Bibliophile Bookmarks by Erica Henderson!

I am a horrible, horrible person.

I fold over the corners of books while I'm reading them.

This kind of bibliocide is completely outrageous, as any book lover will tell you. There's nothing worse than reading a book and finding the corner missing every hundred pages or so...

Given my ambitious reading schedule (I'm tackling thick, but thrilling The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789) I felt it necessary to forgo my page folding fixation before a mob of librarians lynched me.

This is the answer I came up with:


These stunning bookmarks were the handiwork of incredibly talented cartoonist, artist, seamstress and blogger Erica Henderson. I've been a fan of her work for ages (see me rave about her here) and I've been in an official state of (entirely platonic) less than three ever since she immortalized dachshund diva Piglet.

Anyway. As soon as I saw Erica advertising these beautiful bookmarks, I knew I had to have 'em. If you feel the same way, you can purchase them from online arts and crafts store Etsy.

Check out Erica's online store here.

In the meantime, take a look at the beautiful artwork on each of these amazing items. The cards themselves are rigid and laminated - perfect for preserving your place even in a weighty tome from Oxford University.

Saturday Morning Silliness...

Today is Saturday - which means it's Erica Henderson Saturday over at Sluggy Freelance.

Check out the Saturday Filler Strip here - or go right to the source at Erica Henderson's blog here.

In other news - Blogger's spell-check stopped working (I don't know whether to spell things with an 's' or 'z' now.)

Plus, make sure you schedule your shopping and trips to the gym for tomorrow afternoon - the roads will be deserted because it's Superbowl Sunday! I remember a similar situation occuring during the World Cup in 2006.

Go Giants.

Piglet Immortalized!

A while back I posted about astounding artist and cartoonist Erica Henderson - who inspired me to pick up my pencils and try cartooning myself.

And just to prove that she's even more astounding than we all already thought she was, she drew this for me! It's Piglet!

I'm smiling so hard now, my jaw hurts!

Roland's Comic - First Attempt!

Here is my first attempt at drawing a comic strip, inspired by my antics here...

Apologies to Jim Davies.

Emulating Talented People #2

So yesterday, I spent the evening in Barnes and Noble. Fortunately Tina works there, so I didn't get kicked out.

In the end, I picked out Action! Cartooning by Ben Caldwell to be my guide to drawing something more sophisticated than 'man in beer t-shirt.'

Action! Cartooning is a brilliant book. Ben lays out the guidelines very simply and soon gets you drawing convincingly. I'm a LONG way from the talented style of Erica Henderson or Randy Millholland - but if you look at their stuff, I can see that Ben Caldwell's style of cartooning is pretty reminiscent of the style they use.

If I can just develop some natural aptitude and spend years developing my art, I'm sure I could approach their level of artistic awesomness.

Ben Caldwell's website is certainly worth checking out too. It's great.

This sly looking chick is Space Girl, for a music video Erica Henderson is doing for intergalatic pschobilly sci-fi band The Phenomenauts.

Study the way the head's designed, the face is built and all that funky stuff and then peer at some of the hamfisted sketches I did last night. You can see we're not dealing with the same sort of animal here - but my attempts are at least the same species.

If I can achieve that in one night - well, there's hope for me yet!

Action! Cartooning by Ben Caldwell is available from most good bookstores for $9.95. Space Girl kidnapped gratuitously from the blog of Erica Henderson and shall be returned unharmed once the briefcase full of unmarked tens and twenties is delivered.