Cover Story …

I’m so excited about the ROOTLESS artwork, and it’s been great sharing it with people and getting such awesome feedback. The cover is the work of Phil Falco, who’s been responsible for a lot of stunning book covers in recent years, and I love the original and very cool visuals he came up with… to me, the cover conveys the desolate world of the novel, as well as the beauty of the forests Banyan seeks to rebuild. It’s dark and psychedelic, and shot through with youthful optimism… not unlike the book itself!

Phil started working on the artwork late in 2011, and we went through various iterations along the way. I’m grateful to everyone involved in the design. Especially my editor, Mallory Kass, and, of course, to the artist himself… Cheers, Phil!

As for the cover reveal that happened last Friday… MG Buehrlen and I got in touch quite a few months ago and made plans for revealing the cover for the first time on the great YABC website. I’m a big fan of the site, and MG was brilliant - especially when things came right down to the wire!

So… ROOTLESS now has a cover for the ages. I can’t wait for people to read the book this November! CHEERS!

crazy corn …

4directions:

now this is awesome corn.

npr:

Ooooo.

jtotheizzoe:

Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn

Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?

First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.

If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).

With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.

This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!  

(via Discover Magazine)

My first ever piece of visual art… it’s a flag I designed for the Army of the Fallen Sun. It’s connected to ROOTLESS… and it’ll be featured somewhere on my new website (coming soon) that is going to be AWESOME thanks to the great folks at VOLTAGE a+d. The site is really a piece of art in itself.

CHEERS!

Natural Architecture; an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind’s desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment. It aims to create a new, more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by exploring what it means to design with nature in mind.

(via theflyingoliphant)

Tree Building …

mon-ciel-bleu:

Forever Tangled by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

hitrecordjoe:

Our first issue of HITRECORDERLY has arrived from the printer!

Be the first on your block to own our inaugural issue!

Subscribe here! :oD

(Source: hitrecord)

like tree rings in a black hole.

7knotwind:

BEILI LIU
Void, Silk Organza, 49 layers, 30”x43”x15”

let the wild rumpus go ever on…

jujukitten:

RIP Maurice Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012).