John Martz

An excerpt from the upcoming circus issue of chickaDEE Magazine.

The Work/Life 2 directory of illustration is out from Uppercase, and it’s a beautiful little book packed with profiles of great illustrators, their workspaces, sketchbooks, and illustrations.

This is the piece I created for the book.

An illustration for a kids magazine story about strange Canadian inventions. It was a series of illustrations, but this was my favourite — a spinning device for the dinner table that would keep flies away.

Cross-posted from Picture Book Report

I, Willy Wonka, have decided to allow five children — just five, mind you, and no more — to visit my factory this year. These lucky five will be shown around personally by me, and they will be allowed to see all the secrets and the magic of my factory. Then, at the the end of the tour, as a special present, all of them will be given enough chocolates and candies to last them for the rest of their lives!

After missing last month, I’m back with another Charlie illustration. Here we meet the first four finders of Wonka’s Golden Tickets. I borrowed one detail from Tim Burton’s adaptation, and that was to turn Mike Teavee, the toy-gun-toting couch potato, into a gamer. I think it’s fair to say that if the story were written today, this violence-loving-brat would be addicted to shoot-em-up video games instead of gangster movies.

I also borrowed a visual gag from Gene Wilder’s Wonka — the type that gradually diminishes in size to the point of illegibility.

I won’t replicate the descriptions of every child, but oh the picture Roald Dahl paints of poor Augustus Gloop:

The picture showed a nine-year-old boy who was so enormously fat he looked as though he had been blown up with a powerful pump. Great flabby folds of fat bulged out from every part of his body, and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes peering out upon the world.

Next month we will finally meet Mr. Wonka himself.

Here’s another puzzle page for chickaDEE Magazine. Again, this is obviously presented here without the text, but you should be able to figure this one out, kids. Which machine made which wacky foodstuff? Bonus points for finding the hidden cat, computer mouse, calculator, rocket ship, and star.

A recent illustration to decorate the website belonging to the fine folks at Subvert Marketing.

This was a fun project, and I’ll share some of the rejected roughs and process soon.

Here’s a little illustration I did for Uppercase Magazine. It accompanied an article about scotch, suspenders, and smoking pipes.

The article references Mr. Potato Head as once having a pipe as a standard accessory, and once I read that, the drawing basically created itself.

This is the cover to the upcoming October issue of chickaDEE Magazine, without the text of course.

A double page puzzle spread for the upcoming October issue of chickaDEE Magazine.

This is without the text in place, but the puzzles include the maze, finding 3 sets of matching pumpkins, finding the 6 hidden scarecrows, and figuring out if there are more children in pirate costumes or in wizard costumes.

Cross-posted from Picture Book Report.

…he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don’t Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact the most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

With this illustration, I travel backwards in the book again to Arthur’s introduction of the book within the book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s difficult to imagine this once-fantastical device without thinking of iPads, iPhones, Kindles, and Wikipedia. And it’s unfortunate that Douglas Adams, a Mac-user and tech nerd, never got to see his vision realized of a handheld device with instant access to endless sources of information.

In the book, the device is described has having “about a hundred” tiny buttons, though were it written today, the Guide would surely have a touchscreen. Still, I couldn’t resist making it look like a calculator (and very much like a Kindle) if only to decorate the buttons with an alien alphabet.

I used the same palette as my first illustration in the series, so those who wish to buy prints might find the two make a decent diptych.

This will be my last illustration for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In creating the series I realized that I didn’t want to illustrate the characters. It’s a book about ideas — science, reason, philosophy, religion — and the characters exist only as vessels for these ideas. I feel I’ve exhausted this stylistic exploration of the book, and so next month I will begin a new series for a different book. Stay tuned.

And if you’re an iPad user, I’ve created iPad-friendly wallpaper of this illustration that works in both landscape and horizontal orientation.

A recent spot illustration for Jamie Oliver’s magazine.

Cross-posted from Picture Book Report.

Something a little different this month. I wanted to do a simple spot illustration of the Starship Heart of Gold. Now, if you’re familiar with the story you’ll recognize that what I’ve drawn bears little resemblance to the ship described in the book:

…a huge starship, one hundred and fifty meters long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white, and mindbogglingly beautiful.

It seems to me that all spaceships look like, in some way, sleek running shoes. I wanted to have a little fun with the design of the Heart of Gold, and as I had been collecting images of vans and RVs, it also seemed to me that the Heart of Gold would look just as mindbogglingly beautiful if it resembled a retro camper van.

After all, with the Infinite Improbability Drive at its heart, it seems all too likely (or rather, unlikely) that the most impressive starship in the galaxy would (or, in this case, would not) look exactly like a retro camper van. So the very improbability that the ship would look quite the opposite of how it is described in the book makes my interpretation all the more plausible. I think.

Yesterday I posted the rough sketch and some of the reference photos I used for this, as well as the horrible realization that a spaceship that looks like an RV, had already been done, and that I had just ripped off Spaceballs.

“That is really amazing,” [Zaphod] said. “That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I’d like to steal it.”