Dan Santat's Blog, page 130

A Chalk Mural for my Son's School

The Art Process of "Fire! Fuego! Brave Bomberos!"

The art for this book was special experience for me. I had always wanted to do a fireman book and I've also been dying to experiment with something new in my artwork, so when I got the call for this project I jumped at the chance.

The main idea I wanted to handle with this book was to make the artwork interact with the fire and water in the story with the idea being that the pages in the book were so close to the fire that it burned the pages and when the firemen came in with their hoses the...

LA Times Festival of Books and other news.

Howdy folks,

I'm in a great mood. I have several deadlines coming up in the next few weeks then after that it will be smooth sailing until the end of the year. I'll finally get to start writing my next graphic novel for Scholastic, I'll get started on my next picture book with Little, Brown, while illustrating a few other projects in the year. Meanwhile, this weekend will be the start of what will be many appearances in the upcoming Spring/Summer for the many books coming out this calendar y...

Happy Easter

I was in wine country this weekend and I realized that I don't blog enough. I'm horrible and I'm sorry. So I decided to change things. I decided to download an app so that I can blog on my phone. Now I can blog from anywhere. This is a picture from wine country in Sonoma, California. It's a beautiful wine vineyard just down the street from my in laws house. It's the same location where they filmed the movie, A Walk in the Clouds, starring Keanu Reeves.

I am an FBI agent!!!!

Sidekicks (sweded)

The other week I received a fan letter from a sweet kid named Daniel Wiles from Forest Dale, VT. It reads as so.....

I get fan mail from time to time but this one happened to have come at a particular time when I felt inspired by his letter to do some video making of my own. As a salute to the hand made art form I made a short "sweded" adaptation of the book. For those of you who don't know, the term "sweding" comes from the Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind. In the film, the character...

Children's Choice Book Awards

This is a huge next few weeks for me and I'm going to tell you why....

SIDEKICKS has been nominated for a Children's Choice Book Award

This is what I need you to do.

1. Chick on this link here > CHILDREN'S CHOICE BOOK AWARDS

2. Vote for Sidekicks

That's it.

 

In other news SIDEKICKS related I want you to read my most favorite blog post in my recent memory... THE BRACKET BUSTER

I'll post again soon, hopefully, to tell you why I posted that image of the Sidekick puppets up above.

In the mean...

I'm on Comics Are Great tomorrow!

Join me tomorrow March 21st at 12ET on COMICS ARE GREAT! where I will be doing a live video interview. Go to http://comicsaregreat.tv or watch the stream below. I'll be talking about all sorts of stuff and cracking jokes! CHECK IT!

 

 

Watch live streaming video from comicsaregreat at livestream.com

Do I Say, Not as I Do.

So I spoke at SCBWI NY a few weeks back and in my intensive presentation I told everyone that I blogged once a week, which is good advice to those of you starting out. Then, of course, I go on and break my own rule and I'm already behind in my posts. (Forgive me for last week)

In any case, I have to admit that I've been busy to the point of stressing out, but I need to post and so I'm just going to shotgun out some things that have been happening in my life these past few weeks and you can...

SCBWI NYC (In pictures)

    My son turned six last Thursday. I was attending the SCBWI Conference in NY to speak and this was going to be the first time ever that I would miss his birthday due to business. He was sad that I wasn't going to be around for his birthday, but optimisically, we decided to turn the trip a little adventure. He gave me a little toy skeleton finger puppet and said, "Take my friend with you and show him around New York." 

    I took his little toy and did just that...

WEDNESDAY

(Creative...

Going Out of Your Comfort Zone

    So as you know, this year will be a busy year for me in terms of book releases. I must confess that towards the end of the year I got a little sick and tired of drawing in "my style" and this year I've been pushing publishers to let me do slightly different work for this year. I find that as an artist it's good to try and continue to grow and experiment, otherwise you can get bored and the work you do can end up feeling stale and uninspired. This is not to say that the work I've done is...