NGM Blog Central - Tiny Art Director - National Geographic Magazine

I try not to act like a child at the office. I wear crisp shirts, proofread emails, and treat all artists with respect even when their work makes me want to jump up and down and throw things. So it was with great chagrin that I stumbled across the blog, Tiny Art Director, which holds a funhouse mirror up to the profession and makes my efforts seem in vain.

You see, the Tiny Art Director is a four-year-old girl. In each post, she commands her artist—and father—Bill Zeman to make, revise and often scrap paintings of dinosaurs and monkeys. (That T.A.D. and National Geographic both love dinosaurs and monkeys is not lost on me.)

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"I'm going to tell you what to draw," she says in one post. "Draw a dragon sneaking up on a girl." Zeman obliges (above). Her critique? "Daddy it's not supposed to be like that! He has dog legs! I'm so mad at you! I'm going to erase those legs! Daddy why did you do those legs???" Tiny Art Director then collapses into tears. "Job Status: Rejected"

I can't say that scenario has never happened around here, but it's rare. We want an artist's vision to be realized in the same way that an editor wants to bring out the best in a writer. We try to make changes only for factual accuracy, clarity, color reproduction, or to allocate space for text or the gutter—that pesky crease between two magazine pages. Truth is, we'd prefer all our conversations with artists to be like this one:

Tiny Art Director: "I like it."
Artist: "Anything you don't like about it?"
Tiny Art Director: "Don't ask me that Daddy! Just give me a treat right now!"

—Oliver Uberti

Posted by Oliver | Comments (0)
Filed Under: The Process

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