Drawn to the Light

Lizzie Nichols is a Los Angeles-based visual development and concept artist. Currently at Paramount Animation, she has worked for Sony Pictures Animation, DreamWorks Television Animation, RGH Entertainment, Rough Draft Studios, and Walt Disney Imagineering. She is originally from Connecticut and received a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 2003. She graduated from Art Center College of Design in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in Entertainment Design.

For Zócalo’s latest Sketchbook, Nichols gives us a closer look at one of Southern California’s greatest features—our natural light. It’s this …

March 17, 2021

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The Kathy Fiscus Tragedy Transfixed the World. Seven Decades Later, I Can’t Let It Go

A California Historian Can’t Shake His Obsession With the 1949 Death That Became the First Live, Breaking News TV Spectacle

by William Deverell | March 10, 2021

I can walk from my home to the area where Alice Fiscus stood in the kitchen chatting with her sister Jeanette on that fateful late afternoon of April 8, 1949. …

Window Nesting

February 3, 2021

Maria Picassó i Piquer is a Catalan artist living in Barcelona. Her illustrations meld sharp angles and precise lines into a humanistic whole, betraying her original training as an architect. …

Body of Color

Naima Lowe’s Installation ‘Ropes, Pinks’ Uncoils Trauma in Pursuit of Black Freedom

Interview by Minal Hajratwala | January 14, 2021

Consisting of three lengths of cotton and hemp rope of varying thicknesses—200 feet in all—dyed in shades of pink, “Ropes, Pinks” is an installation work by artist Naima Lowe. This …

Wheels in Motion

January 6, 2021

Alexandra Lockwood is a multimedia illustrator based in New York City. She is currently attending the School of Visual Arts, where she is studying with Zócalo Sketchbook alum Yuko Shimizu. …

How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas

One Hundred Years Ago, Italian Nationalists Went to War With Their Own Country, Bringing the Border City of Fiume a ‘Christmas of Blood’

by Dominique Kirchner Reill | December 14, 2020

In 1920, in a small town outside Turin, Italy, 17-year-old Luigi De Michelis was everything his middle-class parents could have asked for. His teachers liked him, which was important to …

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