Life in a book

By now, everyone has seen that Ugly Volvo post on everything that is wrong with Goodnight, Moon. Many of us were already quite firm in our understanding that Goodnight, Moon is abominable - in my case I find it suspicious that we say goodnight to AIR and to SOUNDS - much as one might if one were being nailed into a COFFIN because of premature burial, which people are not afraid of as they once were but maybe that is just because we're not reading as much Poe as we ought to be.

RIGHT?! Here in Baltimore, where we are generally pretty well up on our Poe, we know that the 'great green room' is a good place to lie in your bed scared shitless. So does Emily Carroll, apparently - this is one of the final spreads from her deliciously creepy graphic novel Through the Woods. I think it's the only use of green in the entire book - there is noooo way that's a coincidence.

In fact, one of the themes of that Ugly Volvo post is the utter hideousness of the great green room - and I mean KELLY green, SHAMROCK green, not apple green like my living room or swampy green like my basement bathroom (I am a big fan of green walls) but screaming pure uninflected green - with a red floor. And it's true, we can do better.

In fact, there are quite a few picture book illustrators who freakin' EXCEL at interior design. I was spending some time with The Jacket this week, and I was struck by this room:

Pink rug! Luscious upholstered furniture in honey gold and nectarine! Against what looks like a wooden floor painted warm grey and lighter-grey walls. Illustrator Dasha Tolstikova can keep the blue-green curtains, but I'll take the red throw pillow and put it right on my dark grey couch.

In fact, I've done this. We made a guest room in our basement a few years ago, and I swiped all the colors in that room from the terrible Meryl Streep Mamma Mia! movie. I had to watch it on mute so as to avoid Pierce Brosnan's frightening braying, but you gotta admit that those Greek blues, along with all the orangey golds and lipstick reds, are cheerful as all hell.

You know who else draws an interior I would love to live in? Leigh Hodgkinson. In Goldilocks and Just One Bear, Goldilocks grew up, moved to the city and found a flat with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough square footage for a sectional sofa:

To say nothing of a sculptural houseplant and the kind of light fixtures you pretty much ONLY see in Roche-Bobois ads in the New York Times Magazine. Also note: colorful throw pillows.

An image from the Roche-Bobois catalog. CLEARLY JUST WAITING for picture book characters to come and live there.

I recently had a complete style crise over the new book Ella. Ella lives in the penthouse suite of a downtown hotel that looks a lot like the Soho Grand. She has a nanny named Manny, a tutor, and a miniature dachshund named Stacey. She's an updated Eloise, a free spirit, but so hip that I wondered if the average preschool reader would be put off by all the edamame and the muddling and the Costa Rican zipline.

Needless to say, Ella's bedroom has a functional/fanciful loft bed with built-in bookcase, corkboard, and breakfast tray, a plumbing pipe clothes rack, reclaimed industrial signage spelling out her name, and a sculptural houseplant. Does she have a painting of three little bears sitting in chairs on her wall? No she most certainly the hell does not. She has a silhouette portrait of Stacey at about twelve times life-size.

By the way, she also gets to attend New York Fashion Week:

That is for sure Grace Coddington in all black, and I think it's Irina Lazareanu whose train Ella is stepping on. Illustrator Marcos Chin has done a lot of advertising and grown-up books, but I like the way he speaks to kids here.

Another artist whose interiors I lust after is David Roberts. I have noted his love of fashion in previous posts - if that dress (from Iggy Peck, Architect) is not vintage Pucci, well that's Emilio's fault, not mine:

...but just check this apartment full of reclaimed treasure in Janet Wong's The Dumpster Diver:

The orange of Bette Midler's hair goes with the red-orange vinyl of the dentist chair, and is complemented by the sculptural houseplant off to the right. And no domicile is complete without a coffee table made out of a busted guitar.

Here's another example of eclectic style that hangs together, from Roberts's illustrated version of The Wind in the Willows. That triangle wallpaper has a real Wiener Werkstätte thing going on, contemporaneous with Mr. Badger's country sportswear and the 1908 publication of the original book. The person who picked out that sky-blue plaid upholstery furnished this room to please himself and not others. And look at that coffee pot and trivet combo.

Recently we've seen a lot from French artist Benjamin Chaud. Chronicle apparently just OWNS his ass, putting out like seven books illustrated by him in the past couple years. He does these magnificent, crazy-detailed scenes for The Bear's Song and The Bear's Sea Escape, but he also illustrates Davide Cali's undersized tall tales I Didn't Do My Homework Because... and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School.... Check these out:

That man loves a fainting couch almost as much as Brett Helquist does.

Why, one wonders, don't MORE picture books feature cool furniture and window treatments? Well, I'll tell you.

How do you draw a page that a) advances the story, b) has room for type, and c) keeps everything visually distinct enough for a small person and their reader to easily figure out the action?

In general, you leave the walls blank, and usually, you keep those rooms furnished pretty sparsely. Or you take the action outside. This page from David Mackintosh's Marshall Armstrong Is New to Our School gets around those problems by pulling out and up, so he can show all the kids and the piano and the microscope. Tricky. And note how he backed off on color.

But you want tricky? How about - draw a stylish little room... with a ton of people in it... nestled among the roots of a tree. And do it before digital drawing tools. Who could do that?

Mary Blair, creator of concept art for Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, among others. Coatrack, chandelier, settee, four children and a maid - under a tree.

And that's how you do it.