UPDATE: Curious about how I took those pictures? I’ve got the answer right here.

On Tuesday DC Comics announced that it would be renumbering more than 50 of its superhero titles, starting with Justice League #1 on August 31st. This morning DC put up a new blog post that gives a few more details about the titles that will be restarted, but it isn’t an all-inclusive list.

The big question on a lot of collectors’ minds is whether DC will also renumber the titles that are precursors to the superhero era,  Detective Comics and Action Comics. These titles have been around for more than 70 years and have introduced iconic, house-hold names like Batman and Superman. Would DC really renumber these historic titles to try to attract new readers?

Personally, I think it’s a mistake and Supes agrees with me.

Everyone seems to have fond memories of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, so I decided to give the book a try. The story is echoed and referenced in many other cultural works, so I confess that my standards were very high.

Within a few pages of reading I already hated it, but I powered through it nevertheless, hoping that there would be some redeeming quality somewhere. I was mistaken. What’s worse, Alice, the heroine, is a bumbling idiot and an embarrassment for girls everywhere.

Reeling in my disappointment over such an important cultural work, I decided there was only one course of action: Alice had to die.

So intent was my murderous ambition, that I decided to read through the book again to pinpoint the likely places where Alice would bite the dust. Here are a few excerpts:

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way and then suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
[...]
thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Alice was dead.

I love the previous excerpt because you get to kill off Alice right at the start of the story and spare yourself any more inane nonsense. I also did a quick sketch of the scene (above).

This one happens a little later in the story:

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed ‘Off with her head!’

Plop! The knave obeyed.

And finally, if you were as sore as I was about being duped into reading the whole stupid book, you might want to grab her right at the end:

Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well as she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

Lost in thought, Alice did not notice the rocks in her path. She tripped, broke her neck, and died.

If you have any other ways that Alice could die within the story, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve been helping out a few friends with their websites recently and I’ve come to love using the Less Framework as a CSS layout solution. It’s not really a “framework” if you compare it to other tools like the 960 Grid System or Blueprint, but the minimalist approach is what makes it so attractive to me.

Anyway, since I’ve been using the Less Framework so much, I decided to create a Photoshop template that could aid in my design work. The template features include:

• Photoshop guides that mark the columns and the gutters in between
• Blocks that span various column widths to give you an idea of how to divide up your space
• All pixel width values within the document itself so you don’t have to try to remember them
• The default, tablet, wide mobile, and mobile layouts within a single template file so you don’t have to copy your design elements to different files

To get your own copy of the template, just click  the icon below:

If you find this useful, please let me know in the comments!

I won’t even pretend that I know the first thing about Pokémon, so let’s leave it at that.

A great meme has been going around the Internets for the past couple of months and I thought it would be a great exercise: figuring out my biggest influences in the visual arts. The Influence Map meme comes from fox-orian at deviantART and it basically involves filling out this template with your artistic influences. Naturally, bigger influences take up more squares, etc.

I’ve filled out my influence map above (click to embiggen), and below I’ll write a little blurb of each:

• Lord Frederick Leighton: Ponce, Puerto Rico is my hometown and the Ponce Museum of Art has had the incomparable Flaming June on display for as long as I can remember. I ogled this painting so much throughout my life that I’m sure it seeped into my psyche.
• Jon Foster: An amazing painter that is just as comfortable doing features for National Geographic as he is for creating online-only images for Tor.com. The dynamism in his compositions is stunning.
• James Gurney: I read Mr. Gurney’s blog religiously and I have a few of his books at home. He may not have a direct influence on how my pieces look, but I know that he has influenced how I think when I’m creating them.
• Francisco Rodón: A Puerto Rican painter that had a brief exhibit of his Portraits series at the Ponce Museum of Art. His huge canvases and fractured figures had a huge influence on my ideas of beauty.
• J. Scott Campbell: I read Gen13 for a while when I was a kid and I remember copying Campbell’s artwork to make posters and covers for my notebooks.
• Chuck Jones: I can recite The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Movie from memory. ‘Nuff said.
• Lorenzo Homar: A graphic artist that brought Puerto Rican poster art to the forefront of the artistic world. A master calligrapher and a genius with colors, his stylistic lines and indefatigable craftsmanship are awe-inspiring.
• Chris Bachalo: I was reading Uncanny X-Men while Bachalo was the penciller. His boxy stylization of the figure is immediately recognizable, and sometimes I see hints of it in my work.
• Andrew Wyeth: Even though his daddy, N.C. Wyeth, is more famous in the illustration world, the richness of detail in Andrew’s paintings has captivated me since I was a child.
• David Hockney: Mostly remembered for his Pop art paintings in the 60′s, Mr. Hockney’s influence on me is actually through his photographic collage works. His exploration of Cubism through photographs was a revelation.
• Ashley Wood: I used to pick up comics by Mr. Wood without even stopping to look at the title. I didn’t care about reading them, I just needed to absorb his amazing energy and freedom.
• Rama Hughes: I sent him an email once to say that I admired his work and wanted to know more about his process and he sent his reply on a postcard through the mail. How do you not love a guy like that?
• Egon Schiele: This guy lived, along with Gustav Klimt, in the sweet spot between Art Nouveau and Expressionism. Super ballsy work.
• Dan Jurgens: I remember him as “the better Superman artist.” I read Superman during the time of The Death of Superman saga and I copied his work incessantly.
• Goñi Montes: How can you live and work with a man for years and not be influenced by his work? Goñi makes his subjects glow (literally and figuratively) and the results are stunning.

What do you think? Do you see the influence of someone else in my work that I didn’t list here? Let me know in the comments.

When Illustration Friday had the ‘Mail’ theme a few weeks ago, I began to think of all the different ways that people have communicated over vast distances across the ages. I figured that homing pigeons made the cutest image, so here we are.

Actually, I was just curious about how the whole homing pigeon thing worked. Did you whisper directions into the bird’s ear or something?

The truth is always much simpler. Homing pigeons just really like to be, well, home. If you take a pigeon from it’s habitual roost, it will take to wing as soon as you let go and head straight back home again. So if, say, you’re an ancient Greek and you want to relay the winners of the Olympics to your family back home, you take a pigeon on the trail with you to Athens. Once you know who won, you put the message on the pigeon and the pigeon will take care of the rest.

It’s not all ancient history either. There are rafting businesses that use homing pigeons to send USB sticks with their customer rafting photos back to the photo lab, and they have been used repeatedly to show that homing pigeons can send large amounts of data over long distances faster than broadband.

On a separate note, have you ever wondered what we would put on our envelopes if we didn’t have a standardized address system?

Now that I’ve posted images of cats onto my site, I need only to wait for my inevitable fame.

People. Love. Cats.

I mean, sure, there are certain individuals out there that abhor cats, but in general, the statement is absolutely true. Just look at the abundance of kitten videos on YouTube or the pervasiveness of cat-memes on the Internet. My husband experienced some of this cat-fueled fame with a cat illustration that he did for Tor.com: despite all of his other insanely beautiful work, the cat illustration is the one most frequently requested for prints.

If you’re not buying my anecdotal evidence, allow me to convince you with SCIENCE. Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, is frequently found in cat feces and has been proven to affect the behavior of rats in order to complete its reproductive cycle. The toxoplasma bug makes rats love cats instead of being afraid of them. Since the infected rats like to hang out where cats live, they are more likely to be eaten. Inside the cat’s body, the bug matures, lays eggs, the eggs get pooped by the cat, and the cycle starts all over again.

But that’s the rat’s problem, right?

Actually, toxoplasmosis has been shown to affect the behavior of many species, including humans. In fact, one study suggests that the rate of toxoplasmosis infection in a human population can have an effect on the population’s culture. Crazy right?

So the next time you change the kitty-litter, or goof around in a playground sand box for that matter, it’s likely that you’re getting a healthy dose of Toxoplasma gondii. Once the bug gets into your brain, they won’t let go, and you’ll be a crazy cat-worshipper like the rest of us.

So what does that have to do with art? Before the Industrial Revolution, artists were never bothered with the tedium of life. Boredom wasn’t a part of their emotional vocabulary. The reason that paintings before the Industrial Revolution look like they took a long time to paint is because they did take a long time to paint, but that never bothered anybody. Modern and contemporary art looks skittish and impatient by comparison.

Read the full article: Are Artists Bored by Their Work?