I visited ArtCity today, which got me excited for an upcoming March workshop that I will be teaching. They accepted me as a Community Artist to teach a one day workshop in book binding. Art city is a non-profit drop-in community art centre that "is dedicated to providing high-quality, free-of-charge art programming to participants of all ages." It is located in the heart of the West Broadway community. I walked in and the place was buzzing with activity, colour, children, and exciting props and costumes being made for a video workshop that was going on. It will be good to step out of the school setting for an afternoon, and into a different atmosphere, and imagine, actually teaching something where there are other adults there to help! Some people even volunteer to help out there!(Ok to be fair I do have some very awesome EAs who regularly work in my room with me, but they work with some specific higher needs kids, and not there as general help for the whole class.)

Illustration Friday- Layer

Jackrabbit Layer.

Op-Ed Illustration

Recent illustration classes have been educating me on the history of illustration (Thank you Craig Terlson!). These lectures got me thinking that I should do some of my own internet scavenger hunts for inspiring illustrators, and to inform myself a little more about what's out there, what's been done, and what's new.
My search today led me to this great video on the history of the New York Times op-ed pages. It has really good visuals and a great variety of commentators and contributors:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/25/opinion/opedat40-illustration.html

Coloured Pencils and Snow Days

I thought this quote was appropriate for a snow day!
School has been cancelled due to treacherous roads, so I am happily at home in my pyjamas colouring with markers. Now to motivate myself to get my Illustration homework done...
Here is a link with the essay by G.K Chesterton where this quote is from, and is well worth a read if you like a good lie-in (lie-in: the term Brits use for laying in bed longer than is necessary).
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20726/

The Sketchbook Project

I am pleased to announce that my sketchbook has made it to Brooklyn!! I submitted a sketchbook for ArtHouse coops 2011 sketchbook project. I have mentioned this project previously on the blog, and now the sketchbook has actually made it all the way to Booklyn where it will be catalogued and then it gets to travel the united states for about six months stopping at art galleries in Texas, Washington, Florida,California, Georgia, Illinois, and Maine.

It was a little sad for me to send it away and probably never see it again. However, it was also exciting for me to send my drawings away somewhere for strangers to look at.
The sketchbook project takes small moleskin sketchbooks from artists around the world (an astonishing 28838 artists were involved this year!) The sketchbooks tour galleries as a travelling exhitbit where people can take out my sketchbook as though it were a library book. At the end of the tour it will end up in Brooklyn where it will be a part of a permanent sketchbook library.
I have posted many of the drawings from the sketchbook on the blog over the past few months, but I felt the need to document the sketchbook before saying goodbye to it for good, so I did take a video of all the pages, and haven't decided yet if I should edit and upload it to youtube. I treated my sketchbook as a form of a visual jounal, and actually managed to keep my drawings all more or less in the same style throughout. It was a challenge to stick with a theme the whole sketchbook, but it was very satisfying in the end.
check out Art House coop and their other projects they have going on:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject

Oh and I had forgotten to actually promote my own website on my blog!
My online portfolio is up and running, though could still use a few tweeks perhaps.
www.juliamark.ca

Maira Kalman-Illustrator

I was browsing TED talks today at work while I was finishing up marking and getting some things together in my room, and I came across this talk by Maira Kalman. The pictures posted today are her images. Maira Kalman is an Illustrator who works out of the states. She is most known for her illustration work with the New Yorker, the Elements of Style, and for illustrating various children's books. To me she is familiar because on more than one occasion I have considered buying her book "Principles of Uncertainty," which began as a weekly visual column for the online New Yorker. She has a kind of run-on personal style that combines writing with paintings. She tells stories in such a way that makes you wonder if they are real or if they are all made up, or only party based on something true and silly and maybe wonderful or maybe just ordinary. She tells her stories with colour and writing that makes me believe that it is at least a little bit wonderful, just because it's coming from a her very unique perspective.

Her conceptualizations and story telling are the kind that I want to do, if I could only figure out what stories I want to describe. The paintings themselves have a sort of modern Chagall-meets-Matisse-combined-with-German-expressionists-and-hand-written text feel to them. She has recently been working on another visual column about Democracy called the Pursuit of happiness through the New Yorker, which has also been published into a book.

Check out her New Yorker Blog/Column here: www.kalman.blogs.nytimes.com

The ted Talks video with her talking about her work is here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/maira_kalman_the_illustrated_woman.html


I kind of want to be her when I grow up, or at least maybe have her career.