Twin Cities Book Festival Today 10am - 5pm

Come check us out in the MCTC cafeteria (pictured below). We'll have a table ... Big Brain will have a table ... Zak Sally will have a table ....

It'll be a scream.

History Maker Bio Illustrations

Last summer we illustrated six books for Lerner Publication's History Maker Bio series. These biographies are aimed at elementary and middle schoolers, but also sit well with twenty-somethings, as I can attest to. Fittingly, the series of books we were involved with were all about company founders (see the list below).

A big part of our job was trying to match the previous artist's style, which meant doing drawings that were a little looser and a little more painterly than we were used to. The illustrations were drawn as line art on paper, then scanned in and painted using a low-opacity brush in Photoshop (using a wacom tablet).

We haven't received our comp copies yet, so I'm still not sure how the actual printing turned out. Hopefully we'll have some copies for the Twin Cities Book Festival this Saturday!

There are roughly 800 History Maker Bios out there, but here are the ones Big Time Attic illustrated:

Juliette Low
Henry Ford
Levi Strauss
Madame C. J. Walker
John Deere
William Kellogg

FallCon 2007 Photos

FallCon -- Minnesota's big two-day comic book convention -- was this past weekend. Once again I managed to spend the entire weekend within a ten-foot radius of the booth, a sad fact which is reflected in the photos below. Zander spent a good deal of time exploring the con, so maybe he'll post some of his thoughts on FallCon.

FallCon is hosted by MNCBA and is located on the State Fair Grounds in the Education building


Here're the guts of our table. The humidity curled made most of our books and originals curl, but not too badly


Sorry about the glare, Steven Stwalley. Your suit radiated 100% of the light that hit it. Steve is sporting the highlight of FallCon: the fez


Zander and I sat next to the Ha brothers, Donn and Gene


Here's Donn sketching Danno's character Fleming Hazmat


Gene drew a ton of great sketches during the con, and scanned a bunch of them for his blog


Tim Sievert and Brett von Schlosser


Tim Sievert


A sampling of Brett's spooktacular paintings and prints


Tim's hand-sewn Kanary Kid dolls


Matthew Kriske


I was able to trade Kriske of sketch of some penguins for this gem, a janus-esque portrait on watercolor- and tea-stained paper:


I'm kicking myself for not taking photos of the awesome "lounge" set up by the Cartoonist Conspiracy, including BTA's very own Todd Oldham polka dot sofa. Maybe Tim got some photos with that fancy camera of his.

FallCon Happening ... Right Now!

All the action is at FallCon this weekend. So bring a can of soup and join the party:

Clarence Thrun in The Rake

Pick up a copy of the October 2007 Rake for a profile of Big Brain Comics' Clarence Thrun.