#Brian Floca

[kaiyves-backup]

4, 8, 12, and 13 for the space ask game?

(I had an almost-complete answer but I closed the tab by accident and it got wiped. #^£*!)

(From this list)

4 - underrated mission(s)

I feel like the Phoenix Mars Lander gets overlooked in the lurch these days despite the fact that this was the mission that first found water ice in Martian soil. It wasn’t a rover and it was a polar mission never intended to last more than one season, so Phoenix didn’t have the time to build up the kind of long-term following that Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, et al. had, but as someone who was there visiting the website every day, it made for one incredible summer and fall.

Phoenix was the first mission I followed avidly from launch to end of mission. It was the first Mars mission to be photographed by an orbiter during parachute descent and as the first to have a first-person Twitter account from Day 1, it was one of the catalysts of the Space Tweeps movement and the 2010s renaissance in space fandom.

And the mission patch was amazing:

8 - fave space book

Of all? I don’t think I could pick just one, but among my favorites I’ll say that Brian Floca’s Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 is the best Apollo book to come out of the 40th anniversary celebrations. It’s beautifully-illustrated Sweet Dreams Fuel that both children and adults can enjoy and I’ll always recommend it.

12 - what got you into space?

In my 5th grade science class, we watched a documentary about the Voyager probes that featured the multilingual greetings from the Golden Record. They played Nick Sagan’s English-language “Greetings from the children of Planet Earth!” recording and it absolutely blew my mind to imagine this little boy’s voice going out into infinity, that human hands had made this thing and sent it out beyond the planets, with the anticipation no human hands would ever touch it again.

13 - who would win in a fistfight: el*n m*sk or j*ff b*zos? you must explain your reasoning.

I don’t care to devote any brainpower to this, but fortunately I don’t have to, because there are already two r/WhoWouldWin threads about this very subject.

[vixies-grimoire]

FUCK IT. CAMP CAMP DIMWOOD AU.

This has been rolling around in my head for actual years. I'm in the middle of rereading the Dimwood books again which brought it back to the forefront of my mind. Our favorite dysfunctional found family as cute little mice, everypony.

Just doodles bc I'm too tired and busy to draw finished stuff rn. I hc them all as LGBT+ so this counts for my pride month drawing.

Details abt the AU under the cut!\

Max's equivalent "Sunroof" is a four month old golden mouse living in Mouse Town in Amperville. He's on his own living in a broken down vehicle, much like Clutch. The AU takes place after the entire Dimwood series, so Amperville is safer now but only as safe as it can be for a mouse. And being a city mouse, Sunroof speaks in full city lingo. He's street wise and a loner, because in his own words "city dudes look after themselves."

David & Gwen's equivalents Pine & Mulberry live in Jayswood (they lived in Dimwood before the fire) and are both around two years old. They have something of a communal nest where many neighboring young mice will come to play, eat and essentially 'camp' with them.

Sunroof decides to leave the city in the reverse to Ragweed, crossing paths with Pine and Mulberry while running from a snake (which would be the main villain of the story). After a time and after defeating the villain he would eventually decide to stay in Jayswood with them.

(will this ever be written? no, probably not. but it's one of my favorite paracosms :3)

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Drawn in MediBang Paint Pro

Camp Camp is a Rooster Teeth original series. Dimwood Forest is a series of books written by Avi and illustrated by Brian Floca.

Copyright© 2023 Vixiefoxwitch. All rights reserved

[annie-manga]

13, 17, 25, 26, 29, 30!!

13) A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing: this is a good one, I don’t know if I have a good answer for this cause nothing’s coming to my mind at the moment. If I think of someone, I’ll come back & edit this later.

17) Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what: I try not to eat or drink when I draw, cause I don't wanna spill crumbs or other stuff in my workspace; luckily the kitchen & dining area is next to me, so if I wanna drink water or get a snack, I can just take a quick walk out my work space and get something

25) Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by: I remember one of my college professors said that my art/style reminded them of "Daria", which I kinda found endearing even if that wasn't fully accurate to me.

26) What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended: off the top of my head, there was a comment I got where someone had assumed that two of my characters were gonna end up together romantically in the future; ironically, the characters featured in there were both aroace(and was tagged as such, too) 

29) Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically: Also a good one; I’m gonna have to say “The Tales of Dimwood Forest” series by Avi & Brian Floca; I read that in my childhood years & while it’s not a central influence to my art, it’s something I still love even now & still occasionally read to this day.

30) What piece of yours do you think is underrated?: This fanart of Mob 

Feel free to send me more of these!

[winningthesweepstakes]

With Dad by Richard Jackson, illustrated by Brian Floca

With Dad by Richard Jackson, illustrated by Brian Floca. Neal Porter/Holiday House, 2024. 9780823444953 Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4 Format: Hardcover picture book What did you like about the book? Brian Floca goes back to the 1950’s in illustrating this story by Richard Jackson that was written a year before Jackson died. It is a simple story, probably based upon…

[nevinslibrary]

Comic Book Saturday

This was a cool book about the women in space. From the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, to NASA’s Group 9, and just all the awesome women who went past our atmosphere.

I also really loved the art in this by Maris Wicks, from Massachusetts, whoop, whoop!! Oh, and, I can’t forget that there’s also some… let’s go with really fun to read discussion, on some of the designs of spacecraft as well. Awesome.

You may like this book If you Liked: Almost Astronauts by Tanya Lee Stone, Space Explorers by Libby Jackson, or Moonshot by Brian Floca

Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier by Jim Ottaviani

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: In an Open Loft in Gowanus, Six Authors and Artists Collaborate and Commune by Elizabeth A. Harris and Adrianna Glaviano

By Elizabeth A. Harris and Adrianna Glaviano For the children’s book creators Doug Salati, Brian Floca, Sophie Blackall, Rowboat Watkins, Johnny Marciano and Dasha Tolstikova, the light-filled space has become much more than just a place to work. Published: August 3, 2023 at 05:01AM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/jSGw1YF via IFTTT

[pastelomino]

Illustrations done by Brian Floca from the “Poppy” series of books by Avi

[picturebookshelf]

Poppy (1995)

Story: Avi - Art: Brian Floca

[uwmspeccoll]

Monday Motivation Owl

For this Monday’s motivation we present the Great Horned Owl Mr Ocax, the villainous character from Avi’s children’s novel Poppy, with illustrations by Caldecott Medal-winner Brian Floca. SPOILER ALERT: Although a villain, Mr. Ocax is highly motivated to terrorize the little field mouse Poppy, and does a great job of it until the end when Poppy stabs the owl to death with a porcupine quill. OUCH!

Avi is the pen name for Edward Irving Wortis, a prolific two-time Newbery Medal winner and Newbery Honors winner. Poppy, first published by Orchard Books in 1995, received the 1996 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, and is the first title in Avi’s Tales From Dimwood Forest series. This copy from our Historical Curriculum Collection is a later 2007 revised Harper Trophy edition, but bears a 2014 author’s presentation inscription to our library.

View more motivated (and some unmotivated) owls.

[the-dust-jacket]

The moral of this delightful book seems to be: if your parents won’t listen to you, set a crocodile at them. Highly recommended. 

[alter-koker]

About Poppy, not to brag but this girl in my class was related to the guy who wrote them and in like second grade we were reading them and we got to read the unpublished manuscript of the next book 👀👀 I’ve been waiting my whole life to tell someone this bc I’ve never met anyone else who remembered or cared about these books.

and why did YOU get to live MY dream. yeah it seems like people were always more interested in warriors, or less commonly redwall, or that owl one, never met anyone else who was into poppy as a kid (or silverwing which is like the bat equivalent, so good)! i've always loved the talking animal genre though, been obsessed with watership down since I read it in 7th grade, and that's kind of translated into me seeking out non-kids books with that kind of theme as an adult (relatively easy when you like scifi too).

i wonder what avi was like! kind of a mythological figure to me since i used to read so much of his stuff. oh my god wait hold the phones. IT LOOKS LIKE A NEW POPPY BOOK WAS PUBLISHED LIKE, LAST YEAR?

dropping everything to reread the series and then get this bye

[ltwilliammowett]

Light Ships

A light ship is, if we are being precise here, nothing more then a lighthouse on a ship. The first light ship was stationed in 1732 named Nore in the estuary of the Thames River in England. It was an old, disused small vessel that carried a lantern in the masthead that was lit by candles. The vessel was not manned and was located exactly where no lighthouse could be built. The principle was not new, as the Romans had already tried to mark dangerous places and deter pirates in this way.

By the end of the 18th century, England's coast had four more now especially built for this service vessels. These ships usually had two masts but no sails and were towed to their final destination, where they were anchored and served continuously. 

The Trinity House, which was also responsible for the pilots of the Cinque Ports, now had to take care of them as well, and so from the 1820s a rotating crew was established on the ships.

The lightship at Skagen Reef, by Carl Ludvig Thilson Locher 1882  Especially when these ships exchanged their candle lanterns for whale oil lanterns from the early 19th century onwards and were also equipped with a fog horn, the crew had a lot to do with them. To act as effective daylights, trinity House lights were painted red, with the station name in large white letters on the side of the hull and a system of balls and cones at the masthead for identification.

The Sandy Hook in the 1820s (x)

The first all-round light was installed on the lightship Swin Middle in 1837; others used flashing or deck lights. For reasons of visibility, white lights were preferred, although red and very rarely green (as on the lightship Mouse) were also used.

A Jibe Around the Lightship: DAUNTLESS, 1877, by Russ Kramer (x)

The Americans followed suit from 1820 onwards and had the lightvessels moored mainly on the Chesapeake Bay. The initially unmanned ships were like their English sisters. From the 1820s, however, the ships were manned by civilians. From the 20th century onwards, the Coast Guard took over this service.

Illustration of a Lightship, by Brian Floca, 2007

The service was strenuous and dangerous and required a lot of attention, as other ships could easily ram them, which is why they were often the victims of accidents. For this reason, both the British and the American ships were decommissioned in the 1970s and replaced by light platforms.

[literaticat]

Hi Jennifer, what are in your top picture books you've loved recently that you did NOT personally represent?

Oof, this is a tough one without looking at bookshelves -- and the bookshelves in my office are entirely my own books! Let me scour my memory for RECENT faves...

* BEAR CAME ALONG* by Richard Morris and LeUyen Pham - utterly charming, and Uyen’s illustrations are in a different style from her usual, and really are next-level (she did get a well-deserved Caldecott Honor, so I’m not the only one who noticed!)

* HUNGRY JIM* by Laurel Snyder and Chuck Groenick - Laurel is one of my besties so maybe this should also be off the table, but whatever, I would love it regardless. A very subversive, Sendak-esque tale - like a reverse-Pierre!

* THE HONEYBEE * by Kirsten Hall and Isabelle Arsenault - an exquisite read-aloud, and I’m obSESSED with Isabelle’s illustrations! Also I love BEES!

I am lucky enough to already represent some of my all-time favorite illustrators. But here are some favorite illustrators that I don’t rep (but I WOULD IN A HEARBEAT, if they are reading this! lol) -- in No Particular Order:

* Isabelle Arsenault

* Matthew Forsythe

* Sidney Smith

* Elise Gravel

* Beatrice Alemanga 

* Lisa Brown

* Sophie Blackall

* LeUyen Pham

* Kadir Nelson

* Brian Floca

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Youthful Tuesday

Red tailed hawks are the best! And, that’s literally all this amazing picture book is about. One day in the life of a red tail hawk family (mostly the father hawk). It’s told from the point of view of a young birdwatcher, as the hawk tries to find food for his family and new hawk-lets.

The art was beautiful, and the prose was sort of like a free verse poem which was cool. It was a really fun book.

I will say, my one critique is that I think that the crows get a bad rap in this book unfortunately. Corvids are awesome too!

You may like this book If you Liked: The Hawk of the Castle by Danna Smith, Thunder birds by Jim Arnosky, or A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins

Hawk Rising by Maria Gianferrari

[gjhslibrary]

Lonely Book of the Week

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL section remains on of the top sections in the library. City of Light, City of Dark by Avi is wonderfully illustrated in black and white with a timeless good v. evil story.  Avi is very will know in the young adult world and it is nice to see his stories in graphic novel format. Who knows? Maybe this book will encourage you to read another Avi book. Summary: Following a tradition…