Katie has a handy rundown of the PB Month posts over at Out of the Box. Here’s a link, suitable for bookmarking.

Now on to December.

The post Picture Book Month coverage appeared first on The Horn Book.

Our Picture Book Month 2012 celebration draws (no pun intended!) to a close today. Here’s a cheat sheet to our coverage in case you missed anything.

New web-only articles:
- Barbara Bader on “Absorbing Pictures and What They Say”
- 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Illustrator Award winner Peter Sís pays tribute to “Three Mentors”
- “Over and Over,” Crescent Dragonwagon’s poignant essay about her mother, editor and author Charlotte Zolotow
- editor/publisher Patricia Lee Gauch discusses “The Picture Book as an Act of Mischief”

Picture book–related content from our archives:
- author/illustrator Esther Averill asks “What Is a Picture Book?”
- Great Ladies Charlotte Zolotow and Barbara Cooney on writing and illustrating picture books
- Karla Kuskin offers a reviewer’s perspective with “To Get a Little More of the Picture: Reviewing Picture Books”
- eight illustrators talk shop in “Studio Views”

Can’t get enough picture book love? Scholar Leonard S. Marcus writes about first impressions in his November issue article “Face Out: Picture Book Covers.” And Lolly and Robin host a lively ongoing conversation about picture books at Calling Caldecott.

Access all of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage by clicking the tag Picture Book Month.

The post Picture Book Month coverage round up appeared first on The Horn Book.

Mischief: “Playful misbehavior or troublemaking, especially in children.” “Playfulness that is intended to tease, or mock or to create trouble.” As for the mischief-maker, my favorite definition: “Someone who rises up against the constituted authority.”

I remember a historical mischief-maker, the Lord of Misrule, who for a brief time around Christmas in medieval England disbanded all rules, and everything in society was inverted. A servant was the lord, the lord was a servant; chaos was encouraged. Anything could happen, and frequently did.

And isn’t this true in the best picture books as well? Status is inverted: the child rules! Or animals. The outside world’s adult-created orders are frequently and happily subverted. Or the book creates rules of its own. In a picture book, mischief is a badge of honor.

I am a firm believer that mischief in a picture book begins with its author and artist: their sense of play, of fun, of teasing, of surprise. In text think Russell Hoban, Peggy Parrish, Roald Dahl, Mo Willems, Kevin Henkes, Jon Scieszka. In art think David Small, Lane Smith, Tomie dePaola, Rosemary Wells, Eric Carle, Steven Kellogg. The author and artist must wake up to the child in themselves in order to create a picture book. Wake up to delight, surprise, tease. Wake up to the freedom that mischief allows.

Imagination — the bigger, the better — is, of course, a fellow traveler in all of this childlike play. Daring is, too, perhaps.

Ironically, in the beginning, frequently reflecting the period in which they were writing—puritanical, rational, Industrial, Victorian — children’s books in general were most often didactic, meant to teach a lesson. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the industry of printing and reproduction was beginning, books for children became “items of commerce.” Only then, writes chronicler Susan Meyers, “did cows leaping over the moon, Banbury cock-horses, bridges falling down, mice running hickory dickory dock or songs of sixpence assume any significance in the realm of children’s literature.”

Had there always been Edward Lears and Walter Cranes lurking in the draperies? In the mead halls? Did the new possibilities for printing and reproduction let the mischief-makers out of the bottle? In 1846, the nonsense and illustration of Edward Lear was being discovered by Londoners. Lear loved simply entertaining children. He wrote to a friend, “Nothing I look forward to half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg down the great gallery…but I dare not.” Yet his verses and art never lost this sense of the absurd, “and they were designed to make children laugh, not tremble.”

Randolph Caldecott came onto the London scene in the mid-1800s; and in the 1860s, one of my all-time favorites, Walter Crane. He believed that stories should teach, but by arousing the child’s imagination. He felt stories that aroused the child’s imagination were not only acceptable but “downright necessary.”

The tradition of mischief-making in picture books, then, is long. Indeed, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century picture book writers and illustrators, this state of mind is so pervasive that it makes its way grinning or dancing into the contours of every aspect of a picture book. And to say “what if?” to the most extraordinary and frequently lawless, spirited, outrageous and impossible circumstances.

Think of Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel fame who loved his steam shovel so much that, when Mary Anne was deemed old hat, defunct, and surrounded by new electric and diesel shovels that put her out of work, Mike decided he and Mary Anne would dig a hole for the new town hall, unbidden. So, happily — and mischievously — they took on the whole Popperville establishment by proving that Mary Anne was anything but defunct, as huffing and puffing she indeed dug the cellar of the new town hall in one day. The problem: no way to get out of the cellar. It was a little boy, in another inversion of power, who said, “Why couldn’t we leave Mary Anne in the cellar and build the new town hall above her?” Talk about mischief!

And how about Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola? DePaola, himself a mischief-maker, clearly loves Strega Nona, the wise witch of the Italian village, but it is into childlike Big Anthony that he puts his sense of mischief and play, allowing the character a liberating day of Misrule. On that day, Big Anthony doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t obey! He cooks pasta in Strega Nona’s forbidden magic pot, and pasta flows out of the pot, out of the doors, and into the very streets of the tiny village. Big Anthony, totally out of control. Do you suppose Tomie dePaola was grinning wickedly as he let the pasta roll?

I love the whole school world of Kevin Henkes: Chrysanthemum, Owen, Julius, Chester. But no character more so than Lilly of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. Surely Henkes became the saucy Lilly herself to know so intimately and understand so well how crucial it was for her to tell her favorite teacher, Mr. Slinger, about her new musical purple plastic purse immediately, mid-class, not waiting, even though the purse was tinkling right throughout show-and-tell. When Mr. Slinger takes Lilly’s purse away until after class, Henkes lets Lilly loose, allowing her to mischievously send Mr. Slinger a note saying: “Big Fat Mean Mr. Stealing Teacher! Wanted by F.B.I.” Talk about Misrule!

Characters as “mini Lords of Misrule” abound in picture books. You are probably naming more of them to yourself now. And you know their stories: Madeline, Curious George, Babar, Eloise, Max of the Rosemary Wells sort as well as Max of the Sendak sort. And these are old friends, but new friends appear every year. Friends like Olivia by Ian Falconer, The Ladybug Girl by Jacky Davis and David Soman, Otis by Loren Long, Fancy Nancy by Jane O’Connor, Pigeon from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems — at-large child characters in adult worlds. Children love characters that are characters, and they love adult worlds out of control. It gets children’s attention like almost nothing else.

Mischief affects everything in a book. Even shape and design. In truth, shape and design are a critical part not only of the artistry of a book but of the character’s adventure itself — its very motion. This was certainly something that I discovered when editing picture books at Philomel: that — in addition to the words and the draftsmanship — the shape and design of a picture book is part of the mischief.

One of the prime movers of picture books is the shape created by the snowball effect. George Meredith, in his “Essay on Comedy,” writes about comic spirit and the snowball effect as an accumulation of event that gathers the snow of story as it careens up or down toward climax, going too far, and making us laugh or wonder or cheer because it is out of control. The snowball effect functions similarly in picture books. Something happens to unleash the snowball of story — in art and text — rolling faster and faster, up or down hill, as it gathers the snow of incident or mishap or superabundance — like the growing number of animals in Amos McGee’s kitchen in the Caldecott-winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by Erin E. Stead — until something happens to stop it. The speed and growing weight demands redress.

Wanda Gág, that Minnesota-born American writer, came on the scene in the 1920s with Millions of Cats. Her snowball-gathering story of the little old man and little old woman who had no child rolls relentlessly through the pages of this book as the old man, deciding that a cat of their own might be just the right substitute, “climbed over sunny hills…trudged through cool valleys…at last [coming] to a hill which was quite covered with cats. Cats here, cats there, cats and kittens everywhere, hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” Over and over in the best picture books, the artist and author are willing to go far enough. In this case, two cats wouldn’t do. Nor would ten. Nor would fifty. The old man chose hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of cats. A superabundance. Gág’s woodcut art snowballs lyrically through the book, stealing your eye and telling it just where to go as the hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of cats make their way home with the old man, and begin to quarrel. The chaos of misrule finally gets redress when the littlest, homeliest kitten somehow prevails, to become the couple’s own.

Can you feel Wanda Gág, both artist and author, going far enough? Can you feel the snowball of story? And supreme designer that she is, understanding that after the weight of all those quarreling cats, their climactic fight to see who will stay, the single small, slightly homely kitty, even in design, is an extraordinarily powerful image.

Shapewise, you can begin to see the picture book is almost a wave of story, and the artist as well as the writer knows that: creating horizontally, letting go to picture after picture, shape is a felt thing. A mischievous thing. Shape is not only lovely to look at, to savor, to appreciate: shape is movement, horizontal movement, a vehicle for story on its way to climax. It takes a sense of mischief to push it far and originally enough.

Readers know David Small, and his books, the touching The Librarian or enchanting The Gardener, books that he created with his poet wife, Sarah Stewart. However, it was the wildly funny manuscript that the usually sensible nonfiction writer Judith St. George wrote that grabbed Small’s internal child by the collar and gave it a shake. The manuscript was called So You Want to Be President?, about the quirky history and known foibles of presidents.

Everything was wrong about this picture book text. It was too long — twenty typed pages. It was certainly too old for kindergarteners. It was about presidents: not kindergarteners’ favorite subject. But, oh, that text! Both smart and sassy, and definitely mischievous. I loved it on the first read. Cecilia Yung, Philomel art director, thought almost instantly of David Small to illustrate it. That was fine with me. I remembered that David had illustrated Gulliver’s Travels in a nice warm and sensible crosshatch that would be perfect. We sent him the manuscript and crossed our fingers. He loved it instantly, and I am sure with a wry grin and mischievous pen, he started sketching president after president even before he had a contract. When the first wild sketches came in, I just flopped down into a chair and said, “Oh, my!” He had worked as an editorial cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal and New Yorker — unbeknownst to me then — and he launched into these presidents like a koi fish at a feeding! He sent us sketches for Nixon kicking up his heels in the White House bowling alley, Taft being lifted into a giant bathtub by derrick, Reagan getting fitted in Truman’s haberdashery. And so it went.

Despite having nothing in Caldecott rules that asked for art to add something to text, So You Want to Be President? added mood and mischief, and David Small won a Caldecott medal for his trouble in 2001.

There are almost no limits or rules for the mischievous world of the picture book, except: does it work? Anything goes, as long as it is good: words with wit and tenderness and original moment, art that is art, in unlimited mediums — collage, line, erasers, oils, pencil, computer — a vast variety of mediums and creators mischievously going “far enough” to give their readers something so new it imitates the best of life. Perhaps more than life.

In the 1860s Walter Crane called creating a picture book a “matter of consequence.” But lately, the very future of the picture book has been called into question. Let me ask it out loud: how important is a picture book?

None of us knows what changes the digital age will bring to the picture book. Even so, while it is exciting to see a child read a book by him or herself in whatever form, lucky the parent and child who can cuddle together, child in lap or close, to read a picture book — with all its wonders — and to look at the extraordinary art along with the words as a miraculous extension of life itself.

There is in a picture book, make no mistake, something for the eye, something for the heart, something for the mind, something for the funny bone, something for the senses. The picture book, made through the wit and comic spirit of high mischief and consummate skill, is, and will continue to be, as Walter Crane said well over those hundred years ago, “something of consequence.”

This article  is adapted from the BERL Lecture (originally delivered at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art on October 22, 2011) and is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post The Picture Book as an Act of Mischief appeared first on The Horn Book.

So, with deceptive simplicity — for who, of any age, does understand time? — did my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, begin her book Over and Over, first published in 1957.

As I write these words today, Charlotte is ninety-seven and I am fifty-nine. I see to her care. When she wrote Over and Over, she was forty-two and I was four, and she saw to mine. It is also fall, maybe her last on this green-and-gold spinning globe. At this intersection Over and Over, about cycles, seems to me celebratory, bittersweet, and comforting. Its meaning and its text — first read aloud to me by my mother before I was myself able to read — seem almost as enduring as the cycles of death and renewal themselves.

Twenty-eight years after its original publication, Over and Over was reissued in hardcover in 1985, then published again in paperback in 1995. The unnamed little girl in Over and Over, who doesn’t understand about time (and note, please, that Charlotte did not add the word yet), is at a cusp, the border between the hardly differentiated passage of days, weeks, and months and a dawning sense of memory. She hasn’t connected what makes sequential time, but she does hold pieces of it; they move, unconnected, in a dreamlike déjà vu. This happened before…didn’t it?

“She was so little that she didn’t know about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” Charlotte wrote. “She certainly didn’t know about January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. She was so little she didn’t even know summer, winter, autumn, spring.” And how thoughtful of Charlotte to kindly enumerate these compass points, just in case a young listener might be in the same predicament as the little girl.

“She remembered a crocus once, but she didn’t know when,” Charlotte continued. “She remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, and a Christmas tree, and a birthday cake, a Thanksgiving dinner and valentines. But they were all mixed up in her mind.”

When the little girl awakens one morning to snow, her excitement is palpable; at least to her mother, who, slowly and gently, explains winter. But the little girl has a question: “What comes next?” She and her mother continue through seasons and holidays, noting spring rabbits, summer vacations, and “the ghosts and witches and tigers and tramps and devils” that come at Halloween. After each explanation, the little girl asks her mother, “What comes next?” Thus the book travels a full turn on the year’s wheel.

Those who study children’s literature might describe Over and Over as a concept book, for it teaches the concept of time’s passage — life’s cycles, days, weeks, and months adding up to a year, which then repeats. But that classification no more captures Over and Over’s essence than a chloroformed butterfly pinned to black velvet touches a living monarch fanning its wings on the petals of a red bergamot blossom. The essence of Over and Over is its blend: everyday and wondrous; the reassurance of routine and predictable cycles and the exhilaration of large and small miracles that come and go. Over and Over gets across a life-force: the alternating current of permanence with transition.

Now, as Charlotte approaches a hundred years, she and the little girl in Over and Over stand at similar cusps. The little girl is leaving babyhood, the timelessness of life’s beginning, to enter childhood and the eventual time-bound phases of adulthood; Charlotte is in the process of returning to a state unbound by time. All the things she has seen, done, and experienced in her long, interesting life are, as Over and Over put it, “mixed up in her mind.” She too is dreamlike. Sometimes people, objects, and ideas she remembers break from the depths and float up. Sometimes she communicates what has surfaced to me and her other caregivers, usually without context. But unlike the little girl, she does not ask, “What comes next?” It seems this is no longer an important question.

That things are “mixed up in her mind” does not, at this point, upset her; rather, her glimpses of déjà vu delight her (and those of us who hear them). Charlotte has shown me that one need not go to a yogi’s cave in India to “be here now.” Just get old enough. You lose the past and its wounds, as well as the future, with its anticipated losses. There’s just now. And now, for Charlotte, who is not in pain but is safe and warm in her own home, surrounded by people who love her and look after her well, with frequent visits from a much-loved black-and-white cat named Tumbleweed who sleeps with her…now is generally a wondrous place to be.

Still, the past does surface. Many afternoons, during the week each month I spend with her, I’ll go out on a walk. If she’s awake when I leave the house, I reprise a version of the lines from her book Do You Know What I’ll Do? In that book, an older sibling tells a much younger one, “Do you know what I’ll do on my walk? I’ll look at the clouds and tell you the shapes when I get home.” If Charlotte’s awake when I return from the quiet streets of her small suburban Hudson River town, I’ll say, “Charlotte, do you remember those delicate, airy white wildflowers that’re called Queen Anne’s lace?” A smile will break over her face, like sun coming up over the horizon, lighting the hills. And she’ll reply, with some variation of “I didn’t…until you reminded me of it just now.” When I describe people, and the dogs they are walking, or children getting ice cream from a truck, or a cat glimpsed in a window, her response is simply, “Awww…” smiling; a response which conveys, “How adorable! How marvelous!”

This peaceful state has continued for about two years. Oh, how she suffered before that, when she began to lose linear time! She yelled at me, and everyone around her, a lot. Everything infuriated her. Bed rails. The wrong flavor of ice cream. “I KNOW that!” “Don’t do that!” “You don’t understand me, you never have!” “The coffee wasn’t even hot, they brought me lukewarm coffee! If they brought you cold coffee, wouldn’t you be angry?” A brutal phase. We went through seventeen caregivers in three years. I found notebooks and calendars she’d kept earlier, in which she’d written “Monday THEN Tuesday Wednesday wedsday remenber THINK CHARLOTTE think” and similar disjointed self-reminders, some written many times. That phase of aging is heartbreaking; elders have not yet let go, but though they grip furiously, they know that they cannot keep holding on. I saw my aunt, Charlotte’s older sister, go through a similar phase. They were both so angry at what they perceived as pending helplessness. I grieved for and with my aunt and with Charlotte. I tried to be patient. If you know that control of your own life is slipping away, I came to understand, you try to control everyone else’s.

I could not have anticipated that things were about to change.

As I said, I spend one week each month with Charlotte, in her home — the same home in which I grew up, and where she still lives. Her bedroom is now downstairs, not upstairs. And she lives not alone, as she did from age sixty to eighty-two, nor with two children and a husband, as she did when she was a young wife and mother. Her days are shared with round-the-clock caregivers, Jamaican and African. Young, Charlotte loved the music of Vivaldi and Telemann. I made an effort to have CDs by these composers played for her, especially when she was waking up. But now she seems, improbably, to much prefer the music of the Senegalese singer Yossou N’Dour, introduced by Hawa, her Mauritanian-Guinean caregiver.

How can I tell? I never saw Charlotte dance to Vivaldi or Telemann or, for that matter, dance at all. But now — even though she is bed-bound and can no longer stand, I have seen her sit forward some mornings, when she is partially raised in her hospital bed, and simply sway, smiling. Sometimes she even lifts her arms, moving them in time to the marimbas, the gentle acoustic beat, N’Dour’s voice singing in words neither of us understands. Moving in time to. Time again: these moments are in time yet out of it. I am amazed. My mother?

As brilliant and insightful a writer as she was, Charlotte was also (when she was in what we call, perhaps wrongly, her “right mind”) often demanding, perfectionist, tense, and driven (you don’t write more than a hundred children’s books and become vice-president of a major New York publishing house without being driven). To see her now swaying, smiling… and to ask her, “Are you happy?” and hear her say, “Yes,” and not, “Yes, but…” is an undreamt-of privilege and surprise.

Charlotte divorced her husband (my father, show business biographer Maurice Zolotow) in 1969; they remained friendly, however, until his death in 1991. As for the children, they grew up and moved away, as children do. Charlotte’s son, my brother, Stephen, grew up to be a professional poker player. I stayed, loosely, in the family business: literature.

A few years back I was sitting in an attorney’s office with Stephen. Charlotte’s royalties were being discussed. “Well, some of her books,” said my brother, who is highly literate in finance, “are always going sell, like Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. They’re — what would you call them, cash cows?” I looked at him, bemused, and said, “In the trade, we call them ‘classics.’” Though straight faces and a flat emotional affect are de rigueur in both poker and law, both my brother and the attorney half-smiled.

A classic, by definition, endures.

The point at which Charlotte’s Over and Over protagonist steps into the river of time is winter: the first event discussed is snow; the first holiday, Christmas. The girl and her mother travel on through Valentine’s Day, Easter, spring, summer, seasons, and celebrations. Finally, after Thanksgiving, seemingly replete with the wonders of the year, the little girl asks, “Does anything come now?”

“‘Oh, yes,’ said her mother. ‘The next thing that comes is a very special day. Your birthday!’”

Birthdays: mine is late November — yes, after Thanksgiving, like the little girl. My mother’s is in June.

Charlotte dozed during the first part of her last birthday party. So perhaps when she asked me, “What did I miss?” she may have meant while she was half-asleep that day, listening as people came and went, as food was eaten and bottle caps flipped, as laughter and conversation rose and fell. But I chose a different context. “Well, Charlotte,” I said, “It’s your ninety-seventh birthday today, we’re on your porch for the party, and let’s see…you wrote many, many books, and you helped hundreds of other people write their books. And you read thousands of books. You were married, you had two children, you had a lover…You had a garden, and you traveled all over America and went to Europe several times. You were head of a department. You went to great museums. You had a poodle named Cleo and now you have a cat named Tumbleweed. You ate Chinese food and French food, and Italian and Indian food, and now, today, you’re eating African and Jamaican food…I don’t think you missed much!”

Charlotte started smiling as I began this recitation, and her smile grew wider and wider as I continued. She began to laugh. When I finished she said, “Good!” Not long after that, we brought out the cake and, with help, she blew out the candles.

When the little girl does that in Over and Over, she makes a wish. “‘What did you wish?’ everyone asked her. ‘I wished for it all to happen again,’ the little girl said. And of course, over and over, year after year, it did.”

So ends Over and Over, a book that will last, I believe, as classics do. But Charlotte herself will not and cannot last. I will grieve all the harder, I think, yet also be better able to let go, because of the surprise of our time together now; a gift following a relationship which, though close, was always conflicted.

When a parent dies, a life ends, and another life is permanently altered. Something that was is no more. It can’t all “happen again.”

And yet. I will be left, when Charlotte goes, not only with her books and the cycles themselves that she enumerated so well but with something she said to me recently. It was late. We were having a long, rambling conversation, which happens rarely but occasionally. I never know if such a conversation will be our last, since there are days when Charlotte does not speak at all. We were in the dark, me sitting by the hospital bed in the room that had once been the family living room but is now her bedroom.

Charlotte has lost many teeth. She speaks softly and slowly, so to hear her I had to lean in closely and listen with full attention.

Here is what she said that night: “Since I’ve had all the days…and they…were wonderful…I want you…to do the same.”

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage. Click here to read the classic Horn Book article Making Picture Books: The Words by Charlotte Zolotow.

The post Over and Over appeared first on The Horn Book.

My mother taught me photography. She was a superb amateur photographer, and as a child I was introduced early to the wonders of a darkroom. I grew up in a house filled with family photographs that were valued and enjoyed. And even when I was young I was aware that my mother’s photographs provided strong visual connections to the past.

I think of my books as extended family albums. In fact, many of the children have appeared in four or five of my books as they’ve grown from cradle to nursery school. But, more importantly, I seek a close “family” connection with each child that combines both photography and friendship.

None of the kids in my books is a model. They are children of friends, friends of friends, or strangers that I approach in the grocery store or the park. Sometimes I have never laid eyes on the child until I show up with my camera and lighting equipment in tow.

When I walk through the front door, I’m hunting for an emotional bond with the child, the joy of new-found friends that animates a photograph. In my ideal picture, the child is comfortable and relaxed and at the same time radiates an appealing energy. Overcoming the basic discomfort of the situation — the common anxiety of being photographed, the flashing strobes — is a continual challenge.

I always arrive with a wish list of photos, but I have learned to go with the flow of the child and to improvise quickly. I will use every device from silly animal noises to playing hide-and-seek to sharing crackers to create my personal hybrid: a photo playdate. As I pack up my equipment and say good-bye, I may be tired, but I’m also high with excitement because I’ve tapped into a special pool of energy — I’ve found the genuine smile.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: Family Albums appeared first on The Horn Book.

See, the thing about the medium I’m using now is, every morning I get up to it, or sit down with it, and I try just a little red with it, and BANG I have the same trouble with that red as I did yesterday. But that’s the medium I’m using now. Cat hair. Did I mention cat hair? There will be no cat hair problems with the new medium. Also, and this is important, my new medium is not going to be the kind of medium that would have me work for months with it, finish page upon page of paintings using it, only to find, after some reflection, that I am disgusted with both it and them. My next medium is the medium I never looked at through the spaces between my fingers, hands over my eyes.

My next medium is going to flow like mad, fluid, yes, mmm, like honey but not so sticky, like butter but not so greasy, like melted chocolate but cool.

All that I ask of a medium is that it let me create something that looks like you could hold it, like a real object, something that could carry some story along. That it look like it was really easy to do, just this side of uncouth, held there by the lightest touch, that still satisfies me just as colored shapes and lines. I want a medium that can be applied simply, casually, which, if repeated and layered in some hitherto unfathomed sequence, will knock me on the head and make me leave my table to dance the Hucklebuck.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: My Next Medium appeared first on The Horn Book.

“While there is copper there is hope.” — an old French proverb

As an etcher, I think etching, of all graphic media, is the most beautiful way of putting ink on paper. The lines are both freely drawn and sculptural. I love etching.

I’ve tried other graphic techniques but had difficulty getting the desired expressiveness from the techniques that require manually manipulated tools to form images in hard surfaces—woodcuts, wood engraving, and metal engraving. Other techniques that I’ve tried are lithography and serigraphy. And, although both allow ease of movement when making lines, the resulting prints look flat to me when compared to the sculptural quality of etchings.

All graphic media have special qualities difficult to achieve in another media: crisp whites — woodcut and wood engraving; clean precise lines that swell and taper — metal engraving; subtle tonal gradations — lithography; large solid shapes with precise edges — serigraphy.

My work is almost entirely line, and I rely on the ease of execution that moving an etching needle through wax allows. The sculptural quality is just an added benefit. Run your finger gently over the surface of an etching and you can feel the relief.

If you could see an etching at its most beautiful — when it is first pulled off the plate with the paper still damp and soft, the ink shiny and glistening, and the relief of the lines at its highest — you would see exactly what I mean.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: The Sculptural Quality appeared first on The Horn Book.

I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil).

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: Tiny Pieces of Paint appeared first on The Horn Book.

With the lead from a pencil I can make thin delicate words and lines, bold solid black forms, and wispy, smooth gray shadings. All with the same soft lead. Everybody can, anybody — no experience necessary. Everybody can do it, from the very beginning, right out of the box.

Any pencil will do, but my absolute favorite would have to be a TICONDEROGA #2, brand new (they don’t last long) and freshly sharpened. Golden yellow (Cadmium yellow), six-sided, with yellow and green ferrule, and at one end a pink eraser.

Sharpening a new pencil, cutting away the wood to get at the lead, was, at first, very conservative: a hand-held sharpener with one or more hobs for various thickness of pencil. A little later on, and more interesting and bold: a penknife (a non-threatening, pencil-sharpening-only penknife). More limiting: a wall- or desk-mounted hand-turned apparatus.

Up/down, side/side, cross/cross, scribble/scribble, swirl, and then smudge/smudge with a thumb or finger. A wonderful way to make marks on paper. Spare use of the eraser preserves it and avoids losing some potentially useful bit.

Number two is a degree of lead soft enough for most of my needs, but if I must have a very bold, extra-black image for a dog or a train in a tunnel or the night sky, only an EBONY VERIBLACK will do. The whole pencil is black, the lead very soft with unparalleled smudge-ability.

Sketching, note-taking, list-making using a lead pencil in sketchbooks, on envelopes, and on bits of paper of every size and description is a necessary, useful, and pleasurable part of my life. Finding a bit of an old pencil note or sketch, no matter how cryptic, can bring entire events into focus.

Never-used lead pencils also have their place. I often come across pencils in my drawer that say Grand Rapids, Michigan; Bismark, North Dakota; Meteor Crater, Arizona; Mississippi State University. I’m sure the lead in any of these pencils would produce very satisfactory images, but I can’t bring myself to spoil the typography in order to use them. So I’ll just sharpen another TICONDEROGA #2 and get busy.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: Ticonderoga #2 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Cotton rag fiber suspended in water (a wet, messy, colorful slurry) is poured through hand-cut stencils (made from foam meat trays) onto a screen (a window screen will do). The result—an image in handmade paper. The paper is the picture. The picture is the paper.

The advantages of this technique are many:

I now have a use for all those discarded yogurt containers and hair coloring squeeze bottles; they make excellent pouring cups and drawing tools.

I’ve developed marvelous upper-body strength, without the cost of a gym membership, from hauling forty-two pound pails of damp fiber (pulp) around the studio.

At the market I’m known for my fashion sense; my pulp splattered clothing makes quite an impression.

I’ve discovered that a bucket of pulp is the better mousetrap (I am withholding the disgusting details).

Looking for additions to my motley collection of blenders (used to mix pigment and chemicals) gives me a reason to stop and shop garage sales.

Friends have found that the five-gallon pulp shipping pails make nifty nesting buckets for Rhode Island Reds.

And, of course, there is the pleasure of swirling my hands through five gallons of glorious color to mix fiber and pigment.

The drawbacks are few:

Cotton rag fiber spoils, and it is no secret when it does. Open the doors and windows and turn on the fans!

Then there is the problem of color test strips catching fire in the microwave — quite a dramatic touch, but a bit dangerous.

So why pulp painting? It works.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Studio Views: Pulp Painting appeared first on The Horn Book.