Eight picture book artists talk shop in these pieces about tools and techniques

“Ticonderoga #2″ by Donald Crews

“Pulp Painting” by Denise Fleming

“The Sculptural Quality” by Arthur Geisert

“Family Albums” by Margaret Miller

“My Next Medium” by Chris Raschka

“Sharpie Markers to the Rescue” by Lynn Reiser

“Tiny Pieces of Paint” by Peter Sís

“Why I Use Oil Paints So Much” by Paul O. Zelinsky

Originally published in the March/April 1998 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, these pieces are part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In designing each of my books, I try to match method and medium. As I lay out the pages, the story takes shape, the text evolves, the art and the words begin to interact. Best Friends Think Alike is a play — written in dialogue — about playing. I looked for ways to indicate the speakers and to convey the interaction of fantasy and reality. Colored names, type, and clothing — red for Ruby and blue for Beryl — would identify the actors.

Markers are not just watercolors in a different delivery system. A limited palate of watercolor offers a limitless variety of color. A marker, like a crayon, asserts its own color. But I found that dotting, swirling, striping, and stippling created new colors and built contours and textures. Like watercolors, washable markers are transparent, and become deep and rich when layered. Unfortunately, their color can run when one line is drawn over another. Sharpie markers to the rescue. Like technical ink, Sharpies are not waterbased, do not smear, and make clear lines. This property suggested the use of colored outlines to define the boundaries between the everyday world and imagination — black for reality, and each girl’s color for her fantasies — and inspired the design for the endpapers. Throughout the book I had used purple — a mixture of Ruby’s red and Beryl’s blue — to express the friends’ agreement. In the pattern of the endpapers, red and blue meet in crisp stripes to make a purple grid — simple with markers, too difficult with a brush.

Like watercolors, markers reveal the activity of the artist. This gives the art immediacy and energy, but comes at a price. Both media are unforgiving when there is a mistake. Each picture is quickly drawn, but often must be drawn again and again before it is right.

Not every picture book calls for markers, but I look forward to being surprised again by their happy vitality.

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

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Watercolors:
They don’t stay where you put them. You lay down a nice, beautiful wash, and five minutes later it’s all collecting in pools and drying like rings under a coffee cup. Then you rush in and swab the dark patches just slightly, lightening them to match their surround. It’s instinctive; you can’t help it, even though you know all the while that so many white blobs will soon appear, sending new rings of color flowing out from each botched repair. I would have illustrated E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle in lovely watercolors, but ended up corralling all those unruly washes within more dependable pen-and-ink lines, and even punching up their tonal gradations with ink hatchings.

Pastels:
I have a great, big set of pastels that I bought in college. Though they’re thick sticks and clumsy for details, they can create some marvelous effects. One of my earlier books, Mirra Ginsburg’s The Sun’s Asleep Behind the Hill, had soft clouds of pastel rubbed into watercolor in many places. But pastels do send up clouds of dust—and some of these colors contain terrible toxins. So these days the chalky sticks just sit in chromatically ordered rows within their futuristic plastic case, unused. I’m afraid of my pastels.

Colored Pencils:
I really don’t like the kind of color a colored pencil produces unless it reaches near solid coverage. If you have any area to cover, this can mean a tremendous amount of work. You scrub and scrub and scrub until you’ve laid down a solid layer of color. Mrs. Lovewright’s green argyle socks, for example, in Lore Segal’s The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless, Her Cat. Then you close up shop for the night, and in the morning, you see that you haven’t done such a good job: white specks of paper show all through the dulled-out green. So you go over it again, day after day. Even simple lines, like the paisley of Mrs. Lovewright’s house dress, break up. For the longest time I thought my eyes played tricks on me, and wishful thinking made me see a stronger color than was there. But some other artist, I forget who, recently confirmed my experience. So now I hold the paper responsible for this dirty trick: decompressing overnight, and undoing the day’s work.

Then there is the disastrous situation when one particular color (say, the blue-gray of her dress’s shadows and her walls’ wainscotting) is discontinued in mid-book. Your one remaining pencil grows shorter and shorter, you husband it all you can, no store carries that color anymore—in fact, the company has gone out of business, or merged with another—and you can’t create it by blending other colors. Pencils don’t blend. Nor can they be erased.

Acrylics:
As part of my art education, I was taught to disdain acrylics. And from what I’ve done with them, I haven’t been convinced otherwise. They are excellent, though, for ease of wash-up.

Computer:
I think the computer is an excellent collage machine, but for actual drawing—well, it doesn’t exactly meet my needs, or perhaps I don’t meet the computer’s. I’ve taught myself Painter 4, and have yet to create even a doodle worth saving.

And then there are oils. There’s nothing like them for emulating Old Master oil paintings, which accounts for my three Grimm tales, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Rapunzel. Also American primitive paintings, as in Anne Isaacs’s Swamp Angel. My only other oil picture book, I think, is The Wheels on the Bus. Candy-colored, thick and almost chewable, spreading thin but still brilliant, showing brushstrokes or smoothly hiding them, and always staying exactly where you put it, oil paint was the only choice. On top of which, I could come home from work with the wonderful scent of linseed oil and turpentine in my clothes.

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