The Matchbox Diary

The Matchbox Diary by Paul Fleischman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you’re a collector or even if your just someone who occasionally saves a memento from a cherished event, you’ll love Paul Fleischman’s “The Matchbox Diary.” The book opens with a colorful illustration by Bagram Ibatoulline, a double page spread depicting a sunny room, filled with antiques. An old man is inviting his great-granddaughter to choose something from the room so that he can tell her a story about it. What she chooses is a cigar box filled with small matchboxes, each one containing a saved memento. The first one that the child opens contains an olive pit and with that, her great-grandfather begins his tale of his boyhood life in Italy and how his family journeyed to America. As a young boy, the old man’s collection began when he was inspired to keep a diary. But, since he didn’t know how to read or write, he began saving objects connected to a memory. As he shares the contents of each matchbox, the old man’s story unfolds. A matchbox containing a bottle-cap is linked to the first time he made a trip to Naples and had a drink from a glass bottle, a matchbox filled with sunflower seed shells is a reminder of the long voyage from Italy to New York. Each of these memories is accompanied by one of Bagram Ibatoulline’s magnificent illustrations. On one side of the page we see the matchbox with its contents that trigger the old man’s memories. On the other side of the page is a beautifully rendered scene that shows us the event connected to the memento.

Detail of an illustration by Bagram Ibatoulline
from "The Matchbox Diary"

Prior to this book, I knew Ibatoulline’s work from his splendid 2003 collaboration with Paul Fleischman, “The Animal Hedge.” Ibatoulline’s illustrations in that book were inspired by 18th and 19th century American folk art. The illustrations in “The Matchbox Diary,” are the complete opposite in style. The illustrations in this book are done using acrylic gouache in a photo-realistic style, similar in a way to some of Allen Say’s books, such as “Grandfather’s Journey.” Ibatoulline’s illustrations in this book are marvelously detailed, the kind of illustrations that will reward you with repeat viewings. The renderings of the matchboxes are so carefully done, that you can almost feel the worn edges and the crumbling cardboard. The detail in the sepia-toned flashback scenes really help bring the past alive. This is a wonderful book, not only for introducing the concept of a diary to a young child but also perfect for exploring memories and in explaining the immigrant’s experience.

Detail of an illustration by Bagram Ibatoulline
from "The Matchbox Diary"

Detail of an illustration by Bagram Ibatoulline
from "The Matchbox Diary"

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Illustration Friday - "Yesterday"

Click illustration to see it larger

As someone who has a hard time of letting go of his past, I’ve often associated the word “yesterday” with a feeling of nostalgia. I especially get nostalgic for my childhood, a time when I was closer to my sister and lived in a home where I felt safe and secure. I didn’t come from a perfect family, we definitely had our dysfunctional problems but I won’t go into those problems here. Despite our dysfunctions, I felt cared for and loved by my parents and even when I was younger, I think I knew they were spoiling my brother, sister and me.  

I was sick a lot as a child and because of this I missed a lot of school. My bedroom became my refuge and safe haven. I was a shy and inhibited child, afraid of much of the real world and my room, with all of its books and toys, became the only place where I felt safe and secure. I remember thinking that I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life in my room. 

For this week’s Illustration Friday challenge, I’ve drawn an affectionate portrait of the way I remember my room.  It represents ‘yesterday’ to me because I often feel as if my childhood in that room took place only yesterday. I find it hard to believe that it’s been over 40 years since I could legally be considered a child. It really does seem like yesterday that I was curled up on my childhood bed and reading the Oz and Narnia books.

I’ve tried to include a number of things that were actually in my room at one time or another. I always had a lot of stuffed animals and dolls on my bed, a few of which I’ve shown in the drawing, including a Raggedy Ann doll, a plush green snake, a large dalmatian, several bunny rabbits and a teddy bear.  Above the bed, sitting on the headboard is a large papier mache cheetah that I made when I was 11 or 12.  On my walls I had thumb-tacked several posters, including a reproduction of a 1920s poster for  “The Thief of Bagdad,” starring Douglas Fairbanks (shown on the wall behind the cheetah). I remember I also had a poster showing a ruined castle in Ireland (you can see a portion of it on the right edge of my illustration).  The floor was made up of linoleum tiles in various shades of speckled browns and tans.  For awhile I had a large, oval braided rug that took up most of the floor space.  At the base of my bed I remember having a decorative green cardboard box that had a flowered lid. There were often newspapers stacked on this box because for a while I used to cut out and save the ads for my favorite movies.  The curtains on my window were beige and patterned with green, blue and tan representations of colonial shop labels and broadsheets. My room faced our backyard and from my window I could look out on to our backyard with its oval swimming pool and the brown mountain that rose up a block away from our property.

Even after I moved away from home in the late 1970s, my parents continued to live in this house so I often returned for visits.  Some time in the mid to late 1980s disaster struck my room in the form of a busted water heater which was in a service porch behind my bed. When the water heater broke, it flooded my bedroom, damaging many of my record albums and anything else I had stored on the floor. The linoleum was also damaged and had to be replaced. After this disaster, many of my things were put in storage and moved to other parts of the house. From that time on, my room never felt the same again. It no longer looked, or felt, like the room I had grown up in. 

I created the illustration using Painter 12's "Real" watercolor brushes and a customized "Pen" brush.

Illustration Friday - Snow

We've been having a mild fall here in Indiana, no snow so far and there's none forecast for the near future. We do have a lot of cardinals around and when I saw this week's Illustration Friday challenge, which is the word "Snow," I thought of how pretty a red cardinal looks against a snowy backdrop. I created my image as a quick watercolor sketch in Painter 12. I started off with a digital pencil sketch (see below) and added the watercolor on a separate layer.

After coloring the bird, I used one of Painter's Bleach Splatter brushes to make some spots on the bird's feathers (see detail below). After that I used Painter's Real Watercolor Scratch brush to draw some snowflakes over some of the bleach spots (detail below). I decided to leave the background white to further enhance the feeling of a bird on a snowy day.

digital pencil sketch

detail of the bleach spots created with the Bleach Splatter Brush

Snowflakes drawn with Painter's Real Watercolor Scratch Brush

Evolution of an Illustration

I was recently commissioned by FarFaria to illustrate Clement Moore's classic Christmas poem, "Twas the Night Before Christmas."  FarFaria is an app for the iPad and their stories are published for that device (to be honest, I'm not sure if they can be read on other tablet devices or not).  This version I created for them is due to be released on December 24th.  Here is a sneak preview of the evolution of one of the images I created for the story.

Storyboard panels for pages 9-12

Designing for the iPad can be a bit of a challenge.  Unlike a traditional picture book where you have the ability to have an illustration cross over the page gutter (the division in the middle of the book where the pages are joined) to cover two pages, an illustration for the iPad is limited to the size of one screen at a time. For FarFaria's app the main part of the illustration needs to fit within an area approximately 6 x 7 inches (the text will cover the lower portion of the illustration, so any important information needs to be in the aforementioned dimensions above the text).

For this job, the art director requested that I create the illustrations in a specific style. He cited an older illustration of mine from my website that he liked and asked me to create the story in that style. The first step in creating the illustrations was to draw storyboards, one sketch for each page of text. I created these as digital pencil sketches, four to a page. Once these had been approved, I enlarged the sketches to the appropriate size and refined them. For this blog I will be showing the evolution of page 12. All of the art was created in Painter version 12.

Above is the enlarged story board sketch that I used for my digital inking

On a new layer above the sketch, I have begun inking the final line work.

Above is the final inked line art

On separate layers, using digital watercolor brushes, I have begun to color the image

The next step is to start adding shadows

The final image with some darker shadows

House Held Up By Trees

House Held Up by Trees by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ted Kooser’s beautiful history of a house is in someways reminiscent of Virginia Lee Burton’s “The Little House,” but unlike that book, Kooser doesn’t anthropomorphize his house or try to imbue it with human feelings.

In telling his story of a house from the time when it was new to its rebirth as a house held up by trees, Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate uses language that is evocative but at the same time wistful. Like in Burton’s “The Little House,” the house in this story is the main character, the humans are secondary and they come and go. In the beginning we see the house when it is new, being cared for and loved by a man and his two children. Set in a clearing between two wooded lots, the house’s owner keeps the grounds immaculate, uprooting any seedlings that pop up in his perfect lawn. But as the years pass, the children move away and eventually so does their father. Sitting unsold, the house falls into disrepair. As time passes, seedlings and saplings pop up around it, hugging the house and protecting it from the winds. One day the trees, whose roots and branches have held the house together, begin to lift the house up toward the sky, where it is reborn as a house held up by trees. Jon Klassen’s digital and gouache illustrations are the perfect compliment for this somewhat melancholic story. Many of the illustrations are double-page spreads that give us wide panoramic vistas that emphasize the house’s isolation in the landscape. In two spreads early in the story we see the house as it looks from the point of view of the woods. We glimpse it through tree branches and see it sitting in the distance. It’s a clever foreshadowing of later illustrations where we will once again see the house through tree branches, the difference being that in the later illustrations we are up close to the house, with it looming large in the frame and the trees we are looking through are the ones that “held it together as if it was a bird’s nest in the fingers of their branches.”

As I mentioned, there are human characters in the story, but we never learn their names. We get glimpses of them from a distance or from behind, but we never see their faces. There are several haunting illustrations in this story that tugged at my heartstrings. In one, the two now grown children are shown from behind looking at the woods next to the house, a place where they use to run and play. It’s also a place where they would sit in the shadows and watch their father as he worked on his lawn. On the left side of the illustration are the woods, cool and inviting and unchanged from their childhood. On the right side, we see the adult children, the man holds a baseball cap at his side, while the woman holds a leaf. For me, these two details - a baseball cap and a leaf convey the melancholy of growing older. The only thing we can hold on to from our childhood are our memories and a few small mementoes, we must let go of everything else.

In another panoramic illustration, we see the father sitting in a folding chair, watching the sunset. The text tells us he is older now and his grown children "were gone for good . . ."  Next to the father, is an empty chair. On the left side of the spread we see through a window into the house's dining room where we get a glimpse of a lone place setting. Leaning against the outside of the house is the man’s lawnmower. Tall grass is starting to grow around it and even without the information in the text, we know that the man has given up on trying to keep up his lawn. It’s an illustration suffused with loneliness.

I loved this book. It was published by Candlewick, a publisher that seems to strive to put out beautiful books. This one is no exception. The language, illustrations and story are all beautiful. Having said that, I was somewhat surprised to see a publisher put out a children’s book that has no strong characters for children to identify with. It seems very much a book that will appeal more to adults looking back wistfully on their lost childhoods, then it will to most children. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. But I do hope that children will read this and love it. Those who do will be rewarded by a book that demonstrates the passage of time and what it means to grow older. Though there is a tone of loneliness in the book, there is also a comforting message of rebirth. I checked this book out from our public library, but it’s one that I fell in love with so I know I’ll be buying a copy for myself.

The illustrations below are by Jon Klassen from Ted Kooser's "House Held Up By Trees."

One of the panoramic two page spreads showing the house near the forest

Detail showing the house as it looks from the woods

A detail showing the father sitting alone on his perfect lawn

The now derelict house, sits alone, but the saplings are starting to surround it.

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