Artist's vision is right on the button

Character designer known for her whimsical take on things

There's art that feeds the heart and art that feeds the stomach.

Whitman's Rachel Maguire is fortunate enough to do both.

She's a character designer for the Emmy Award-winning PBS show "The Amazing Colossal Adventures of WordGirl," an animated series that follows the everyday life and superhero adventures of WordGirl as she fights crime and enriches vocabulary, all in a day's work.

When she's not engaged in digital animation, Maguire often finds herself relaxing with acrylics, one of her first loves, though she notes: "The animation work pays the bills."

Her work will soon become familiar to New Year's revelers in the Boston area.

Maguire designed the button for Boston's 33d annual First Night Celebration. The colorful design - featuring playful penguins - was unveiled this month and will adorn all advertising connected with the event.

"I see my job as an illustrator as taking an idea and moving it forward using art," she said. "And let's face it - penguins are fun, and they also mean winter."

First Night spokeswoman Joyce Linehan said that every August, members of First Night's marketing staff identify a genre that hasn't been used for the button recently, and this year they decided on illustration.

Then they did some research to identify possible artists. This year, Linehan said, organizers asked staffers at The Weekly Dig for recommendations, since they work with illustrators all the time.

"We were immediately struck by the whimsical na ture of Rachel's work, and felt that it would be perfect for First Night," said Linehan. "Besides, who doesn't love a penguin?"

The best part of having her design on the First Night button, Maguire said, is that she'll be seeing it on the train as she commutes each day from Whitman to her animation studio in Watertown.

The First Night celebration also includes several things she loves - noisemakers, fireworks, and "kids having fun."

At her studio, Soup2Nuts, productions such as "WordGirl" and "Dr. Katz" use Squiggle Vision, a type of animation that reuses frames to make animation look smoother.

"We can work quickly, cutting and pasting," she said. "When Disney was doing 'Snow White,' all 24 frames per second were drawn by hand."

She attributes the success of "WordGirl" to what she calls "mass brainstorming."

"There's a lot of group think," she said. "I'm part of a real team. You have the artists putting in backgrounds, the storyboarders, the character designers. We talk, sketch, revise. There's great energy."

The Pembroke native graduated from Sacred Heart High in Kingston and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston with a degree in illustration and animation.

Her art has appeared in The Weekly Dig, Parents, and Kids magazine, and Live Nation's Rock and Art charity auction. Her animations have aired at the San Diego Women's Film Festival, Boston's Underground Film Festival, and the Port City Animation Festival in Wilmington, N.C. She has also worked at restoring works of art at the Oil Painting Conservation Studio in Kingston.

On her "art blog" - www.rayarray.com - she's been known to take requests from visitors to create and post a particular kind of art; she also uses it to sell prints and other works.

Her free art and the charity work, however, sometimes have to take a back seat to keeping a roof over her head.

In replying to a fan who asked when she might post a requested piece of art, Maguire was her whimsical self. "I will ask the gods who determine when I have free time when I see them next."

For more information on Boston's First Night celebration, visit www.firstnight.org.

Rich Fahey can be reached at faheywrite@yahoo.com.