20 of Today’s Most Exciting Artists and Illustrators Reimagine the Paper Plane

What the quintessential childhood staple teaches us about the bounds of the imagination.

The paper airplane is among the most beloved of childhood toys — and for good reason: It seems to embody just the right balance of function and fantasy, of hands-on practicality and make-believability. In Little Paper Planes, 20 of today’s most exciting artists and illustrators — including Brain Pickings favorites Julia Rothman (♥ ♥ ♥), Lisa Congdon (♥ ♥), and Gemma Correll (♥) — reimagine the childhood staple. From the literal yet expressive to the wildly abstract yet playable with, the designs range from a meticulously engineered plane mobile to a paper doll to a crumbled up piece of paper to a handful of shreds, and just about every imaginative in-between shape.

Kelly Lynn Jones, founder of pioneering artist community Little Paper Planes, writes in the introduction:

While working on this book, it became clear that the concept of the paper plane represented more than just a flying object, but brought up moments of nostalgia for childhood, varying perceptions on the act of making and creativity, and notions around authorship and the collaboration between artist and reader.”

Each paper plane design is prefaced by a short introduction to and single-question interview with the artist, contextualizing his or her work, background, and approach to art.

Julia Rothman

Gemma Correll

Lisa Congdon

Michael C. Hsiung

A refreshing treat for that timeless inner child, or the creatively-minded real child, Little Paper Planes reminds you that the limits of even the most seemingly formulaic and constrained of concepts are set only by the bounds and boundaries of the imagination.

↬ Open Culture

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Farm Anatomy: Julia Rothman’s Illustrated Guide to Country Life

What comb styles have to do with cow plumbing and mapping autumn frost.

It really does seem to be the season of exiting food–relatedreleases. From the ever-talented Julia Rothman — she of Drawn In and The Exquisite Book fame, and one of the most original illustrators working today — comes Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life, a charming illustrated guide to the intricate microcosm that underpins your dinner plate. From how to properly milk a cow to a taxonomy of squash varieties and faming tools to a morphology of barn cupolas, Rothman’s warm drawings are bound to entertain, educate (did you know that a one-year-old goat is called a ‘yearling’ and you can use cornflower to dye wool blue?), and instill in you newfound awe and fascination with rural life.

And as if the striking illustrations weren’t enough of a feat, most of the type in the book was handwritten, with the exception of the introduction and metadata font, which Rothman created from her handwriting.

The book was inspired by Rothman’s first visit to the farm on which her husband, Matt, grew up, which left the born-and-bred New Yorker artist wide-eyed and wonderstruck.

Working on this book has given me a chance to learn more about what it’s like to live off the land and to better understand Matt’s roots. In small ways I hope to bring the ideals and traditions he grew up on back into our daily lives.” ~ Julia Rothman

The last pages of the book feature Rothman’s meticulous biography, which not only pleases the attribution crusader in me but also tickles my Rube Goldberg curiosity as a fascinating rabbit hole of a reading list, featuring such esoteric treats as Storey’s Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle, and Pigs, Amish Quilt Patterns, 500 Treasured Country Recipes, and Country Wisdom & Know-How .

Utterly charming and thoroughly researched, Farm Anatomy is one of those rare treats that speak to your eyes and your heart, and in the process manage to expand your mind.

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Drawn In: A Peek Inside Favorite Artists’ Private Sketchbooks

What the myth of the muse has to do with the discipline of refinement, visual poetry and Shel Silverstein.

I’m a longtime fan of artist Julia Rothman, who pens the wonderful Book By Its Cover blog and who in 2009 co-masterminded the excellent Exquisite Book, in which 100 of today’s most exciting visual artists engaged in a collaborative game inpsired by the surrealist movement of the 1920s. This month, Julia is back with another superb book project: Drawn In: A Peek into the Inspiring Sketchbooks of 44 Fine Artists, Illustrators, Graphic Designers, and Cartoonists — a voyeuristic visual journey into how artists doodle, brainstorm and flesh ideas out, doing for art what Field Notes did for science, Street Sketchbook did for street art and Pure Process did for advertising.

The lavish volume offers a rare glimpse inside the minds and hearts of favorite artists like visual poet Sophie Blackall, happiness-designer Tad Carpenter, nature illustrator Jill Bliss and many more, showcasing stunning full-color images alongside profiles of the artists, who discuss their sketchbooks and how they use them.

Today, I sit down with Julia to chat about the theories of creative genius, common patterns of creation, and insights from the project.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the origin of genius and the driving force behind the creative process, whether it’s the product of this age-old notion of “the muse” or closer to something like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory, which frames “genius” as the product of merciless practice and discipline. Do artists’ sketchbooks bespeak a particular truth to tip the scale in either direction, or do they embody some combination of the two models of genius?

JR: I think it’s definitely a mix of both. While you can learn a technique like drawing and try to perfect it by practicing and practicing, you still need that bit of natural talent to bring it to the level of these artists. In these sketchbooks, there’s evidence of artists spending a lot of time getting their drawings to look a certain way. Sam Bosma’s sketches of the same character over and over are a great example. His pages show a refinement in each rendering of the same subject. But there is definitely a spontaneity in much of the work in these sketchbooks. One of my favorite examples is Christian DeFilippo’s balloon page. It seems like he just threw a handful of balloons on the paper and taped them down flat. The result is an amazing colorful and sculptural page, an experiment which couldn’t have been created from practice.

Did any specific patterns emerge from the bird’s-eye view of the 44 sketchbooks, anything that was common to many artist and perhaps a useful insight on how the rest of us can best tame our inspiration and creative process?

JR: Each of these artists have such different styles and ways of working, but one of the things that they all seemed to do was observational drawing from life. While much of Anders Nilsen’s sketchbook was filled with comics and imagery from his own head, you’d turn a page and see a realistic sketch of a person who was sitting in front of him. It seems like being able to capture the world around you is an important skill to each of these artists whether or not their non-sketchbook work reflects that. Being able to recreate the world around them, must help artists to be able to create their own worlds.

What dead artists’ sketchbooks do you most wish you could peek inside?

JR: Keiko Minami, Vera Neuman, Ben Shahn, John Singer Sargent, Shel Silverstein, Ezra Jack Keats, Olle Eksell, Alexander Calder, Charles Schulz… I could go on and on.

Drawn In is out this month and an absolute, rare kind of treat.

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The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game

Conceptual horizons, or why the time to judge a book by its cover may have just arrived.

In the 1920s, a collective of Surrealists invented exquisite corpse, a game-like collaborative creation process wherein each contributor tacks on to a composition either by following a strict rule or by being only shown what the last person has contributed. Now, Brooklyn-based designers Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe have replicated the exquisite corpse idea in a brilliant collaborative illustration project that enlisted 100 of today’s most talented artist and designers to co-create a book by building on each other’s work. Today, the project comes to life as The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — an absolutely remarkable tome nearly two years in the making.

Here’s how it works: Each artist contributed one page to the book. The first five were given a few starter words to inspire their drawing, then each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded theirs and used images to build on the story. Besides this conceptual continuity, a more visual one — a horizontal line that starts on the left side of the page and ends on the right — drew the images together. Artsts were free to interpret the line ever which way they liked, which most did with incredible ingenuity.

The project is an instant piece of creative culture history, from the illustrated introduction by McSweeney’s Dave Eggers of 826 Valencia and Where The Wild Things Are fame, to the meticulous making of its cover, to the all-star roster of contributing artists. (Including many we’ve raved about previously — Lisa Congdon, Luke Ramsey, Meg Hunt and many, many more.)

Sample some of the goodness, then do yourself a favor and grab a copy of The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — we haven’t been this excited about an extracurricular art book since Pixar’s The Ancient Book of Sex & Science.

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