The last of 2016!

It's almost 2017 and this year has been quite a crazy one! Chris and I recently moved up to the Hudson Valley, so it's been a great period of adjustment getting used to the new house. With not quite as much time to draw, and no scanner hooked up until now, I decided to condense the last few months into one big finale for 2016!

This timeline also chronicles our slow descent into winter...These first drawings are from a lovely day of drawing with Audrey Hawkins back in September.

For the next couple months, each warm day felt like the last warm day we would ever have, so everyone, including me, was out trying to take advantage of the sunshine.

The city always feels so full on these warm days.

I loved this grouping of 2 mostly naked young people sunbathing next to a nun, all enjoying the park.

It still felt like summer until the sun went behind the buildings and everyone started putting their coats on over their sleeveless shirts.

A couple weeks later, as fall had begun to set in, Audrey, Chris and I had another nice day drawing out in Central Park.

The colors were beautiful, but the day not quite as luxurious as it had already started getting dark depressingly early.

Up in Croton-on-Hudson, I decided to grab a few hours on a warm day, in between renovating, to draw the new house before it got too cold. A huge and exciting project!

 In the Hudson Valley, summer was fading, but the fall leaves were just getting started.

It was so magical getting to see the leaves change and fall over the weeks, and watching how the light and colors changed.

Our friend and fellow artist Julia Sverchuk came up to visit and we went out to Fishkill Farm to enjoy a not-quite-so-warm fall day.

It was chilly, but people were still out and about, stretching their legs before the looming hibernation.

Chris and I went out for a brisk day up north drawing at Staatsburg State Historic Site, where we got married last June. The wind got a little intense on the river, so we made it a short day.

November brought the harrowing election (you can read more about my thoughts here) and less time drawing out in the cold.

And finally winter came with our first snow in the new house! The whole neighborhood looked like a Christmas card.

So now the year is almost over, and we have a strange new 2017 to anticipate. 2016 was definitely a year of change, but I am still hopeful for the new year.

Best wishes to all of you for the new year! See you in 2017!

Stronger Together

Trying to process everything with the election...decided to do a little drawing while thinking. I drew an enormous oak tree in our back yard that has lost most of its leaves. The oak is the National Tree of the United States. It is a symbol of strength, endurance, longevity, and patience. 

The results of this election are appalling. The rhetoric and ridiculous pandering to hate has made a large segment of our population (although not the majority) free to indulge their most hateful fears and thoughts. The media has been hideous in their exploitation of this hate and bitter divide to produce ratings. It has been ugly. And it will continue to be ugly. 

I thought about this as I made the drawing of the oak tree, because often in drawing, you go into it hoping for something beautiful. But when the drawing reveals that it won't be what you want, it is up to you to make something beautiful out of something ugly. It does not always work, but you are always left understanding more than when you began.

I mourn Hillary Clinton's loss, and our loss, not as the loss of the lesser of two evils, but as uncommon brilliance, grace, and dedication being stomped under the boot of ignorance, fear, misogyny, racism, and importantly, opportunism. Whether or not Trump really believes his hateful rhetoric will come to light in the coming months, but the damage done by it is already growing. 

For gay people like myself, the LGBT community, women, Muslim Americans, African Americans, Latino Americans, immigrant Americans, the hate is a very real daily fear, not just an abstract notion.

For those that are happy about the election results, please keep this in mind as you go forward. We are your fellow citizens. I have to hope that what Clinton said in her campaign is true: That we really are stronger together. This means all of America, not just the ones we agree with.

I don't know if anything beautiful will come out of this ugliness, but I hope that we understand more about ourselves as a country after the next 4 years. Let us hope that we can be strong, endure, and be patient.

Behind the Scenes: Be The Change: A Grandfather Gandhi Story

I am so excited to announce the release of the companion book to Grandfather Gandhi, Be The Change: A Grandfather Gandhi Story. I was so thrilled to go back into this world and illustrate another beautiful lesson, this time about how our actions have repercussions and our power to change things for the better. Arun, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, lived with his grandfather for 2 years in adolescence, and these two books have been "crystallizations" of lessons he learned during that time.

My first step for a new project is always drawing people, so I went to the South Asian part of my neighborhood, Jackson Heights, to draw people and observe their body language.

It's always exciting for me to be able to try and transport myself to another place and time for a project, and nowhere is better for that than the many different neighborhoods of New York City.

I had a fun time chatting with this boy and his sisters from Bangladesh, who reminded me of Arun and his sister Ela in the book.

Since I was working in a similar style to the first book, I wanted to find a way to introduce new symbols and visual elements that tell this particular story.

Much of the book focuses on Arun's confusion regarding his grandfather's lesson that "waste is a violent action." This confusion comes into the illustrations in the form of the swelling black monsoon clouds that begin to dominate the pages. As his grandfather begins to illustrate the lesson, the monsoon clouds burst.

For the teaching scenes in the center of the book, I used a surreal, swirling background and color palette to emphasize Arun's dawning understanding.

Images from Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

With the flooding of the monsoon, this sequence in the book was inspired by Indian miniature paintings depicting the infinite cosmic ocean.

As Arun begins to comprehend the lesson, the colors begin to return to normal. And as Arun and his grandfather return to the ashram after it has been renewed with the monsoon rains, the bright colors return. The whole book follows this arc of color, which you can see in these thumbnail sketches I used to plot out the color palette.

Preparatory thumbnail paintings/collages

Another aspect from the first book that I wanted to continue and build upon was the idea of thread. In the first book, the thread became an example of raw cotton being turned into something useful, in the same way that anger can be turned into useful energy.

In this book, I expanded upon that idea by using the thread more and more as the book progresses, embroidered into the illustrations, as a way of showing how that channeled, useful energy begins to permeate everything around you.

Kantha Quilts (Images from University of Nebraska, LACMA, and Honolulu Museum of Art)

Inspired by the Kantha embroidered quilts of Bengal, I machine embroidered the pages with intricate patterns. Sewing the paper like cloth, the images become more and more embroidered as the book progresses.

Once you realize that your actions affect everything around you, you can see that we, like patterns in a quilt, are all pieces stitched together in the same design.

Be The Change: A Grandfather Gandhi Story is available wherever books are sold! It is a beautiful story, and I am very honored to be a part of it. Please check it out at your local independent bookstore, or use one of the links below.

Book People | IndieBound
Amazon | B&N

Italy: Venice

 

Venice! From the minute we stepped onto the water taxi at the Venice airport, it felt like we were wandering through a fairytale. It is a city so beautiful and improbable that it feels like it could have only been designed by artists.

Every view, archway, bridge, window, and pattern, is worthy of a painting, and becomes even moreso as the evening light begins to hit. Once I sat down to draw, I found it hard to focus on the reality of one view. The whole city felt more like a montage, with layers upon layers of beauty.

We decided to indulge in the romance of the city and stopped to have a cocktail in St. Mark's square at sunset, while a string quartet played behind us.

The whole city begins to feel like Venetian glass, where everything is reduced to layers of color, light, and pattern. As I was pondering the extravagant beauty of the scene, a seagull dropped a half-eaten pesto sandwich into my drawing bag. Ahh romance! Nice to be reminded that this place actually exits in reality.

People complain that Venice is touristy, but if anywhere deserves to have millions from all over the world come to visit, it's here.

And nothing captures the romance of Venice more than the gondolas. The tourist trade is a far cry from the days when the dramatically shaped boats were the main method of transportation. But the elegant sweep of black as it glides across the water is still a miraculous sight.

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This week central Italy experienced a devastating earthquake. If you appreciate these drawings and the beauty of Italy, please consider donating to help the relief effort:
Italian Red Cross
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This post is part of a series of travel illustration from a three week tour of Italy. For more of Evan Turk's travel illustration, check out the link below: 

Evan Turk Travel Illustration

DisneyWorld with Dalvero Academy!

I just got back from another great workshop in DisneyWorld with Dalvero Academy and instructors Veronica Lawlor and Margaret Hurst. It was 5 days of drawing, experimenting, and working all day on-location in the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and EPCOT. Can't get enough!

Below are a few drawings and thumbnails:

The Victoria Crowned Pigeon in Animal Kingdom 

 

 People around the Magic Kingdom

 

EPCOT China

 

EPCOT Morocco

 

Harambe Village in Animal Kingdom

EPCOT Italy's Flag Throwers

Eating lunch in Animal Kingdom