In honor of President Barack Obama visiting the People's Republic of China, I extend my best wishes to those who love imaginative art there.
"The 21st Century is a tricky time. Our future isn't clear. We need to re-examine many things we've taken for granted, whether it's common sense or our way of thinking. We need to reconsider each norm in the field of entertainment and children's films, too. We must question the format we've been following. You can't just create a baddie from a mould, then beat him. We must not make a film in the easy way."
"Inside me I have negativity, despair, or hopelessness; in fact a lot of hopelessness and pessimism. But I don't feel like expressing it in my films, which children see. I'm more interested in what drives me to make a happy film or what makes me feel happy."
In an atrium of the Mission Inn, there's a fountain.
I sat there and sketched it, and here's one of the creatures that waddled up for a sip early one morning when no one was looking.
Then a saucer descended and dropped off this guy, who was old and twice as huge before he took a sip. 
But right now I just want to show you a few pages of my Explorer's Journal.
I've been traveling all over the Mission Inn in Riverside, California to document some of the strange creatures who live here. 
If you wake up early, the rooftop dragons are still perched on the towers because they love the sound of bells.
I was awake at these wee hours because the Gronkus was pounding away on the old piano.
I'm doing 50 of these little drawings, all on location. There will be one to give each of the collectors who are attending.
Better get back to work. The fandango told me to check out Gladys, the one-eyed fortune teller in the sitting room of Floor 3.
Sometimes I like to exaggerate a little when I'm out sketching to poke some fun at my fellow man (and at myself in the process).
First published in 1921, Drawing Made Easy taught millions of people to draw, and it’s the one that taught me. Now Darren Rousar, a prominent instructor of academic sight-size drawing has brought it back into print.
Drawing Made Easy uses a sensible approach. Each drawing begins with simple, easy-to- comprehend shapes and proceeds to details last, essentially the same method used in the 19th century academies.
The beginning student—either child or adult—progresses to fairly challenging subjects by the end. That clover would be difficult to get right without the analytical method that Lutz presents. This new edition also includes a few key chapters from Lutz’s intermediate book, Practical Drawing, which covers the proportions of the figure and the management of light and shade to produce form.
When Mr. Rousar asked me to contribute the foreword to this edition, I was thrilled. Here’s what I wrote (click to enlarge). 
(Above, Andy Wales of Lynch-Bustin Elementary School in Athens, PA, a pioneer promoter of comics to schoolkids). His blog is "Panel Discussion".
“My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I've got God."
HUGHES: "And what did she look like?"
CRUMB: "I went through that whole thing too; maybe I'll draw God as a black woman. But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch. It's a lot of fun doing Genesis, actually. It's very visual. It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people."
We sat next to each other on folding chairs. Jeanette got out her ballpoint pen and watercolors and sketched the 1961 Dodge Lancer and the 1958 Plymouth Fury, slightly exaggerating to bring out their personalities. 
I liked her idea, so I tried to graft the cars onto the bodies of people walking by. I jotted down fragments from conversations that I overheard.
In 1958 America seemed to be caught between memories of war, fears of nuclear devastation, and dreams of space, and that zeitgeist is written on the cars’ faces.
Maybe Chrysler will bounce back to life like a ‘toon car. Let’s hope so. Maybe the key to the success of the company is putting a little more personality into the car designs.
Being on location lets you see the objects in three dimensions, walk around them, peer under them. That’s the first step to understanding their forms so that you can transform them any way you want.
He made a series of small busts or maquettes of "Les Célébrités du Juste milieu" to use as reference for his incisive and irreverent drawings. One polychromed set can be seen in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Another casting of the set, without color, is on display in the basement of the National Gallery in Washington.
When I sketched some of them, I was struck by Daumier's approach to caricature not as an assortment of distorted features, but rather as a foundation in the construction of the skull underneath. If you go for the structure of the skull, both the likeness and the expression comes off more powerfully.
Here's one of his finished lithographs made with the benefit of the maquette.
