Picture book post for a hypercaffeinated Saturday afternoon

Readers of unadulterated.us may be familiar with the twice-yearly festival of craft that happens at my house for about a month prior to my deadline for the biannual special issue of School Library Journal called Series Made Simple. For, like, one hundred years I have been writing the arts and crafts section of that special issue. I am a pretty good choice to test craft instructions meant for elementary school children, as I pretty much suck at crafts.

Look at these things:

Paper boat fail.

Can tab bracelet fail

Paper bauble fail - these are a lot harder to make than you might think.

Shrinky dink super fail

But these are not the worst crafts that have come out of my kitchen by far. In past years, we've made a salt-dough fake wound that looked like a drowned vagina, empanadas the size of squirrels, and a book with a secret compartment that destroyed all my exacto blades and my ability to grip with my right hand. That was a birthday gift for Milo and I think he's completely forgotten about it. Or he keeps his contraband in it - either way, I regret cutting up a spare copy of The Book Thief.

It's shocking to me how many origami books educational publishers seem to think the market can absorb.

Anyway, I'm pumped full of iced coffee so that I can keep going. I still have the 'You Can Draw Manga' and 'Sleepover Crafts' series to get through. I need a break, and it's three hours til I can slap my laptop shut and go over to the pool for movie night. So - what do I do when the job part of my job is buggin' me? I put Moby on the iPod and look at picture books.

This image, from The Tea Party in the Woods by Akiko Miyakoshi, stopped me in my tracks. The solidity of that building. The reflection in the window. The stillness of that neat lamb - are you ever dressed in clothes that really fit you and feel comfortable on you, so that you can stand inside them and not even really feel them? That's how that lamb is standing. As if that coat has been tailored to her body - well it would have to, right? She's a sheep - and she needs to pay it no more attention than the air.

The little girl's stance communicates, too. Slightly turned, infinitesimally leaning forward. This is a person who is arrested in shock and holding herself very still waiting for the next rational thought to enter her mind.

Of course this image also pulls most of us right back to the first time we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, recalling as it does the first time Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus.

Good god, McAvoy - that kid is way underage! Pick on someone your own size. Or, like, taller than you but closer to your own age. Me. I mean me. I'd go to tea with you.

Anyway. I recommend finding this book and spending a long damn time looking at every page.

Witches always have the best shoes, don't they. Look for Holly Hobbie's Hansel & Gretel. It's a traditional telling, but the artist's beautiful watercolors keep it from going too gruesome.

You do realize that Holly Hobbie is the same person who created the sunbonnetted Holly Hobbie character, right? I had Holly Hobbie sheets, paperdolls, a lunch box I think, and my grandmother made me a Holly Hobbie doll, with a sunbonnet that came off. It's extraordinary to me that this woman is - well first of all, that she's a real person, honestly I thought Holly Hobbie was just the doll - and not only is she still working, but I swear getting better with every book.

I drew this character obsessively in third grade.

Ok here's how I imagine this went: Kate Messner took a fantastic family vacation to Costa Rica, but just couldn't keep her teacher head out of the trip, and so she came home and wrote a picture book totally packed with science and arithmetic: Tree of Wonder: The Many Marvelous Lives of a Rainforest Tree.

Hey man, I understand the impulse. My family went to Costa Rica in 2010 and believe me we spent an entire afternoon watching ants:

Some people just can't learn a thing without immediately wanting to turn around and teach it to everyone else. And you know what? If you do that as well as Kate Messner does, you should. In past books, she's taught us what she's learned about gardening, hibernating animals, and national treasures. Someday she can write a picture book about how she gets her hair so lush and shiny.

Ugh it's a terrible pun to segue from Kate's marvelous mane to the truly otherworldly textures in Katie Cotton's Counting Lions: Portraits from the Wild. The black and white photographs that illustrate the hypnotic, swaying text of this book are NOT PHOTOGRAPHS AT ALL. This is the work of some self-taught savant named Stephen Walton wielding charcoal until he goes blind or achieves photorealistic results, whichever comes first.

I MEAN:

AND:

I picked the macaws to highlight in this post because these fellas put me in mind of the famous story about Edward Lear (well, famous to librarians who formerly worked with rare books at a natural history library). Lear, in addition to writing fun nonsense and being a sad man, was a scientific illustrator. In 1832, he published a marvelous volume on parrots, called Illustrations of the Family of the Psittacidae, or Parrots. Drawn from life as he sat outside the cages at the London Zoo, his parrots had attitude and personality, as Lear accurately captured the angle of a head, a raised foot, a hunched shoulder. Exactly as Walton gives us here.

The difference being that Lear caught a lot of shit for it - back in the day, he was supposed to be making illustrations that conveyed identification information about the species, and individual variation was thought to be beside the point. Poor Lear.

Now let's talk about Marvelous Cornelius: Hurricane Katrina and the Spirit of New Orleans, by Phil Bildner and John Parra. I met John at a party at Chronicle Books during ALA this year. Guy thinks a lot about what he's doing. I like that in a person.

What's going on in Marvelous Cornelius? Well first of it's a Katrina story, and I think we need as many Katrina stories as we can find. There's a reason why Sunday School classes are all full of Noah - a flood is an easy story to visualize. Inexorably rising water that puts every living thing in the same boat (so to speak) and leaves mud and destruction in its wake - that's a story you can tell a little kid.

Cornelius was a garbageman who brought a unique showmanship to his job. Well. That's New Orleans for you. Bless 'em all. Bildner uses him as a focal point in his story about the spirit of the city and the cleanup efforts.

We've got a lot of rhythmic calls, like "Hootie-hoo!" which coincidentally is the call my husband lets fly when he needs to get the attention of one of us across a field or down the street. The kids are not yet mortified by this practice, but it's only a matter of time.

There's great rhythm to the text, alliteration and internal rhyme which will make the book a pleasure to read aloud.

But look at this art. Anyone who has spent some time with outsider or folk art will see how John Parra is placing this story firmly in the folk canon. The flat picture plane contains a wealth of background detail along with an outsize main figure. This is typical of unschooled art - perspective is secondary to the imperatives of the story. Little kids draw like this too.

Colors are drawn from an industrial or housepaint palette - something that you begin to notice once you've looked at a lot of folk art, people painting with the materials at hand, not art supplies - and likewise each painting appears to have been painted on a salvaged board - scratches and woodgrain give each painting a roughhewn texture. Stars, birds, banners and sunbursts - imagery that folk art shares with tattoo art - frame his heroic vistas.

This streetscape calls to mind Haitian veves as well as tattoo imagery and quiltlike color blocking. Human figures each stand separate and distinct, and play out little interactions that kids will enjoy puzzling out. The more I look at this book, the more I see.

The same thing can always be said of Benjamin Chaud's tall Bear books. The Bear's Song, The Bear's Sea Escape, and now The Bear's Surprise.

I don't know if my favorite detail of this one is the Neanderthal family snoozing in their Stone Age cave with their mammoth pal...