How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator

Awesome Austin Writers Workshop in session (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

A mega-critique of 26 children’s and YA published and soon-to-be-published authors, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop  ended Sunday, June 29, and everyone drove home in shock.  Shock because it was over and had gone so well and we realized  that we weren’t coming back to hang out with each other again the next day.

The workshop took place in the 1920s-vintage Austin, Texas home of authors Greg and Cynthia Leitich Smith.

Cynthia, who teaches in the children’s and young adult writing MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts thought up and organized the event with help from her author-attorney husband, Greg and other friends from the Austin chapter of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.)  

For three days she led the critiques in a tour de force of quick wit, good fun, practical erudition, zinging (as opposed to stinging) professional insight and Kansas Pioneer Woman stamina. 

Months before we’d been asked to submit up to ten pages of our works in progress. These were the beginnings of picture books, parts of YA novels and sci-fantasy chapter books, poems and nonfiction stories. Each writer got 40-45 minutes of vociferous attention from the group, moderated by Cynthia. 

Liz Scanlon, Alison Dellenbaugh, Erin Edwards and Phillip Yates get their papers in order. April Lurie is in the background. (Photo courtesy of Cynthia Leitich Smith.)

It’s an odd sensation to be on the receiving end of so much focus – 26 bright minds reacting to your prose or verse, while you’re not allowed to talk back. It feels like a surgical procedure is being done – a double cataract removal. 

Like the other dazed & AAWW’ed patients after their operations, I got my copies back scribbled with thoughts, kudos, suggestions for fixes, often accompanied by typed notes. We clutched our precious stacks like they were our medical charts and we were on our gurneys in the recovery room.

Since I was one of two illustrators present, I was invited to pass around a couple of sketches to accompany my picture book offering – for additional AAWW-some scrutiny.

There was a lot of sharing, bonding, helping and a lot of eating going on.  Our graceful “pages” (fellow SCBWI’ers)  Donna Bratton and Carmen Oliver kept us supplied with coffee, scrambled egg kolaches, chocolates, juice and jokes (bad pun jokes — relentless pantomiming on the theme ”turning pages”,  ”flipping pages.” At one point they donned tunics with labels: ”Page #1″ and “Page #2.”)

The founder and first regional adviser of our Austin SCBWI chapter, Meredith Davis was there, along with our current RA Tim Crow and former RA Julie Lake and our 90 year old member Betty X. Davis, who frequently outpaces us.  Participant Gene Brenek wrote later, ”These relationships have been years in the making.” It was true and probably contributed to all the magic we felt around us. Still, not  everyone present was an Awesome Austin writer. You see, Awesome writer Varsha Bajaj joined us from the Houston SCBWI chapter. She became one of us quickly, though.

Taking time out from their paginations, Donna Bratton(left) and Carmen Oliver (right) visit with author Lindsey Lane at the Saturday night party at author Helen Hemphill's home. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith.)

We enjoyed a relaxing Saturday night party in the lovely loft residence of YA author Helen Hemphill and her husband Neil. Children’s writers settled right in to flowing wine, a spectacular catered supper and twinkling night views of the downtown.

Sunday around lunchtime everyone drove home in shock, as I’ve explained above. Many, after recovering somewhat, went straight to blogging about their experience, which is why the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop is all over the Internet today, as it should be.

I’ll borrow the list of attendees from Cynthia’s blog Cynsations.

Brian Anderson, Varsha Bajaj, Chris Barton, Gene Brenek, Shana Burg, Anne Bustard, Tim Crow, Betty X. Davis, Meredith Davis, Alison Dellenbaugh, Erin Edwards, Debbie Gonzales, Helen Hemphill, P.J. Hoover, Varian Johnson, Julie Lake, Lindsey Lane, April Lurie, Mark Mitchell, Jane Peddicord, Liz Garton Scanlon, Greg Leitich Smith, Jo Whittemore, Phil Yates, and Jennifer Ziegler. (Brian Yansky and Frances Hill submitted manuscripts and donated chairs but had to bow out due to a last-minute conflict).

Here are some of the blogposts::

Jo Whittemore, Julie Lake, Liz Scanlon and Betty Davis prepare for the next critique round. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

Mark Mitchell, who wrote this, teaches a summer class in “How to Illustrate Children’s Books” beginning next Tuesday, July 15 at the Art School Austin Museum of Art Art School at 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, Texas 78703.  The class will run Tuesday nights from 6 to 9 p.m. through August 19. For more information on any of the AMOA summer art classes (for adults or children) call the Art School at (512) 323-6380 or visit the AMOA  website. 

I saw this animated film on an art blog and knew I had to commandeer it for my own blogging purposes.

It’s an older work by Seattle animator Tony White (who posted it on youtube a few weeks ago): A life of Katsushika Hokusai, 19th century master of the woodblock print. Appropriately, somehow, he was the son of a mirror-maker.

I remember sitting in the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas one morning years ago, sketching, copying a Hokusai drawing for an assignment in Life Drawing class. He seemed so perfect and so modern. 

White suggests that this genius draftsman (who died in 1849) would have been an animator if he were alive today.  I look at his work and think “children’s illustration.”

Of course you can’t invoke Hokusai without also mentioning that other print master of Edo (Tokyo) whose name also started with an “H.”

June is so yikes-hot in  Austin, Texas. Maybe that’s why this next video grabbed my eye. Enjoy the wintery Agano Snow Scene by Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige.  He was influenced by Hokusai, who was just a few years ahead of him on the ukiyo-e  time line. 
 

Born in 1797 to a samauri family, Hiroshige became a Buddhist monk in his later years.  He has an out-of-this-world-distinction as a graphic artist: A  crater on the planet Mercury is named after him.

BTW, my ASK survey for my upcoming How to illustrate Children’s Books online course is winding down. However you can still get four months of the course absolutely for free by going to

 this link

and answering the question you see on the screen. 

The class begins in just a couple of weeks.  Your suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Author-illustrator Mark G. Mitchell hosts “How to be a children’s book illustrator.”

Some members of “The Inklings” picture book critique group review their portfolios at a pre-conference “emergency session” at Austin’s Central Market Cafe in April.  One of many critique groups in the  Society of  Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Austin Chapter, these ”Inklings” were preparing to have their work examined by their peers and artists’ agent Christina Tugeau at the Austin SCBWI Spring Conference that Saturday. Left to right around are illustrators Martin Thomas, Diandra Schwartz, Amy Farrier, Austin SCBWI Illustration Chair Christy Stallop, Sarah Ackerley and Clint Young. 

 
Thumbs up, down or sideways?

It was the nonverbal language of the portfolio huddle. Christy Stallop, author, creator of humorous illustrations and the Austin SCBWI illustration chair initiated the Sunday morning ”emergency session” review. It would be an RX for those with portfolio jitters before the regional Spring conference that was set for that Saturday.

All right, review may be too milquetoast a word for what came down at the cafe amid sleepy tables of taco breakfasters and laptop mullers. 

Thumbs up and thumbs down, of course, derived from the Romans deciding fhe fates of fallen gladiators. Thumbs sideways is Christy’s contribution to the vernacular. It means ”Toss It.”  
 
“Get it out of your portfolio before it ruins everything !”

Sometimes she would say “Out” flatly while also gesturing thumbs sideways — a sort of combo-imperative.  (Christy is a very talented, ”tough love” illustration chair.)

Great pointers from Christy and the group:                  

1.) Get a real portfolio at an art supply shop. It does not have to be large, but it should have pages with protective sleeves to slide your work into, like a photo album.  Never put original art in your portfolio. Only show reproductions — scans and transparencies are best. (See more on that below.)

2.)  Avoid a busy-looking portfolio with busy pages. I.e. Don’t stuff your portfolio – one piece per page is best. Then the viewer can actually see the artwork. Of course the corollary to that is the artwork you select for the page must have an impact and be unassailable. Ask yourself, ”Is the piece good enough to stand on its own?”

2.)  Don’t worry too much about “rules” of portfolio presentation or format. Use your common sense.  But do find a way to present and organize your portfolio so that it makes good sense for your work. For example, have all of your art pieces lining up the same way in the album so the viewer doesn’t have to turn it this way and that way to examine pieces right side up.  

Grouping  is nice. It breaks things up in a nice way for a better read and gives the viewer a bit of a rest, too, going through. 

Christy suggested that I group my portfolio into two sections — one for color and one for black and white, with each section prefaced by a title page with some spot art (either B&W or color, suggesting what’s to follow.) 

3.) Get business cards professionally printed before an event such as an SCBWI conference. (Christy expressed this a little more emphatically  to me than that.) If you don’t have a print shop handy and you need the cards fast, try a place like Overnightprints.com.  They have plenty of templates on their website that you can use to hastily throw together your card – and still it won’t look like an amateur effort. Yes, you will pay to have the cards sped to your doorstep. 

4.) Yes you may include a few of your “tearsheets” or color photocopies of your published work. 
But carry some of your best original art to a print shop and have it professionally scanned there. 

If you’ve scanned your own artwork at home (make sure the resolution is nothing less than 300 dpi) bring your flashdrive or  CD to printshop to have the piece professionally reproduced.  Choose a matte rather than gloss finish. Yes, it is expensive to make these professional scans. If you must economize, use just a few as your portfolio showstoppers.

5.)  Remember you’re showing your art to editors and art directors in the children’s book industry. So consider this in your selections. Kids, animals, people — especially in action. are good. Duh.

Industrial art, however well done, should probably go.  Same with the techy-looking digital game art, graphic design, most cartoons, album covers, machinery, cars, monsters, sci-fi, architecture (real or fantasy), space ships, nudes from art classes… Thumbs sideways.

And now for something completely different:

The How To Be a Children’s Book Illustrator  blog is offering four months of free online instruction for anyone who clicks here  — and answers the survey question they see on the screen. 

Good deal, huh? The offer is only good through June.
So click now if you’re interested.
The first lesson goes out about the end of the month.  
 

  
Theresa couldn’t find reference of a cat in the pose she imagined for this scene, so she made her own cat of clay, and her own moth of paper and string. She assembled her own little stage set, replete with twigs and texture, to place her critters in.  After creating her world in 3-D, she felt comfortable recreating it in 2-D as an acrylic painting. 

Illustration, diorama and mini-lesson by Theresa Bayer

When I used to do a lot of clay sculpture, I got to the point where I didn’t need much reference. Over the years I developed the ability to sculpt something straight out of my head. When I started painting, I tried doing it purely from my imagination, only to find it much more difficult than sculpting that way. With sculpture, I didn’t have to deal with foreshortening, chiaroscuro (light/shadow), and composition. When I started painting from my imagination, these three aspects of painting confounded me, and I realized I was out of my depth, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Conversely, I found painting from life the simplest way to go. Easy enough to find reference by setting up a still life, or going outdoors to paint, or painting from a live model. But how to tie this in with composing from imagination? Photographic reference was good, but didn’t supply everything I needed for each project. Sketching from life was good, but it still presented some problems: it’s really hard to draw something that doesn‘t hold still, and I’m not skilled at photographing such things.

My answer came in the form of sculptural reference, ie., creating a little scene, or diorama, and painting from it.

I wanted to do a small, whimsical painting of a cat playing with a moth. I sculpted the cat from sketches of my two cats, plus photos I found of cats. I picked out a moth from Animals, by Dover Publications. This book has copyright free reference for artists– although whenever I am using reference such as clip art or photos I always change it around to keep my work original. I made a model of the moth using a clay body and cardboard wings. I set up the models in a box, and added some greenery–the boxwood hedge from our yard had tiny leaves, just the right size. I added a small pan of water for the pool. I painted directly from the diorama; the photo above is strictly for illustrative purposes.

Here is the finished painting.

There are three kinds of clay that can be used to sculpt from: pottery clay, which is water based, poly clay, and plastiline clay, which is oil based. The advantage of pottery clay is that it can be kiln fired, making the model permanent. Poly clay can be made permanent too, if it is oven baked. The advantage of plastiline clay is that it never dries out, so the same figure can be adjusted. I use both pottery clay and plastiline clay.

Creating your own models saves time and frustration. Last year I had a 24 hour deadline for an illustration of a hang glider.  The photo references baffled me; I did not see how I could use them without running into copyright issues. I accomplished the task by making a model of a hang glider out of cardboard and wire, with a tiny clay figure of a man. I used several photos for reference for the model, and ended up designing my own hang glider (I have no idea if my design would actually fly). The model was fun to make, and easy to draw. I made my deadline.

Commercial figurines and toys also make good 3D reference (again, they should be changed for the sake of originality), but there’s nothing like sculpting your own models. Your own style comes through, reiterated in your painting or illustration. You can light sculptural models any way you want, and reuse them for other projects. To sculpt from any kind of clay, all you need is a book to inform you of the technical aspects of that kind of clay, or take a sculpture course or two. Once you’ve made the models, placing them inside a diorama makes it easier to come up with a good composition. 

 Theresa Bayer received her B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.  See examples of her watercolors, acrylics, sketches, sculpture, caricatures, professional illustration, ceramic art, including ocarinas at her website http://www.tbarts.com.
And check her three blogs: 
http://tbarts.blogspot.com (fine arts),  http://tbarts2.blogspot.com (fun arts) http://waterlark.blogspot.com (watercolors)

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Who is the creature lurking in the library in Erik’s Webcomic? I think I know, and I’ve entered Erik’s contest, but I can’t share my guess with anyone. But I will say this much — it’s a character from a book we know. After all, the strip is Hex Libris, in which Kirby, the main character is charged with taking care of a ginormous enchanted library. 

Ever read a novel that just comes to life before your eyes? Well, Hex Libris seizes that theme and runs down the field in an unexpected direction with it. The webcomic by designer- writer Erik Kuntz of Austin, Texas began as a New Year’s resolution. So did his illustration blog A Dog a Day Project  that features Erik’s unstop able canine imagery — with doggy bites of daily commentary.  But that’s a subject for a future post. 

Erik was thinking of the classic Nancy Drew stories of the 1950’s, mulling  how they compared to and contrasted with the Nancy Drew graphic novels being created for today’s teens.

“I wondered, ‘What if there was a place where characters could wander out of their books?’ ” Erik says. ”‘And what would happen if the real Nancy Drew ran into the punky Manga style Nancy Drew?’”

Our hero Kirby meets them both as a result of his new archival responsibilities. And so it is inevitable that the trio and who knows who else (stay tuned…) join forces to solve a mystery or two.

Kirby’s story unfolds in  semi-weekly panels that move us cleanly, easily — even sweetly —  through space and time.  We care about Kirby and Amy (a girl who likes him) and teen girl detective Connie Carter ( the “original” Nancy Drew) and even the little old lady (or is she a witch?) who leases Kirby the uptown apartment that, somehow, magically contains a Library of Congress-like basilica within its tiny walls.

Erik hatched the idea at last year’s Summer Arts Workshop at California State University. He studied comics and animation in the summer program.  He knows and adores comics.  He’s studied under Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, Re-inventing Comics and other titles all about the ‘language’ of an art form that goes back to well, let’s just say paintings on cave walls. 

One of the teachers at the summer workshop, comic book writer-illustrator Trina Robbins encouraged Kuntz to see it through  – his Hex Libris storyline.

“I’ve done so much study over the last few years as to what makes a comic a comic as opposed to an illustrated story,” Erik says. ”It’s a constant struggle between what needs to be put in the picture and what needs to be said ‘out loud’ in words.”  For inspiration, he looks to the late “father of Manga” Osamu Tezuka and the late  E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye and Thimble Theatre.

“Kimba the White Lion  was my favorite show as a kid,” Kuntz says. “It was cartoony without being overly simple.”

“I like the older style of newspaper comics, where the adventure strips had a more realistic look.”
As much as he enjoys comic books,  Erik says, “it’s the comic pages in the Sunday paper that I most enjoy and try to emulate here — their sequential nature and the art style and sense of humor — especially from the 1940s to the 1950s, where they could work bigger and there was more possibility.” 

Alas, the gorgeous graphics of Prince Valiant (Gary Gianni carries on with the storybook imagery first created by Hal Foster in 1937) and For Better or for Worse  (Lynn Johnston) have been scrunched to near-insignificance as newspapers continue to shrink their content. 

Newspapers themselves seem to be folding (no pun intended) as a mainstream media and the ultimate cartoon delivery vehicle. But perhaps the World Wide Web can do for the old newspaper “funny pages” what Manga has done for comic book and graphic novel publishing.

“I think every artist who does children’s or cartoony stuff would do well to look at the web as an opportunity.” Kuntz says. “There is a huge number of people publishing strips. Often the content is poor. You won’t ‘get’ it if you weren’t out drinking with the cartoonist and his friends the night before. Other webstrips cater to extremely specific readers, such as Penny-Arcade.com.  ”If you don’t know anything about video games, you’ll be mystified by the strip,” he says. 

“There is a stunning amount of good work out there. There are quite a few brilliant child-friendly comics.  More kids are reading comics on the Web. Half of them are newspaper strips in syndication – the traditional old newspaper strips like Calvin and Hobbes, which is being run again and again on the Web. That’s where kids go now to read Calvin and Hobbes.  My browser opens all the comics I want to read each day in tabs. I don’t read them in the newspaper any more.

“I decided some while back that the Web would be an ideal way for me to do an old fashioned serial strip.  It’s an inexpensive way to put work out there and a much easier way to get in front of somebody. With the Web and the 2.0 social networking, everyone’s sharing things, pointing their discoveries out to each other.  It’s a new milleu. It’s an old art form, but a different way of delivering it.

Some cartoonists endeavor to make an income from their sites. ”The business model is web advertising, or accepting donations or sale of merchandize, such as T-shirts, mugs or print versions of their work. Others are willing to do it for free,  for the artistic expression or to have an online portfolio or as just another way of posting,” Erik says. “It’s an interesting way to get people to your site. ”

 He begins by writing a synopsis of what’s going to happen in the chapter, without the dialogue.

“With a serial strip, just like in the Sunday funny papers, you kind of need to have a stop every day. You want each page of the comic to be a beat  Each one has to be a sort of mini cliff hanger. And each chapter must have its own arc. That’s the other thing I work with to get right.”

Then he sketches in the panel and the individual frames. Once upon a time it was pencil on paper. ”But now I’m working directly on the computer, starting with rough sketches in Corel Painter using my Wacom Cintiq tablet monitor,” he says. ”To be more precise,  I use Painter’s Mechanical Pencil brush set to a light blue color.”

“They look a lot like my traditional sketches look, since I use a col-erase blue to do my roughs on paper,” he says.  “I’m most of the way done with this roughing, I have some poses to adjust, some faces to finish and I’ve got to fix the perspective on the backgrounds, which are currently just scribbled in.  Oh, and I need a background in the final panel. Painter has a perspective grid,  which is useful for simple 2-point perspective, so I’ll be using that to get the kitchen sorted properly.”

Erik’s ‘pencil rough’ for the March 13 panel of “Hex Libris”, except he’s done it digitally, using the “mechanical pencil” brush  (set to blue) in Corel Painter.  

“I stay with Painter through the inking process. Then I bring the whole thing into Illustrator to do the lettering. Once in a while when I’m out and about with my sketchbook, I capture a pose I want to use and scan that in and mix it in with my computer sketches.

“When I ink, I use a variety of Painter’s Ink Pen brushes – mostly the Smooth Round Pen one. For the next one, I’m going to experiment with the tools that more closely imitate traditional comics inking brushes. It’ll be looser and I am not certain whether I’ll like it. I’ll know in a day or two when I get to the inking.”

Erik incorporates a slight shading  - a barely perceptible yellow layer — behind his “inked” panels.  The off-white tinge “warms up” the strip and maybe subconsciously evokes the nostalgia of newsprint, Erik believes. “That kind of pulls it together for me,” he says.

He imbeds his URL on the bottom left and his copyright information on the bottom right. 

Erik and his wife, writer-actress-comedian Maggie Gallant own 2 Bad Mice Design in Austin, Texas. He teaches classes (for children and adults) in animation, digital art and digital cartooning at the Austin Museum of Art Art School.  The “Hex Libris” webcomic can be found at http://hexlibriscomic.com/

Mark Mitchell writes for How to be a Children’s Book Illustrator and The Admiral’s Blog    An award-winning author illustrator, he also teaches classes (for adults) in children’s book illustration at the Austin Museum of Art Art School. 

So much for the requirement that picture books have 32 pages. Brian Selznick  told his children’s story The Invention of Hugo Cabret in 530 pages — and it won the 2008 Caldecott Medal. 

You know? The Caldecott Medal !!  The American Library Association (ALA) awards it each year to the artist of what the association decides is the most distinguished American picture book for children. 

The Invention of Hugo Cabret  has reviewers saying that Hugo has invented at least the new format of the 21st century picture book and maybe that of novels and books generally.  

Have they never seen a graphic novel? Anyway the book started a conversation, which of course is the right thing for an intellectual property to do. 

Selznick’s book also was named a finalist for the National Book Award and was included on the The New York Times list of the Ten Best Illustrated Books of the Year. It’s already been optioned for the movies. Martin Scorcese wants to direct.

I leafed through it the other day at a nearby Barnes and Noble.  I have not read the book. When I do, I’ll talk about it here. 

I’ll give you my reaction anyway: 
It’s a movie between hardcovers. A storyboard in a book. The pictures are rendered in pencil with beautifully orchestrated darks and lights, and they stream at us like the montages in an Eisenstein  film – except occasionally they’re interrupted by pages of text and some still photos from some very early silent movies.

Weighing as much as a hardcover edition of War and Peace, the book bustled with set pieces, props and gizmos. I thought, ”This is all too gadgetty and complicated for a small child to understand, much less enjoy.

“Why, if I want a ’storyboard for a child’, I’ll go for Peter Spier’s 1978 Caldecott Medal winner Noah’s Ark. Now there’s visual storytelling perfection. It is huge but simple and human-scale — and it busts the 32 page rule, too,“  I continued the conversation with myself as I stood in front of the store-shelves of Caldecott-winners.

    But even then as I thought of Noah’s Ark, the fascination of The Invention of Hugo Cabret was starting to settle in. By the next day it had taken hold — and I hadn’t even read the book.  

How did this happen? Well it is hard to deny the assured draftsmanship, clarity and gray-scale splendor of Selznik’s illustrations. They use the kinesthetic kick of the movies and the black and white magic of the silent movies to tell a story.

A character in the story is one of the world’s earliest film-makers, so it’s quite appropriate.

There are poignant nonfiction truths behind this fiction of a boy who lives in a Paris train station at the turn of the century – and there meets a toymaker who
turns out to be a real life historical person, George Melies.  

   Melies was a one-time stage magician, tinkerer and film-maker who made the movie, A Trip to the Moon that he based on two novels of the day (one by Jules Verne and the other by H.G. Wells.) 

His little “science fiction” fantasy reel became a hit in 1902 — long before Charlie Chaplin or Abel Gance ever thought of making movies. 

Hard times fell on the elderly Melies, who wound up working in a toy booth at a Paris train station to feed himself.  His collection of life-sized mechanical robot toys (which also figure into Selznick’s story) was given to a museum that neglected and finally trashed it. His films, which he had sold off many years before, were melted down to make a material for shoe and boot heels.

Talk about a commentary on the impermanence of art…

Will children find a rapport with such ideas? We’ll see.

In the meantime see a NY Times review by John Schwartz. 

The ALA’s Award announcement page  has more and covers the finalists, those Caldecott Honor books: 
Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad  illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Ellen Levine (Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic.) First the Egg, written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger (Roaring Brook/Neal Porter.) The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, written and illustrated by Peter Sís (Farrar/Frances Foster) and Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, written and illustrated (with cartoon/photo collages)  by Mo Willems (Hyperion.)

The website for Selznik’s book is fun and full of links, including one that lets you see The Trip to the Moon and another that takes you to the Expanded Books website for a lovely short  video interview with Selznik.

“Reads Like a Book, Looks Like a Film” declares the headline in a  New York Times piece on Selznik  by Motoko Rich. The feature begins, “Brian Selznick, the author and illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret uses the word ‘obsessed’ a lot.”

It goes on to report how Selznick, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design once skipped a visiting lecture by Maurice Sendak — he was that ambivalent about a career as a ‘children’s book illustrator.’  

A School Library Journal  article by Joan Oleck surveys the (mostly enthusiastic) reactions of librarians to the award announcement, while Christine V. Baird of the Newhouse News Service profiles the creator . 

In a Scripps Howard News Service story by Karen Mcpherson Selznick recalls how he ”took out big chunks of text and replaced them with narrative [illustrated] sequences.”

Graphic novel, as I said.

So there you have it – a book report from someone who’s not read the book.  (Why do I feel like I’m back in school?)

Does The Invention of Hugo Cabret really change things on the kid lit scene? Who knows? In the meantime, let’s have fun talking about it — and looking at Selznik’s wonderfully realized pictures.

Author-illustrator Mark Mitchell writes for “How to be a Children’s Book Illustrator.”  You can download  his book “Raising La Belle” for free by going here.

 Swedish folk art-inspired? From “Gustaf Tenggren’s Tell It Again Book” courtesy of ASIFA- Hollywood Animation Archive

Now that we’ve got the elephant in the room (the year’s Caldecott winner) out of the way,  we can talk of other children’s illustration news.

School Library Journal serves up coverage of the National Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) 2007 Golden Kite Award winners and runners-ups, as does SCBWI’s own  website. 

  Little Night, written and illustrated by Yuyi Morales,   published by Roaring Book Press - Holtzbrinck (designed by Jennifer Browne) won the Golden Kite Award for best picture book illustration.  
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April’s The Artist’s Magazine  (F+W Publications) features an interview with Jan Brett (33 million books in print and still going strong.)

Funny, I was reading The Mitten to my three year old-granddaughter just the other night and we were both enjoying this book very much.

Brett’s only formal art training came from museum art classes when she was young.

She works with a very dry (watercolor) brush technique, “almost like a colored pencil,” she tells interviewer Paula Theotocus.  

Loved as much by booksellers and librarians as by children, she  travels the world  researching the locales of the stories she works on, accompanied by her husband, Joe Hearne, who is also her business manager and webmaster.   
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In recent weeks Cynsations, the blog of teen and children’s author Cynthia Leitich-Smith has featured interviews with children’s books folks in anticipation of this month’s SCBWI Bologna Conference 2008. 

And it has not neglected the art end of the industry, with interviews by guest writer Anita Loughrey  of Caldecott winning illustrator Paul O Zelinksy, French comic author-illustrator Emmanuel Guibert  and Harper Collins executive art director Martha Rago.

For Loughrey’s question, ”What makes an artists illustrations stand out for you?” Rago had an interesting answer:

“I would not underestimate technical skills, which are very, very important: anatomy, composition, and perspective, good use of color and line, and effective use of materials,” she said.

“But I am always looking for someone who has not just the technical skills but a distinct individual style, a clear voice and images that suggest narrative through context,emotional tone, and the way they relate sequentially.”  It’s not often you get to peek inside the mind of an art director at a major children’s publishing house. Read the full interview with Martha Rago here.

Rago, Zelinsky and Guiberty are among  the 31 scheduled to speak at the conference set for March 29 and March 30 in Bologna, Italy.
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Speaking of SCBWI, the Austin chapters of SCBWI has been preparing for its Spring conference “Write in the Heart of Texas”  on Saturday April 26 at the University of Texas Club. 

The line-up of expected prestenters and critiquers includes artists agent Christina Tugeau , along with Deborah Wayshak, editor at Candlewick Press, Alvina Ling, editor of Little, Brown and Co. and artist-illustrator Christy Stallop and other special guests.  
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Courtesy of the ASIFA - Hollywood Animation Archives

Check out the March 11 post: Illustration: The Genesis of the Golden Book Style  in the Animation Archive website. The Archive is part of ASIFA-Hollywood, which is part of the International Society of Film Animation. 

The post,  by the society’s director Stephen Worth, focuses on the towering (see above, pun intended) work of Gustaf Tenggren.

Hey, who are these guys?

I stared, mouth open at the work of this Swedish born artist who had worked on the Disney classics Snow White, Pinocchio and Bambi,  before storming off to basically create the look and feel of the Little Western Golden Books of  the 1950s. 

Reading Worth’s insights and devouring his digital feast of Tenggren images, I realized that I already knew these.

   Poky Little Puppy, which launched Golden Books. Yep, Tenggren’s art illuminated Janette Sebring Lowrey’s text.
 

 
Courtesy of the ASIFA - Hollywood Animation Archives

I never had any idea of who Tenggren was but, clearly, his images have never left me.  They must have been everywhere in my childhood and somehow imbedded themselves in the deep recesses of my psychic tissue. 

This made me think of a storybook that stayed on a shelf  in my little brother’s room. Everytime I opened the book its illustrations cast a spell on me.  Hmmm. The style was like Tenggrens!

Could it be? I Google-searched the title that I remembered for it, Pirate Ships and Sailors  (I was never able to forget that either.) Up popped a certain Golden Book by that name, written by Byron Jackson with Kathryn Jackson and illustrated by Gustaff Tenggren - 1950!

I always remembered that Pirate Ships and Sailors  was not your ordinary pirate book. 

Now I know that it was because of Tenggren’s hypnotic artwork – sweetly beautiful and hauntingly disturbing at the same time.  Great for the Grimm bros, right? In fact Tenggren was the ultimate Grimm’s tales illustrator.

Clearly, his pirate pictures had traumatized me at some level.  I remember one in particular of some emaciated old sailors chained up in a dungeon.

Steve Worth discusses in his post how Swedish folk art probably influenced Tenggren, particularly  in the golden Golden Book days, when he often placed his figures in silouhette-like vignettes against the blank background of the page — perhaps to save labor and time. But it sure made for effective design (as it did for those Swedish arts & crafts folks of earlier generations.)

The ASIF -Hollywood Animation Archive features vast stores of images and scholarship on Tenggren and hundreds of other illustrators, animators and cartoonists. It also makes available courses and tutotials, such as the Preston Blair animation course.
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Speaking of cartoonists The Boston Globe ran a review by Daniel Akst of a new book about comic books, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, By David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) “My mother didn’t like it, but the children’s books of the time were thin gruel if you were accustomed to the thrilling life-and-death adventures of Spiderman, Batman and Robin, and the Fantastic Four,” Akst writes.

“A key thing to bear in mind about all this is that the primary market was children. And in those days comics weren’t just about superheroes fighting injustice. Two of the most popular genres were horror and crime…” 

Hajdu’s book brings home how “New York was the epicenter of this [comic books] creative ferment, just as it was for painting, baseball, and musical theater,” Akst says.

“Everyone knows about Jackson Pollock, Jackie Robinson, and ‘Guys and Dolls,’ but few appreciate the role comics played in American culture. In those days the industry put out perhaps 100 million copies a week, each of them passed among several readers. Producing this colorful weekly avalanche required a small army of artists, writers, letterers, and others who grew out of the Depression and leapt at the chance to work at the intersection of art and commerce.” See Akst’s review.
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Mark Mitchell writes for the new webzine How to Be a Children’s Book Illustrator. He is the author-illustrator of the nonfiction children’s book Raising La Belle, which has a few pirates in it.  You can download it for free right  here.

Here’s a black and white storyboard rough for an early reader illustrated by Mary Sullivan, of Austin, Texas.

The book is Jog Frog Jog by Barbara Gregorich (re-issued by School Zone Publishing for their On Track Beginning Reading series for Grades K-1.)

Mary scanned her rough original pencil sketches, pulled them up in her computer’s Photoshop program — and went to work on them with the Photoshop brush tool and other crafty tricks she’s come up with to give her computer art a painterly look. 

The publishers eventually asked for style changes, so the full color published version looks different, but this draft is too fun to ignore.

Read all about Mary  on the next post.

 
from “Hidden Picture Playground” (”Highlights for Children” magazine)

There are a few things you should know about illustrator Mary Sullivan.

She is a yoga instructor.

She has a dog named Scout and cats named Rasta and The Cheat who often keep her company in her studio when she’s working.  

She draws all the time. 

She’s not driven to draw, she says. She just likes to draw.
But — and this is important – she does not much like to paint. Not with a real brush, I mean.

She does paint with the brush tool,  in Photoshop, on the computer.

That speeds things up a bit. And it’s a good thing because in recent years 
her workload has grown and grown and grown  — to include hidden pictures, puzzles, stories, poems, nursery rhymes, books, covers,  cartoons and even kids’ comics — for the Highlights Magazine Group, Boyds Mills Press, Phonics Comics, School Zone Publishing, Scott Foresman Co. and other clients.  Last year she was signed up by the Kid Shannon Agency of New York, which means that her assignments won’t be slowing down anytime soon.   

From “Innovative Kids”

Mary graduated with a B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. As a child she had dreamed of being a fine-arts painter maybe one day.  But early in her college career she was told point blank that she was not a painter. She was an illustrator. 

She was devastated– then relieved, because she was already starting to see that she did not care that much for applying pigment to canvases.

Many years later she brought her art-making into the world of the Apple computer, and became one of the pioneers in the digital-resistant-world of children’s story illustration.

She still draws with a pencil and paper. She uses an old fashioned light box to trace her sketches, like the children’s book illustrators of yore.  But when it comes to coloring those sketches and “completing her vision” Mary is all about the electrons.

With Photoshop CS2 and a Wacom Graphics Tablet she has forged her own, unique… –  actually it has moved beyond a style to a kind of personal grammar and syntax, her own freakin’ universe, really, that she creates with a very few software tools.

A few weeks ago she conceeded to being interviewed while she was on a white-knuckles deadline and really should not have been taking to anyone.

First here’s Mary’s artist’s mission statement from her website.

 “I am excited by the ability to bring to paper any thought, dream or experience. Drawing allows me to translate emotions and experiences through my own language of line, shape and color.”
 

Mary working at her home studio on a cold Texas day.

So you have classical music playing in your studio right now…

The radio. I always have something on when I’m working. The music depends on the mood.

How did you become a children’s book illustrator?

Mostly I just drew all my life. I was a studio art major. But I didn’t take commercial art in school. I’m  really a self-taught illustrator.  I had Michael Frary for life drawing. Life drawing was a big deal and painting was a big deal. It was really cliquish in the Art Department at the University of Texas back then and I didn’t fit into that whole painting scene. I took as much life drawing as I could take and lithography. I think really at heart I was an illustrator. And I think there’s a big difference between a fine artist and an illustrator.

Because I sit around and wait for people to tell me what to draw. And artists don’t do that. They have things they want to say. They had an illustration sequence at U.T. But I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be in the fine arts and have the passion. But one day when I was in college I took I my best work to a collector. I must have been like 19 or 20. And he really liked my work, but he said ‘You’re an illustrator. You’re not a fine artist.’

I was absolutely crushed.

What made him say that? 

Well it was my art. My art was very representational. There were some pen and inks of some women in Bali and it was all very detailed. And so he saw right away. But eventually it emerged and I accepted it.

I finished my BFA. It was really hard and it took me forever, but I did. And I had some shows. I have a pile of fine art. I still do it but I don’t have a drive to do it.

From “Banjo”, Mary’s story about a homeless dog

You have a drive to draw. 

I have a drive to cook. I don’t have a drive to do anything.  

Everytime I see you you have your sketch open and your working in it. You’re one of the few people I know who really draw in their sketchbook.

I do. And I really don’t want to have to use the computer. But you have to.

So what happened after school? 

I came home and put everything on hold and raised my kids. And of course I was inspired by them the whole time. I would draw for them. I would make them worksheets. ‘Mommy, make me a coloring page.’ ‘Make me a hidden picture.’  Even back then I did  a hidden picture — I don’t know how many years ago — 20 years ago? — pretending that I was a Highlights hidden picture artist. I still have it somewhere.

What got me to be an illustrator was I made some cards for someone once. And I ended up having my own card business. People would give me a list of everything they wanted on the card and I would draw a picture from the list. And I did that for a long time. Ten years. So that was how I got my practice. Not just doing the cards.  But getting the list from the customer and translating it into a drawing. 

I got written up in a book and a magazine, about my card business.  These were birth announcement cards. I was busy. They were all hand made, hand painted. I got started in ‘89 before there were any computers. I mean I had a computer but I wasn’t using it for my art. I look back and I think they’re really corny. I mean they’re really funny. I look back and I think ‘Oh my God.’ Interspersed with cards I did logos and brochures and posters for people. I was all over the place.

So then after about 2000 I decided that was it, as far as being all over the place. I knew I needed to hone in on one thing. And I decided to do children’s  illustration. So I sat down and did a bunch of self-promo pieces and mailed them off and I got a job working for Highlights. 

Right out of the chute…

Which is crazy. Yeah. Right out of…the blue.

Why did you focus on children’s art?

Well I don’t know if it had something to do with doing birth announcements all of the time. I was drawing kids all of the time. So I think that’s why I did that, probably.

I sent to Highlights, Cricket…Not that many people. I think I went to BookPeople, the book store and looked at what children’s magazines there were and sent to a couple of them. I made little cards. I drew some things. I didn’t know what I was doing really. I was just drawing stuff and I thought, ‘Wow, that looks good. I’ll send that.’

What did “Highlights” tell you?

That they liked my stuff and wanted to keep it on file. And then they called me.

How soon? Soon. It was crazy. I wasn’t even prepared. Because I was trying to make a transition to the computer but I was still drawing and painting traditionally. So my first job for them was traditional. But I scanned it in, so I was able to send them a digital file. It was an illustration for one of their stories in the magazine, Highlights for Children. 

  
 Working on a slightly warmer day…

They have so many magazines I work for. I don’t so often draw for the magazine now. I have. But mostly I draw for the other magazines they have. There’s Highlights. That’s for older kids. Then there’s Hidden Pictures Playground for a little younger age. Then there’s  High Five, which is like for three year olds and four year olds. That’s their new magazine. Then they have sticker books and hidden picture books. 

 There are a couple of art directors that I work with. There are probably three or four at Highlights.

I was really scared. But they loved it. And I went to Highlights after that to a conference. And they were all like so happy to meet me. And I thought, ‘What is this — some kind of fantasy world?’ It was really surreal. I had just gotten into it and I didn’t know what I was doing. They were so nice. Then after that I got a book deal for Boyds Mills Press, which Highlights publishes. That’s their book division.

From “High Five” magazine (a “Highlights” magazine)

Book illustration is not at all what I expected. I got the job and started on it and I thought an art director was going to be saying, ‘No, this really should go here and this goes here, Move this. Do that…’ You know?  But he pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. He didn’t make any comments. I designed the cover and got to lay out where the text goes and drew everything. I did everything.  And they did everything that I said to do. I did it just for fun, you know? And they said, ‘Okay.’

I had a big bowl and cut up little pieces of paper and wrote the page numbers on them. So I would reach into the bowl and whatever page number I pulled out, I would go to work on that page. Because you don’t want to draw the first page first.

Where did you hear that?

I made it up. You don’t always get into the groove of it unitl you’re into the first few drawings. You don’t want to see that progression in the book. And it’s really subtle. Some people might not notice it. But I notice it. And I would rather that first drawing was in the middle of the book. And the second drawing was maybe at the end. It works really well with me. And I always do it. 

Except I forgot to do that on this book I’m working on now and I’m so mad. Because I just started with the first book out of five books I’m doing for this contract for Scott Foresman, Co.  I’m really tempted to redo the whole first book at the end of the five books. I don’t know if I will or not. I have to work so fast. You have to work so fast for these people. There are 35 illustrations in each book and I’ve had less than a month to do each one. So I’m basically doing two illustrations a day nonstop.   

They’re due Sunday. Actually this one has turned out really cute. I had to draw cars and I hate drawing cars. But it’s not too bad. But look how complicated it is. I had to make them getting in the car and have mom getting the dog. And over here he’s telling the dog, ‘No.’ I had to get all that into the drawing. 

This is what I do. I draw the sketch I scan it and send it to the publisher. So this is the sketch I sent to the publisher. They approved it. So I used my light box and traced this original pencil sketch on this nice paper.

You made another pencil drawing?

A tracing.

Why nice paper?

Because I like nice paper. I wouldn’t draw on anything else. I really like these more sketchy things — the roughs that I do first. But you must remember these pictures are for little kids and everything has to be really clear. You can’t have weird lines.

Editor’s note: Mary will scan this second, more finished pencil sketch and open it up as a file in Photoshop. With some rapid keystrokes  (involving ’load selection’ and ‘edit fill’ on the Photoshop menu) she’ll copy and paste the lines of her sketch on to a “new layer.” She’ll  enlarges her sketch until she can almost see the carbon flecks left by her pencil point. “The lines are really sloppy but when I get them in the computer, I clean them up and erase some of them,” she says. Though she may ‘clean them up,’ she leaves her original grainy pencil lines in the illustration. She does not ”fill in” her lines to create the smooth solid outline that you often see in cartoons and comic book art –  because she does not want her picture to look like it was drawn with a software program, which it wasn’t.   When she gets her drawing just the way she likes it on her monitor, she uses the Photoshop “paint bucket tool” to turn the entire layer yellow.  

Oil painters like to scumble their canvases with burnt sienna, unifying their picture in one giant midtone – before they pick out their lights with turpentine and a rag and move in with dark paints to paint the deep shadows.  This is what Mary does, but instead of turpentine and a cloth, she uses Photoshop’s ‘eraser tool’ to remove the transparent yellow glaze in strategic spots.  She erases the yellow to bring out the whites of her picture: a character’s eyes, or clouds in the sky or a button on a sweater. The revealed white is actually the white background behind her first layer.  With the stylus that comes with her Wacom Graphics Tablet and Photoshop’s “brush tool” she then applies the muted pastel colors she likes in a series of transparent ‘new layers.’ Last she adds the shadows, with the Photoshop “brush tool,” applying her “shadow color” in a 30 percent opacity.  In fact she tries to avoid the the Photoshop “fill tool” generally because she wants her work to look hand-painted, so she can feel like one of those ’fine-arts painters’ she wanted to be but was told she wasn’t and then decided she wasn’t.

Phonics Comics presents “Clara the Klutz“.  Mary uses an assortment of tricks she’s either invented or taught herself  to “paint” her pictures in Photoshop. 
                                                          * * * * * Except for cleaning up your lines a little when you retrace, you don’t re-work your sketches a lot.  You seem to just be able to draw out of your head. For some reason I’m able to see things on the paper, then I’m able to draw them. I don’t know if it’s photographic memory or because I practice and draw all the time but I can just remember. I can close my eyes and see a hand positon and I can draw it.I’ve drawn all the time. I remember drawing in high school. When the teacher was talking, I’d be drawing feet and hands.I always noticed when other illustrators hid the hands or didn’t draw them too well.It does help being able to draw from my head. I can’t imagine having to look everything up. That would be a pain.

A lot of times I’ll sketch the feeling I want. Then I’ll fill in the details. Like I kind of want this person to be leaning over. I’ll kind of do it in my head, and I’ll draw a line and say, ‘Yes, that’s how I want him leaning over.’ And then I’ll fill it out. It’s like a gesture drawing. Remember that in life drawing? Yeah, I used to love that. I did a lot of it. That’s where you get the feeling of the pose.

For the BFA in college I took the maximum class number of hours in drawing. I wasn’t that good with faces and the small details. I was very good with the body.

Well, there’s something about the way you get the whole thing down and the viewer accepts it and doesn’t question your figures at all.

I feel really fortunate to have that. Editors and art directors like that. And you can tell a drawing that’s very strained.

 
 Mary trying to draw

Will you talk just a little bit about the computer?

For working on the computer and color, I had to practive a lot to try to find my voice. That sounds really corny, I know, to say ‘find my voice.’  But I really had to find myself on the computer. I could do what other people did. But what was I? I mean that’s a good starting point, to look at what other people do and do that.

You know, you’re unique in your painterly working ways. 

I have a book on paintings of the old masters and one of them — I can’t remember his name — but he always started with a yellow canvas. He’d always paint yellow first over everything. I don’t know what the name of the yellow was but it was some kind of yellow or ochre and I saw that and thought, ‘Hey, I do that.’

I almost never start with a white page. I lay in the midtone and take away for the lights.

Here’s the duck. It’s going to be white. Shadows don’t come until the very end. The shoes will be white. The rocks will be grey but they won’t be white. And then I start with the color. My first layer is this color right here. Then this color comes on top of this color. It’s really complicated what I do. There turns out to be maybe ten layers of color. And at the end, the last layer I do is the shadow layer.

I tend to go with really light, muted colors, more sophisiticated colors. And they always want you to do bright…And I fight that all the way until the very end, when they will not give in. I don’t like the bright primary colors. They really bother me. But once I merge them,  all the color layers together, I ramp up the red so that it gives more of a warmth. It basically turns the black [of the pencil line] to more of a different color.

If you zoom in for a close-up to look at the line, it’s like trashy — broken and sketchy looking, but I really like that. Because that’s how it is in real life. If you were to do a painting, you wouldn’t do it pixel by pixel. I don’t want this to be clean. It looks softer like this. You can see the original pencil sketch lines and where the first transparent yellow has been left in patches.  It looks better. It doesn’t really show up that much in the picture but it gives a feeling of looking less computery.  A lot of people use the fill tool to color their illustrations. But I use the brush tool.

How did you learn to do this in Photoshop?

A friend of mine that I met, a graphic artist was so supportive and he was like a big brother.  He came over to my apartment and put Photoshop in my computer and I said, ‘I don’t know how to use it,’ and he said, ‘ You’ll figure it out.’ And I did. I went through every button on Photoshop and figured it out myself. I get everything I need from it. There’s all kinds of other stuff that I never use.

Mary Sullivan, who doesn’t like to paint. 

Mary’s sites:
www.marysullivan.com
her artists’ blog 
her agent’s site (look Mary up here)

Mark Mitchell, the writer of this article actually knows Mary Sullivan.
His site is www.markgmitchell.com