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Mary’s magic
Children’s book illustrator Mary Sullivan will add “author” to her extensive illustration credits when her new picture book Ball comes out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this Spring. Based on the ball...
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World touring sketchbooks
Have you drawn in your sketchbook today? It’s a question that humbles every aspiring children’s book illustrator. But in our “high touch era” where the handcrafts site Etsy numbers near the top of...
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Then let us all with one accord…
Stepping away from the news and business this evening, I poked around on YouTube for a nice Christmas video to share with you. For some reason I started wondering if Sitka, Alaska, where I’d spent 2-3...
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2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about...
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“Speak the language.” Children’s book illustrator E.B. Lewis shares his...
“Art is a language,” Children’s book illustrator E.B. Lewis told a roomful of illustrators, aspiring and professional. “Speak the language.” What is a language, Lewis asked. “In spoken language, it’s...
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An amazing way to learn illustration
So what is musician-performer-dancer-composer Lindsey Stirling doing on this blog about children’s book illustration? She’s an artist but she works in a different medium. She hasn’t published a...
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“A marvelous way to tell a difficult story”
The upcoming Austin SCBWI Graphic Novel Workshop on Saturday, October 5 promises to be a day for writers and illustrators, writer-illustrators and anyone interested in exciting alternative literary...
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A ‘Writing Process’ post
My friend, San Antonio SCBWI Illustrators Coordinator Akiko White recently tagged me to take part in the Writing Process Blog Tour. It was fun because it got me thinking about how the kind of online...
View ArticleTerrible in pink?
A Terrible Lizard’s soliloquy moves us to empathy, or maybe not in the gorgeously tactile T is for Terrible (Macmillan)– a 2005 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year by Peter McCarty....
View ArticleCelebrating children’s picture books!
Below, a sweet picture book trailer by author-illustrator Peter McCarty for his incomparable Chloe (HarperCollins Childrens). You can see art samples from the winners of the New York Times Best...
View ArticleMinimally drawn Miffy
Hey Miffy you’re so fine. You’re so fine you blow my mind — hey Miffy! Or Nijntje, as this children’s book character by illustrator author Dick Bruna is known in Holland and much of Europe. She’s a...
View ArticlePainting old buildings
Oh, my. Yes, painting old buildings in watercolor not latex. You’ll want to see illustrator and fine-arts painter James Gurney dash off a plein air urbanscape — before the time’s up on his parking...
View Article‘Charging’ up your watercolor
Why do we always seem to paint so lightly with watercolor? Why do our paintings tend to miss that dependable artist’s ‘best friend’, a dark passage? The omission rarely occurs for artists and...
View Article‘Illustrating’ with watercolor
Illustrating with watercolor requires thinking deliberately about the pattern of darks in the overall painting’s value pattern (light, midtone and dark configuration.) In recent weeks, we’ve been on...
View ArticleWhen Wearing Red
Engraving (left) by Gustave Dore. We’ve talked here recently about ‘pushing darks’ and ‘heading into the darks.’ Referring to dark values — those lower depths of the gray scale so essential in painting...
View ArticleArtists, illustrators, dogged world-builders
He never saw a jungle, because he never left his native country of France. But he brought jungles and dreams to Paris in his art. Henri Roussea’s depictions of beasts in the wild derived from what he...
View ArticleIllustrators, earn your Raccoon Badge of Honor?
Vector art illustration — It’s not just for business logos anymore. Children’s book illustrators like Wendy Martin use it in their fine art creation and the books they illustrate for publishers of all...
View ArticleThe real Dr. Seuss
Yesterday elementary schools across the country pounced upon the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day and its patron saint, The Cat in the Hat — I mean, Dr. Seuss, aka Theodore...
View ArticlePicture books on the library conference floor
The hilarious picture book The Day The Crayons Quit, (Philomel) by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers (mostly, he says, with his left hand) trounced the competition for this year’s Texas...
View ArticleA robust new world of illustrated children’s nonfiction?
“A nonfiction writer is a storyteller who has sworn an oath to tell the truth.” A great quote from Newbery Award winning children’s nonfiction author Russell Freedman. Of course nonfiction has a very...
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