“One of the qualifications for being President of the United States ought to be caricaturability. Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, Reagan: All were wonderfully suited to being drawn comically. And in that respect (if not any other), Mitt Romney is more than up to the job. A couple of heavy eyebrows, a black pompadour with greying temples, and a geometric chin, and you can take the rest of the day off.” — Barry Blitt, on this week’s New Yorker cover
The artist behind this week’s New Yorker cover, Javier Mariscal, recently collaborated with Fernando Trueba on “Chico and Rita,” a feature-length animated film that received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature earlier this year. We asked Trueba, an Oscar-winning filmmaker (his film “Belle Epoque” won, for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1993), about their collaboration:
”When I first saw drawings Mariscal had made of Havana streets, I told him, ‘Chavi—that’s how I call him—Chavi, that’s it! That’s where the movie should take place!’ and he told me, ‘I love that, but we should put a lot of music in it.’ And I say, ‘Well, let’s do a musician story.’ And he says, ‘A love story.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Almost every movie is a love story, that’s great.’ And then I said to him, ‘Why, if he’s a pianist, we should have Bebo!’ Bebo Valdés is our friend, and now today he’s ninety-three, but he’s the best Cuban musician alive in the world. So once we had the idea of Havana, Mariscal drawings, and Bebo in the music, we started building the script and the song. This movie is built on friendship.”
“I say to Chavi all the time, ‘You son of a bitch! You make your first movie, and you get nominated for an Oscar!’ It was fun to be there with him. It’s the first time in history that a Spanish movie was nominated in this category.”
Thank you to everyone who wrote in this weekend to help us figure out the new monthly Blown Covers contest format. Your advice was invaluable. Here’s what you told us:
Thank you all for your enthusiasm, talent and support. We’ll post the winners of last week’s contest later this week and then we’ll begin on the new format by announcing a new contest theme this Friday.
This theme is actually just an excuse to show Nadja’s favorite New Yorker cover (the sleeping Sempé cat below). Really though, we can’t think of anything better than going through 100 or so images about cats and dogs. We’re going to wind down this contest soon: There are only 3 or 4 more weeks to go before we take off for our summer vacation, and in the fall we both have so many other commitments that we don’t think we’ll be able to continue. So if you’ve been lurking in the sidelines wondering if you should submit, now is the time. Break out your leashes, your scratching post and your best kibble bowl - and get sketching!
- By Jean-Jacques Sempé
-By Ian Falconer
- By Gürbüz Dogan Eksioglu
To enter each week’s contest, please send sketches on this week’s theme. Use the submissions page and please include your name and email address. I prefer sketches to finished work and good ideas to good drawings. Please send files in as jpegs under 1mb. The deadline is Thursday at noon (NYC time). The themes on the Blown Covers website closely mirror what I suggest to the New Yorker artists I already work with. This blog and contest are informal and not affiliated with the magazine but I’m always on the lookout for ideas. Please keep submissions confidential in case they are selected for later publication. The winning sketch (according to my own subjective whims) will be posted here on Friday.
This week, the sun beats down on New York at a relentless 90 degrees, making it difficult to imagine that the seasons will ever change. And, for a child, the distance between July 1st and September 1st does seem like an eternity. But for a New Yorker cover artist, the time has already come to start sketching back-to-school ideas. So turn your fans on full blast, throw on your back packs, break out your number 2 pencils and start sketching. We can’t wait to see your ideas!
(please note: starting this week, we are only accepting sketches through the submissions page of our tumblr (no longer through email). We just can’t keep track of everything otherwise. Please submit your images here. Full submission guidelines at the bottom of this post)
Here are a few published back to school images for inspiration:
- By Art Spiegelman
-By Bob Staake
- By Owen Smith
-By William Joyce
To enter each week’s contest, please send sketches on this week’s theme. Use the submissions page and please include your name and email address. I prefer sketches to finished work and good ideas to good drawings. Please send files in as jpegs under 1mb. The deadline is Thursday at noon (NYC time). The themes on the Blown Covers website closely mirror what I suggest to the New Yorker artists I already work with. This blog and contest are informal and not affiliated with the magazine but I’m always on the lookout for ideas. Please keep submissions confidential in case they are selected for later publication. The winning sketch (according to my own subjective whims) will be posted here on Friday.
Food is tied to all our primal senses - comfort, happiness, passion. We live in a culture constantly saturated with photographs of food, discussions of food, videos of food. So what about drawings of food? The New Yorker runs a special Food Issue in the Fall, but it’s a topic that can run on the cover anytime. Whether it’s an update on the classic still life New Yorker covers of the past or cutting cultural commentary, we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
- By Gardner Rea
-By Roz Chast
- By Adrian Tomine
-By Wayne Thiebaud
- By Daniel Clowes
To enter each week’s contest, please send sketches on this week’s theme. Use the submissions page or email submissions to blowncovers@gmail.com. I prefer sketches to finished work and good ideas to good drawings. Please send files in as jpegs under 1mb, and label the file with firstname.lastname. The deadline is Thursday at noon (NYC time). The themes on the Blown Covers website closely mirror what I suggest to the New Yorker artists I already work with. This blog and contest are informal and not affiliated with the magazine but I’m always on the lookout for ideas. Please keep submissions confidential in case they are selected for later publication. The winning sketch (according to my own subjective whims) will be posted here on Friday.
The idea for this week’s New Yorker cover, “Summer Chore,” came from artist Edward Koren’s own life. “This summer I’ll be working on some etchings in my workshop and mowing my lawn!” he said. “Actually, that’s the problem: I mow the lawn as little as I can—I think of it as time-wasting at its worst. I’m surrounded by people with huge lawns—I don’t know why they bother. I think of them as having retirement lawns, you know, empty-life lawns. I stretch my mowing as long as I can.”
In New York there are moments when every city block feels like a runway. Our Blown Covers offices are in SoHo, and every day we have to weave our way through the 7 foot tall model creatures that walk the streets. Think ahead to the changing seasons (The New Yorker runs a style issue in the early fall) and pull out your sketchbook. Show us what you think of the Fashion world — will it be an homage or a jibe or something in between? (full submission guidelines at the bottom of this post, first time contributors encouraged)
Here are some past fashion covers for inspiration:
-By Lorenzo Mattotti
- By Christoph Niemann
-By Art Spiegelman
-By Ana Juan
To enter each week’s contest, please send sketches on this week’s theme. Use the submissions page or email submissions to blowncovers@gmail.com. I prefer sketches to finished work and good ideas to good drawings. Please send files in as jpegs under 1mb, and label the file with firstname.lastname. The deadline is Thursday at noon (NYC time). The themes on the Blown Covers website closely mirror what I suggest to the New Yorker artists I already work with. This blog and contest are informal and not affiliated with the magazine but I’m always on the lookout for ideas. Please keep submissions confidential in case they are selected for later publication. The winning sketch (according to my own subjective whims) will be posted here on Friday.
This week’s cover, “June Brides,” is the artist Gayle Kabaker’s first time in The New Yorker. The magazine’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, found the image through her Blown Covers blog.
“I live in the Berkshires, so I do almost all of my work online,” Kabaker said. “It’s a big deal, getting on the cover. We’ve been getting the magazine forever—it comes in and goes straight on the kitchen table. We talk about the cover with my son, who’s seventeen, and my daughter, who’s twenty-three. ‘What do you think it means?’ It’s a conversation. And we all read it, dog-ear it, and leave it on the table for the next person to pick up.”
“Françoise told me not to tell my mother until the issue actually went to press, because things could change,” she added. “I didn’t want to say that my mother’s dead—but I know she’d be very proud of me.”
See the a slideshow of other Blown Covers winners on the New Yorker website.
Behind the scenes atThe New Yorker with art editor