Who Was Abner Graboff?

Abner Graboff is one of those artists who's fallen through the cracks of time. An enigma, if you want to call him that. Not a whole lot written about him, and what little there is, well, there's not much to glean from. I first found out about him through my Flickr group, The Retro Kid. On there, illustrator Eric Sturdevant had posted some fantastic pages from several of Graboff's books. I immediately made a mental note to remember this artist and his brilliant use of shapes and color, as well as overall design. Soon afterwards, I stumbled upon a book written by Miriam Schlein and illustrated by Graboff titled, "The Sun Looks Down". The dust jacket was literally falling apart, but still somewhat intact. Reading the inside back flap, I found a brief bio for the artist:

ABNER GRABOFF is a young artist, well-known in the field of commerical art, who makes his bow to the world of children's books with his pictures for "The Sun Looks Down".

When asked to tell the publisher something about his hobbies, Mr. Graboff said his only hobby was painting. The fact that he enjoys his work shows clearly in the humor and wit and careful attention to detail in these pictures.

Miss Schlein worked closely with Mr. Graboff when his pictures were still in the planning stage and feels that he has caught her mood perfectly.

The copyright for the book is dated 1954. Here are some spreads:









Notice how Graboff utilizes the space in each spread. I'd like to contribute this to his background in design. He was listed as designer and artist for a few notable ads featured in graphic design annuals around the time, but I couldn't find much more on him. There's no way of telling if Abner started in graphic design and then moved onto children's books, or did the books as an aside, or how long he illustrated children's books, etc. The inside dust jacket of "Sun Looks Down" didn't really tell me anything, save for the fact that he was known for his commercial work and that this was his first book.

Well, now we can know. Even though Abner passed away in 1986, I was able to contact his son, Jon, and ask him a few questions about his father's life and work. Jon Graboff is an established musician and producer, having played with Ryan Adam's band, The Cardinals, among a wide variety of artists. Jon took time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions, most of which probably bordered on fan boy obsession. I'm forever indebted to Jon for doing this for me, as well as for the multitude of current Abner Graboff fans who've longed for more information about this intriguing artist who's touched so many lives with his lively body of work.

Throughout this week I'll feature the interview as well as showcase some books that Abner had illustrated throughout his career. Stay tuned!

Next:
The Art & Life of Abner Graboff: Part 1 of my interview with Jon Graboff. Jon shares some fascinating stories, along with family photos.
The Art & Life of Abner Graboff Part 2

More on Abner can be found here:
My Abner Graboff Flickr set
Abner Graboff in The Retro Kid
Abner Graboff on Biotope (Japanese site)

Terrible Yellow Eyes

I'm sure you've heard of Terrible Yellow Eyes by now, right? If not, please click on the link to visit Cory Godbey's wonderful tribute site. His words:

Terrible Yellow Eyes is a collection of works inspired by the beloved classic, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak....We share a love and admiration for Sendak's work and the pieces we present here are done as a tribute to his life and legacy.

I want to thank Cory for coming up with this great idea. And I want to thank him for allowing me to be a part of it. Above is my submission.

And, of course, I want to thank Mr. Sendak for being so wild as to create such an inspirational bit of children's literature.

And the Winner Is...

#159: H. A. Weaselton


CONGRATULATIONS, H. A.! You win a signed copy of my new children's book How To Train With a T. Rex And Win 8 Gold Medals, as well as a 5x7 print of your choosing from The Ward-O-Matic Shop. Take a look around, see what you like. Choose wisely, my friend.

THANK YOU ALL for participating in this book giveaway, guys. Wish I could give a copy to each and every one of you all who commented here. I had a lot of fun working on the book—it's a great pleasure for me to finally share it with everyone out there. Be sure to come back to check out some work-in-progress stuff I did for the book, like rough sketches and drawings. I think you'll find it interesting. At least, I hope.

-----------------------------------

Coming up: I'm very excited about this one post I've been working on, featuring an interview with the son of an influential illustrator from the 50's - 70's. Stay tuned!

Take a Look Inside the Book (and a Giveaway)

Now that the veil has been lifted, allow me to show off what I've been keeping under wraps since January. Yes, a bit of self-indulgence, but this is my very first children's book and I CAN'T HELP MYSELF! I'm extremely excited to share with you all some spreads of How To Train With a T.Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals. If you like what you see, why not click on the book title and order it? It'll make me happy. And my family. We're counting on you. No pressure.

(However, if you want a freebie, I'm offering a BOOK GIVEAWAY further down in this post!)

Allow me to take you on a visual tour of the book:


Holding up the cover, you can see the gold foil lettering and gold medals. Looks pretty cool, I think. Hard to photograph, though.


I like what my art director did with the back cover here. Lucy took what I had drawn for page 5 and put it on the back. Nice.




I like how this spread looked. Simple and basic.


The dog is Herman, Michael's very own pet bulldog. I looked at pictures and video that was available of Herman (not much actually) and tried to match the color patterns found on his coat.

The audience on the right was a pain. I didn't want it to look like I just drew 10 shapes of people and copy pasted the heck out of it. I really went in and drew and touched up almost every single "person".


This was a fun spread, showing the relative time it took for Michael to train leading up to the Olympics (it goes to 2003, but who's counting). We decided to go with a boy growing up, alongside his pet bulldog, from birth to six years old. Even though it's not really Michael here, I made it look like the kid's really into swimming (he reads a book called "How to Swim Like a Dolphin", for instance).


The whole eating up to 10,000 calories thing is fascinating to kids, so it was fun to visualize the fact that it would be like eating tons of pizza. Of course, eating just pizza would be sorta not healthy, so that's why you see a "I could never eat that much pizza!" line.

Easter Egg alert: the name of the pizza delivery service is "Ava's Pizza".


When in doubt, DINOSAURS! I had a blast drawing this spread—I mean, who doesn't love T. Rex's and Velociraptors?

I was *this* close to putting my graffiti tag on that subway car.


Wrapping it up. Getting near the end of our journey, as we recap all the things that Michael had to endure to reach his goal at Beijing.


Okay, one more shot.

------------ BOOK GIVEAWAY!!! ------------

Now that the book is officially released, I'm going to celebrate by offering a signed copy of the book! (Sorry, not signed by Michael, just me.) I'll make it even MORE worth your while by throwing a 5x7 print from my Etsy shop into the mix. How's that? Yeah? Yeah!

Okay, what you need to do is leave a comment on this blog post by midnight (PST) Wednesday, June 17 and I'll have one of my kids pick a number out of a hat. The winner will be announced this Friday, the 19th.

GOOD LUCK!

UPDATE: Comments are now closed. Thanks for participating, guys!

How To Train With a T. Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals

It's here!

It's official, guys: my very first children's book that I illustrated is now available: How To Train With a T. Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals. I had so much fun working on this book, thanks in part to art director Lucy Cummings and editor Alexandra Cooper at Simon & Schuster. Those two made the project worthwhile for me as I was neck-deep in deadlines and redos. It was a great pleasure to work with such fine people. Thank you, Lucy and Alex!

It feels so good to finally talk about this thing! I'll post a couple of shots of the inside of the book later on this weekend, so be sure to check back later. I'll even talk a bit about the making of some of the spreads, including sketches. I promise it'll be fun.

A big hug goes out to my wife Andrea, and to Ava & Ezra for being patient with me during the months it took to complete the book. I am nothing without you guys.

And one last thing: a big thanks to all of YOU for being so supportive of me! The love & support from family, friends and fellow artists goes a long, long way, believe me. Thank you.

FTW! WTF?

Just an idea I had hanging out in the confines of my brain. For the record, I had no idea what "FTW" meant until several months ago. And really, I thought it was just a funny way to say "WTF" but backwards. Oh, nevermind.

Forcing Myself to Contradict Myself

Realizing it's been a long time since I've posted anything from my sketchbooks. So here's a sampling of some pages below. You can click on each image to go to a slightly larger version on its Flickr page. If you'd like to see any one of these even larger, let me know and I'll put a link up for you. Sorry that I don't make these images large in the first place, I'm just a little wary of posting high res scans of my artwork. Hope you understand!















Andrea and I watched a documentary on photographer Annie Leibovitz last night. Here's a quote from her: "The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much."

When I draw and sketch people and places around me, I lose myself in the process. Even though I have a certain knowledge of how to start each sketch or drawing, it's still a surprise to me how it turns out. And when I look through my past sketchbooks, I'm constantly surprised by the results I see on each page, each drawing. And I can remember the process I took for each drawing: from how I approached the subject, all the way to its completion. It's a funny way of looking at your work, and I like it. It's good to be surprised by your own work—that way, you know you'll never do something the same way twice. At least, that's how I look at it.

I might've mentioned it here on the blog before, but it's worth the mention again: one of my favorite artists of all time is Marcel Duchamp and there's a quote that's attributed to him that pretty much sums it up for me and how I look at what I do as an artist:

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

I guess you could say that I have a fear of repeating myself. Even though I might approach each drawing differently, I know that my overall style comes through, creating an overall artistic signature, or 'voice', that can't be denied. The end result might look similar to the viewer, but, I know personally, I took the 'road less traveled', and that my artistic journey was one of newness and wonder with each page, each drawing.

New Update in The Shop: b-boys now in 5x7!

Until I can actually talk about the children's book I illustrated, thought I'd update The Ward-O-Matic Shop with all 7 prints of the b-boy series now available as 5"x7"s! I'd been meaning to do this long ago, but life got in the way, of course. Nice to have a less expensive option for these images, plus they look pretty cool in a smaller size.

Enjoy!

Box of Books

We found a package on our front doorstep the other day, addressed to me. It was a box, filled with several books, all the same book.

What does this mean? Hmmmm?

Willamette Weekly: This is Lents

Oh look! It's an actual post! And it's of something that I've actually drawn! The miracles never cease here on The Ward-O-Matic, I tell ya. Willamette Weekly is a weekly freebie newspaper here in Portland, OR. I did the cover for the May 27th, 2009 issue. Read article here, if you're curious. Lents is a neighborhood in the SE section of the city that's experiencing a possible re-birth. I actually went to the area to take photos of various buildings, parks, corners, etc. to get the look & feel of the neighborhood. Took the kids to Lents Park and had ice cream. It was a great day.

Got the call on Saturday, and had to turn it around by Tuesday -- yes, on Memorial Day weekend. So it goes.

Of course, this is based off those wonderful vintage large-letter postcards. What's in each letter? See below:

L - New Copper Penny: restaurant & bar on SE 92nd & Foster.
E - The new Beavers Minor League Baseball Park being proposed for Lents Park.
N - I-205: the highway split the neighborhood in two.
T - New MAX stop scheduled to open shortly.
S - Building near 92nd & Foster.

In case you're wondering how "Willamette" is pronounced, there's a saying that the locals say to any newbies: "It's Will-AM-ette, dammit!"

What you see here is the image I sent - the way they comp'ed it together looks rather nice, so i'll take some shots of the actual cover and post them here later on today.

Oh! Hey -- Andrea's got some new prints up in her Etsy shop. Check them out. Stunning images. By the way, I'm getting ready to update my Etsy with some 5x7 versions of the b-boy series. I think they look pretty stinkin' cool, but that's just me.

Coming soon: my children's book will be released on June 2nd!

Fun Greeting Cards

More vintage inspiration, this time from several cool mod cards, made by Sunshine Cards. The imprint on the back says "A Studio Card". No illustrator credit. No date, but probably late 60's-early 70's. I say "early 70's" because of the numerical code on the back suggests it might be 1971. But you can never tell with these things. These cards belong to a full set that feature the same looks and concept: fun stylized characters with a bit of real fabric or yarn, collage-like. The real bits of fabric (yarn for these two cards) are not actually on the cards themselves, but rather a photo. Adds a nice dimensionality to the cards, if you ask me. An extra bit of character to the characters.


"MINI HAPPY RETURNS!"


"But so is THE MORTGAGE, THE GROCERY BILL and the PAYMENT ON THE CAR!

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY anyway!"

Har har! Always with the corny jokes.

I'll have to scan the rest of the set. The box they came in is pretty cool as well.

Kretschmer Wheat Germ Recipes

More inspiration for you guys, this time from Kretschmer Wheat Germ, circa 1971. Even though it's dated a little later from what I normally post, the illustrations found in this little cookbooklet (yes, I made that word up) are fun, colorful and lively. It's an interesting group of illustrations here because they almost serve as a bridge from the cheerful & simplistic 50's cookbook illos to the more decorative and graphic, pen & ink style of spot illustrations seen in the late-60's and 1970's. I'm no expert on this, just a simple observation.

Kodak Ektachrome booklet from 1955

How about some nice Monday morning inspiration? Yes, I thought so: here's a nifty booklet on Kodak Ektachrome film, 1955. No illustrator credit given. The few illustrations that are present are fabulous throughout, with fun linework offset by bold shapes of color. Nice use of type and lettering, too. Click on each image to go to its respective Flickr page.

Hello sun!

Made this today. It's been sunshine-y lately and so I got inspired. Hello, sun. I want more of you, please.

Thinking about selling this as a print on my Etsy. What say you, dear peoples?

Philosophy & Good Design at the Thrift Store

Thrift stores are a funny thing. Each time I walk into one, I'm both appalled and exhilarated. Appalled by the excessive junk that we dispose of on a daily basis, and exhilarated by the potential of finding something overlooked and forgotten. The exhilaration of possibility is what drives me. Wednesday, I walked into a thrift store that we haven't visited for quite some time and I stumbled upon some wonderfully forgotten paperbacks on philosophy and theory. Forgotten textbooks, discarded after a yard sale, perhaps. I wasn't actually seeking out these particular books, but the covers were what piqued my interest. Nice, simple graphic covers, with bold colors and text. I guess you could say on a philosophical level that I didn't find these books, but rather they found me. How profound.


The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner. No mention of cover designer. Simon & Schuster, ©1953, 1961.


Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg. Cover design by Guy Fleming. Harper & Row, NY. ©1958, this edition 1962.

This last one isn't on philosophy, but was found in the same section:


The Enduring Art of Japan by Langdon Warner. Cover design by Roy Kuhlman. Grove Press, NY. ©1952.

Not sure what was erased in that upper right-hand section—original price, perhaps? Instead of photoshopping it out, I decided to leave it be.