Coloring Page Tuesday: Wishing Tree

The fine folks at Elva Resa Publishing have posted the wishing tree coloring page I drew for them to celebrat the award-winning children's book, The Wishing Tree. Visit this link to download it, and be sure to check out DeploymentKids.com for more activities!

Kerlan Collection Field Trip Recap

The field trip to the Kerlan Collection on Saturday was wonderful! Thanks to members of the Minnesota Children’s Book Illustrators Guild and the SCBWI who joined in the fun, and special thanks to Vicki Deutsch for organizing the trip!

Just when I think I have Minnesota all figured out, she surprises me with something new and interesting. The Kerlan Collection, tucked away at the Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota, contains more than 100,000 children’s books as well as original manuscripts, artwork, galleys, and color proofs for more than 12,000 children’s books. Anybody can make an appointment to handle these exceptional materials, but there are certain restrictions so be sure to plan your trip accordingly.

As you can probably guess, I was floored by the Kerlan. I got to view, touch, and even smell original sketchbooks, drawings, and paintings by some of my favorite illustrators. Each piece bore some hidden mark of the artist’s personality, whether it was notations along the edge, erasure marks, or rare errant brush strokes. The selection at the Kerlan is nigh overwhelming and in several hours I lovingly pored through just a few archival boxes: compositional sketches by Chris Van Allsburg, ink drawings by Trina Schart Hyman, and my favorite… the real, original illustrations to the Poky Little Puppy by Gustaf Tenggren. I even found unpublished paintings for the book in there! It was one of my favorites as a child and I was beside myself with joy to hold the real artwork in my hands.

Needless to say, I can’t wait to go back! I hope all lovers of children’s literature get the chance to visit this treasure someday.

15 Books in 15 Minutes

This is another fun little blog game similar to the 25 Random Things post. My friends Emma Goo and Em Salvatierra sent the instructions to me, so thanks to the both of them for the “tag.” Take no more than fifteen minutes to name fifteen books that you love to read and re-read, or have just read once and have made an indelible impression. In no particular order, here is my list of children’s and YA books:

1. The Pokey Little Puppy – One of my favorites in the Little Golden Books series. Plus, it makes a great cake.
2. Ramona the Brave – I’ve blogged my childhood love of the character before, so this is no surprise here!
3. The Magic and the Healing – This book got me through some tumultuous times as a pre-teen living in Germany. I really enjoyed the grounded basis in real veterinary science and application towards mythical creatures.
4. The Neverending Story – As a little girl, I was so in love with Atreyu from the movie that I had to read the book.
5. The Last Vampire – Teenage angst turned me towards YA horror author Christopher Pike for a time. This was the book that hooked me on his writing for several years.
6. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales – Classic fairy tales that my folks read to me before I learned to read myself.
7. The Lord of the Flies – There is a hilarious high school memory that goes with my reasoning for loving this book, but I’ll have to save it for another time.
8. Scientific Progress Goes “Boink!” – One of my favorites in the Calvin and Hobbes series.
9. The Tale of Peter Rabbit – This book started my love for all things Beatrix Potter.
10. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself – One of Judy Blume’s best; I think I love this one even more than Superfudge.
11. Missing May – A beautiful short novel whose ending makes me cry every time.
12. The Witches – Really, everything by Roald Dahl should be on this list.
13. Little Women – My sister introduced me to the works of Louisa Mae Alcott, but this one is my favorite so far.
14. The Boxcar Children – The siblings' resourcefulness and cooperation, plus the fact that they lived in an old boxcar, was so inspiring to me as a kid.
15. The Scarlet Letter – Required reading during high school, but after so much thorough analysis, the book really won me over.

What’s on your list? Feel free to post your list or links in the comments section!

Google Book Settlement Benefits

The Author’s Guild has a couple of interesting pro-Google Book Settlement articles. One is an outline of the benefits of the settlement in regards to readers, researchers, authors, and publishers. Another is an editorial from Roy Blount, refuting the feared monopoly that Google will have on scanned orphan works. While these aren’t opinions that I necessarily share, they are well-written and provide a nice balance. All sides of this issue are important to consider.

Happy Father's Day

Illustration Friday: Drifting

It’s another Storm Codes piece for this week’s Illustration Friday! I thought this scene with Katy drifting off to sleep at the Duluth Harbor fit the theme nicely. Images of waiting amidst freezing temperatures, crashing waves, cold gusts of wind, and a stark November storm precede this page, so I wanted to highlight a moment of peace for Katy and her mother. Too bad I could never fall asleep outside in that kind of weather; Katy is a tough Minnesotan for sure!

Kerlan Collection Field Trip

Attention all Minnesota CBIG and SCBWI members! You are cordially invited to attend a field trip next weekend to the renowned Kerlan Collection in Minneapolis, courtesy of CBIG’s founder Vicki Deutsch.

Date: June 27, 2009
Time: 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Location: Kerlan Collection (2nd Floor Reading Room), Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota, 222 21st Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Parking: $3.00

To register for this event, contact curator Karen Nelson Hoyle by phone or email before June 24th. You’ll also need to specify that you are a member of CBIG or the SCBWI (or both), and select 2 artists names or works from this list that you’d like to see. Be sure to register soon, because space is limited!

For directions or more information about the Kerlan Collection, contact them at (612) 624-4576 or visit their website.

Art Crush Wednesday: Joyce Ellen Weinstein

Though I graduated from high school 10 years ago, I’ve never forgotten the art teacher who played one of the most important roles in my artistic development: Joyce Ellen Weinstein.

Joyce exposed me to different art styles, techniques, materials, and history. She appropriately purged the cheap cartooning I was emulating out of my system by enforcing drawing from life and reference in her classroom. She helped me develop my portfolio and even gave me my first summer internship as her assistant for a set design project. Joyce also gently guided me in selecting my post-secondary education: when I expressed doubt about going to RISD (it was a huge step for me to be so far from my family), she shook me by my shoulders and told me I was going.

Having retired from teaching at Annandale High School a few years ago, Joyce is rightfully enjoying international gallery showings of her work and travelling around the world on a Fulbright scholarship. Her adventures have even brought her to the Anderson Center here in Minnesota, where she is currently an artist-in-residence. My husband and I had the pleasure to attend her lecture about the wooden synagogues of Lithuania last night. It was fascinating to see how her investigations of this forgotten Jewish history have influenced her collages:
I can’t wait to see where Joyce will go next, and what artwork she will be creating because of it! Check out more of her amazing artwork at her website.

Coloring Page Tuesday: Giraffe

Well, my computer is finally back up and running, and we didn't lose any data! To celebrate I'm posting something for Coloring Page Tuesday. It's been way too long since I've done one of these, so I hope you'll enjoy it!

The image above was originally done to advertise the Minnesota Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Field Trip to Como Park Zoo (lots of text went in the negative space). We'll be taking that trip again this July 11th, so check back soon for details!

Back Up Your Files!

Posting will be pretty sparse this week. Our computer experienced a catastrophic failure over the weekend: a power surge fried the motherboard and possibly corrupted the hard drive. Power surges are rather frequent in my building, possibly due to its age, and I guess this was one incident too many for our normally trust-worthy surge protector!

Fortunately I can still check email (and post this) from my phone, and am presently making art "the old fashioned way" for my current projects. However, the last time we backed up our files was a month ago. Quite a few illustrations have been started since then, including several vector drawings for a deployment activity book. I'm crossing my fingers that we having lost any data! We'll have to wait until later this week, when the parts come in to fix our computer, before we know for sure.

So let my misadventure be a lesson to everyone: back up your files regularly and often! You never know when technology might fail...

Children's Book Cakes

One thing I really love about cake (aside from the taste) is the sculptural talent that it takes to decorate them. The cake above not only looks like a delicious piece of art, but it also celebrates one of my favorite books ever, The Pokey Little Puppy. I hope the baker’s skill is appropriately praised and highly compensated on a regular basis, because this is wonderful!

Head on over to Cake Wrecks for more examples of great children’s book-themed cakes, and be sure to check out the fantastic one of Peter Rabbit.

Thanks to Elizabeth O. Dulemba for the tip!

Illustration Friday: Crave

We don’t eat pizza often, so every once in a while I’ll start craving it like mad. My local co-op sells this awesome prosciutto roll with mozzarella, and when sliced and laid on seasoned focaccia and baked for about 10 minutes, it makes one phenomenal pizza. Now I’m getting hungry… good thing it’s almost lunchtime!

This week’s Illustration Friday submission is from the bilingual children’s book, We are Cousins / Somos Primos. Many thanks to the folks over at Illustration Friday for featuring my submission for last week’s theme as their "Pick of the Week!"

“Emily the Strange” Creators File Copyright Suit

"Emily the Strange,” a cult icon from the ‘90s (seen above on the right), has been called a “figure of empowerment,” “a Female McGyver” and “a role model for tween and teen girls.” Feminist kudos notwithstanding, she’s also one heck of a cash cow: Emily is already a popular brand in fashion and comic books, will soon get her own series of novels from HarperCollins, and has a movie deal, a line of hair products, themed guitars, and even a limited-edition soft drink in the works.

However, there is one thing that bothers me and others: the character bears an undeniable physical resemblance to Rosamond, a character from the 1978 children’s book Nate the Great (seen above on the left). Read the original post and resulting furor for yourself at You Thought We Wouldn't Notice and Coffee Ghost.

I can concede that there is no original idea left under the sun and that some coincidences border on the bizarre. However, I can’t agree with what Emily's parent company is doing now: suing the 94-year old children’s book illustrator whose similar work pre-dates their own. Pre-emptive measure? Maybe. Bad PR move? You betcha!

It really bugs me that an aging children’s book creator might have to spend the last few years of his life in the shadow of a seemingly greedy and ridiculous lawsuit. What do you other artists and writers think? Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section!