid's books, and bird names are great fun to play with.

The sketch for the poem Architots. I was a lego and block junkie when i was young. Still trying to kick.

The sketch for Grandpa's Mustache. I think i lost some of Grandpa's nasally hirsute energy in the final.

The sketch for the Donuts spread.I love near-rhymes, and I thought donuts and grownups was a good example.

This poem has lots of near-rhymes as well.This is the last one in the book, I always try to end with a quiet poem and image.

The final page is a visual warning not to let an egret catch you gorging on stolen donuts.

Comments (21)

Benjamin Button
Posted by Calef Brown at 12:51 pm on October 11th

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a story by F.Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Collier's magazine in 1922.

I hadn't heard of it when Collins Design asked me if i'd like to illustrate this tale of a fellow who is born as an old man and ages in reverse.The story takes place between 1890 and the 1930s, and since historical detail is not exactly a hallmark of my work,

I was a little reluctant at first to take it on. (My idea of visual research is to scan the thumbnails on the first Google image page that comes up. (I'm a drawoutofmyhead type person, with an emphasis on outofmyhead.) The art director was great to work with, she encouraged me to interpret the story however I liked, and I had a lot of fun with it.