![]() I scan all of my elements into the computer. Today nearly everyone works to some extent digitally. Sometimes I paint with my fingers, sometimes I collage onto the illustration bits of torn paper or printed ephemera. Later I might use sandpaper to sand off paint layers. I usually start with oil paint but I might mix dirt into the wet paint. However, I still experiment like a first grader. Then we go to art school and de-learn all that. In grade school we finger-paint and glue colored tissue papers together and use markers on tin foil. ![]() “Scratches, smudges, washes, trickles, prickles, veins, splatters and spotting” are what excite me most about painting. Do you illustrate with flat fields of color first and then add the texture? Since realism isn’t the goal, how do you know when you’ve landed on the right texture for a certain object? Looking through this book, I see - and please forgive my amateur language here - scratches, smudges, washes, trickles, prickles, veins, splatters, spotting… There’s a whole grammar of texture here, and I wonder if you could share a little about your process. It’s celebrated for so many of its aspects, but to me your work is always a fascinating study in texture. Occasionally grown-ups say my characters look “too fantastical.” I say, “Ever see a blobfish? A platypus? An aye-aye?” Only its appearance, like many creatures of the natural world. You describe Stickler as the strangest creature in the forest. The gag is Stickler is the only shape left that still cannot be explained- What is that? It remains one odd-looking, multi-eyed being, and we might be a little dubious about its motives until the next page when we find that Stickler is the most joyous, happiest ambassador of our weird and amazing natural world one could ever hope to meet. When the page is turned, the fog has lifted, sunlight slants through the forest and there is an explanation: the shapes are only trees, the eyes belonging to several birds, mice and squirrels. I thought it would be intriguing to begin page one with several nebulous, multi-limbed, multi-eyed shapes in shadow. Stickler is an unusual-looking creature made entirely of sticks. Some kids (and many more adults), are afraid of what they don’t understand. What went into the decision to begin a book about love on an image that evokes fear? ![]() This book is a celebration of our world, one which operates on the belief that around every corner is something ‘so amazing, so weird, so wonderful.’ So it’s an interesting choice to open with a dark forest, ‘where shadow met tree,’ filled with scary-looking creatures with too many eyes. We spoke with Lane recently about the creation of that book and the joys of animal neighbors. There is an awe to the intricacy of it all, which happens to be the subject of his latest book, Stickler. The compounding layers and layers create an aliveness that pulls you close in the manner of the leaves and branches which inspire him. It would take a very advanced calculator to tally up the hours my children have spent absorbed in the work of Lane Smith, whose smudgecore aesthetic defies the idea that an image can ever be fully appreciated the first time you see it.
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