So... 10th grade was a great introduction year for me. I was taught figurative drawing lessons from Phil Jimenez of Crisis on Infinite Earths fame, penciling and inking by cartooning great Nick Bertozzi and learned the art of bookbinding from TIME Magazine published Francis Jetter. The following books are from my first semester of Storytelling with Jetter. At first I was uncomfortable in the class because it was geared more towards illustrators than cartoonists like myself. But after the first project, it was smooth sailing! The project was to take a well known poem and convert it into a folded illustration book. I chose Ring around the Rosie, and told the origins of the poem (The Black Plague) through the art.
After the success of the first book, I felt pretty confident on moving on to the next project. The project asked us to illustrate a famous story and bind it using the Japanese bookbinding technique. I chose the story of Pagliacci, an opera following the love triangle between the clown Canio, his wife Nedda, and her lover Silvio. As I illustrated the pages, I started to get bored with the art. Thats when I made the haphazard idea to make it into a pop-up book... and it actually worked! Sometimes the best ideas come at the last minute!
