Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What’s a poor rabbit to do when the carrots he loves to munch on begin stalking him? Jasper Rabbit is faced with that question when he begins to suspect the delicious carrots from Crackenhopper Field are following him around, spying on him as he brushes his teeth and watching him while he’s in bed. Author Aaron Reynolds and illustrator Peter Brown have created a child-friendly homage to a classic ‘Twilight Zone’ scenario in this funny picture book that is perfect for any young child looking to be scared, but not too scared. Illustrator Peter Brown, using a monochromatic palette of warm grays and carroty orange, captures the shadowy look of an old horror movie. Even the edges of the frame are rounded to suggest a story unfolding on an old television screen. Jasper Rabbit’s paranoia is cleverly conveyed in Brown’s illustrations where the artist shows us what Jasper sees (creepy carrots everywhere) and what others see (everyday orange objects like flower pots or pop bottles). Because no one else can see the creepy carrots, Jasper realizes that he must turn to his own resourcefulness to outwit them. Kids may not look at a carrot in the same way after finishing this funny, slightly spooky tale. This would be the perfect read-aloud for Halloween or any night when a scary tale is called for.

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Sketchy Style

I've written several posts on this blog on pen and ink work and on artists like Erik Blegvad whose black and white illustrations are some of my favorites. I've also posted several of my own pieces that I've created in black and white using Corel Painter's digital pen brushes.  Most of my black and white work has been very detailed, containing lots of cross-hatching, which is extremely time consuming.

Lately, I've been reading lots of William Steig, not only his picture books, but one of his middle grade books, "Dominic," the story of a restless dog who goes out looking for adventure. "Dominic" contains some really charming black and white illustrations that are done in Steig's very loose style. Inspired by Steig, I decided I would try experimenting in a looser, sketchier style myself.

The problem that came up immediately was, 'What should I draw?' I scanned one of the bookshelves where I keep some of my middle grade books and found one of my childhood favorites, "Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet," by Eleanor Cameron, a book with no illustrations. Because I had not read it in many years, I couldn't recall off hand any particular scenes to illustrate, so I sat down to read the first couple of chapters. The early chapters serve as an introduction to the characters and since this book is a sequel to "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet," they set the background for what happened in the first book. The main plot point that takes place is that the boys meet Theodosius Bass who is the cousin of their old friend Tyco Bass. My first attempt showed Theodosius sitting in Tyco's old chair while the boys are standing nearby. But I felt that showing these characters just sitting and standing around was uninteresting and boring so I read a little further until I came to a scene at the start of Chapter 2: Theodosius has been telling the boys about his wanderings around the world and his search for a place to call his own. He says: "'Once I thought the Aleutians might be the answer - but oh, the cruel winds, the fogs, the bitter cold! A great mist-ake, you might say, eh?' And he darted the boys a sudden, twinkling glance, and they grinned at one another and knew with certainty they were going to get along with Mr. Theodosius. 'Something you'll never fog-et, you mean!' burst out Chuck, and then he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. David looked disgusted, but Mr. Theo seemed to think it a fine pun, and laughed and laughed." Even though the characters are still in their same positions, there is a more lively interaction going on - Chuck is in hysterics, David's looking disgusted and Mr. Bass is laughing at Chuck's word pun. If you compare my first attempt (at top) with the final result, I think you'll agree that the second illustration, which shows something of the character's personalities, is a much better illustration.

Pen and Ink - Digital Style Part 5, Reunion with Cooroo

November 15th will be the first year anniversary of starting this blog, and this post, that you're now reading, happens to be my 90th entry. When I started it, I had no idea whether or not I'd be able to keep it going or if I'd be able to find enough to write about. Participating in the "Illustration Friday" challenges has provided me with quite a few entries and for the rest I've either written about favorite children's book illustrators or posted examples of my own work. This will be another of those posts featuring one of my new pieces, with information on how I developed the piece.

For those of you who've been following this blog, you may remember my previous entries where I've featured some digital pen and ink work that I did based on my interpretations of scenes from the children's book "The Hounds of the Morrigan," by Pat O'Shea.

The scene that I chose for this illustration comes toward the end of the book, when the children are reunited with the fox Cooroo, who helped them in their adventures, only now they have to win Cooroo's trust back, since after their return from the land of fairy, he no longer remembers them. Here is the passage from the book: "And from time to time they would both meet a dog-fox; the same one every time, they were sure. He would stand and let them come quite close before walking away. They knew that he was not afraid of them at all. Every now and then he would stand still for a long time, and they would all three look at each other with puzzlement and affection and feelings of knowing that could not be explained by the children. If ever they went on a picnic, he would appear. They would throw food near him which he accepted and ate with perfect ease. On winter days, they particularly went for his sake and he was always waiting for them. In time, to their delight, they found that he trusted them enough to eat the food from their hands and even let Brigit stroke him."

Here is an early stage of the image where you can see the layer with the digital pencil sketch. I've also begun to ink in one tree, which I had on its own separate layer. The great thing about working digitally is that you can have different elements of the drawing on their own layers, which makes it very easy to move them around. In this case, I eventually ended up reversing this tree by horizontally flipping it and then decided to move it to the right side of the image.

Here you can see the tree in its new position on the right side of the image. I have also added a stone wall, and in the sky, a sun and some clouds. Plus, I moved the fox a little closer to the children and added another tree on the left.

In this image, I've inked in the outlines for the children and the fox and continued adding some detail to the background.

In this image, you can see that I have begun to ink in the fox's fur.

I decided to add in some very dark shading to make the two children and the fox stand out. I've also added another group of trees on the left and some grasses. Up until this point, I had worked on the drawing every day for almost a week. I had begun to get a little tired of making all of those small cross-hatching lines and was starting to get discouraged about the overall look. Because of this, I decided to put it aside for a couple of weeks. I finally went back to it yesterday. Once I managed to get into a good rhythm, I was able to finish it fairly quickly.

Originally, I intended to have this scene take place on a bright sunny day, but as I continued to ink it, it began to look more like a moonlit night. I think that was due in part to the rings I had drawn around the sun. I also had very little shading on the trees on the far horizon. This made them look like they were being lit by the moon. By adding more shading to the sky and the distant trees and eliminating some of the darkest shadows on the figures (especially on the girl), I think it now looks like a partly cloudy day time scene, which I think I like better. 

Creative Partners - Maud and Miska Petersham

In the world of movies and television, we can all think of husband and wife partnerships that produced fruitful collaborations, Burns and Allen, Lucy and Desi, Bogart and Bacall, the list goes on, but there is another artistic field where wife and husband teams have also produced a lasting legacy. Since I primarily write about children's books in this blog, you can probably guess that the artistic field that I'm talking about is children's book illustration.  The world of children's books has given us Berta and Elmer Hader (The Big Snow, 1948), Alice and Martin Provensen (The Glorious Flight, 1983; A Child's Garden of Verses, 1951), Leo and Dianne Dillon (The People Could Fly, 1985) and Maud and Miska Petersham (Poppy Seed Cakes, 1924, The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles, 1945). It is the Petershams that I'm featuring in this posting, primarily because I recently acquired two of their books at used book sales.

The Petershams illustrated many wonderful books in a period that lasted for over thirty years, primarily between the 1920s and 1950s. Maud was born in 1889 and was a New York native, while her husband Miska immigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1912.  They met in an art school in New York City, were married and began collaborating on children's books.  The first book that they not only illustrated but also wrote, was "Miki" (1929), which according to Anita Silvey's "Children's Books and Their Creators," was "the first big colored picture book printed in the United States, and the first of a tide of pictures books set in a foreign land."

As I mentioned earlier, I recently acquired two of the Petershams' books - their illustrated version of the combined "Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," published by The Macmillan Company in 1951, and their 1946 Caldecott Medal winner, "The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles." The illustrations in these two books couldn't be more different, one done in pen and ink, and the other in what looks to be lithographs.  The Petershams were known for their depictions of European traditions and old world cultures so their pen and ink illustrations for "Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," were a perfect fit. The Petershams lived in the area where Irving's stories were set and their illustrations beautifully capture the craggy hills, the crooked trees and the natural beauty of a part of New York that was once a Dutch settlement. I think you'll agree that their depiction of Ichabod Crane is a wonderful match for Irving's description of the character,"His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large, green, glassy eyes, and a long, snip nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the pofile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."

"The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles," was published in 1945 and as I mentioned earlier, won the 1946 Caldecott Medal.  As an interesting side note, according to Anita Silvey, later editions of this book had two rhymes and their accompanying illustrations removed due to the fact that they contained offensive black stereotypes. The edition that I recently found at a library sale, and that I am featuring in this blog, is a later edition without the offending rhymes, so I will reserve comment on what was omitted.  "The Rooster Crows," as its subtitle states, features all sort of rhymes and jingles, some of them familiar like "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...," and some not so familiar "Bat, bat, come under my hat, and I'll give you a slice of bacon." 

The illustrations are all delightful with a mix of contemporary (contemporary to the 1940s that is) settings and earlier time periods that look to be close to the era in which "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is set. I love this illustration for "Star bright, star light," (see above right) where the artists have chosen to make the earthbound portions of the rhyme, more fantastical than the starry night. If you look closely you'll see that the young girl is surrounded by some fantasy fireflies, each one carrying a little lantern. It's a good example of how an illustrator can bring something to an illustration that is not mentioned in the text.

This beautiful color illustration for the rhyme "Red at night, Sailors delight. Red in the morning, Sailors take warning," is one of my favorites. I love how they have split the scene in two, one side bright and cheerful, the other blue and stormy. The two different sides are tied together by the rhythmic, almost art deco waves. By showing a sailor facing the ocean, with a caged parrot in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, the artists have given this short little saying a narrative that goes beyond its four lines of text. 

Another of my favorites, is this one for the rhyme, "Engine, engine, Number Nine." This is a jingle that I remember from childhood, and I love how the Petershams have illustrated the last part of the rhyme "If she's polished how she'll shine," by showing a cow looking at its reflection in the shiny engine's surface.

This illustration of a young girl testing the waters of a stream, is another example of how the artists have used their imagination to supplement the limited text. I love all of the little animals that are in the scene, none of which are mentioned in the rhyme.

I'm sure most of us can remember having a parent count out our toes using the "This little piggy went to market" rhyme. Here the Petershams show us a mother in 18th or possibly early 19th century costume, counting out the rhyme on her little girl's toes, while above them we are shown what each of the little pigs is doing. 

I was delighted to find these two books illustrated by the Petershams and they have made me want to check out more of their illustrious output.

Pen and Ink - Digital Style Part 4, Mawleogs

Over the past month, I've been developing my black and white portfolio by drawing scenes from the children's novel, "The Hounds of the Morrigan," by Pat O'Shea. It's quite a wonderful children's fantasy based on Celtic mythology and has two very likable protagonists, 10 year-old Pidge and his 5 year-old sister Brigit. In this scene, the children, who are being pursued by the hounds belonging to the Morrigan, the Goddess of Battle and Destruction, meet the friendly spider Mawleogs who aids them in their journey to find the blood-stained pebble that is needed to stop the evil queen from regaining her full powers.

I originally envisioned depicting this scene from behind the children, looking over their shoulders so that the viewer could get a good look at Mawleogs. But with this layout, the spider would need to be further back in the scene and he would end up being so small, that most of his facial detail would be lost and therefore the scene would lose some of its impact. I did do a sketch of it though, which you can see below. Below it, is a close-up sketch of the spider, Mawleogs. He is described in the story as wearing a shirt with a ruffled neck and cuffs, black knee britches, knitted stockings, buckled hornpipe shoes, and a little hard hat.


In this part of the story, which takes place in Ireland, the children have crossed over into Tír-na-nÓg (the otherworld or Fairy land) so I'm guessing that the hard hat that Mawleogs was wearing might not be what we think of as a hard hat. Considering that he's described as a gentleman, I pictured the hat more like the type that you might see a leprechaun wearing. I had to dig for some reference to find out what a hornpipe shoe was.

After I decided to show the children from the front, and Mawleogs from the back, I came up with this sketch. After spending quite a bit of time working on this composition, I still wasn't happy with it. The children looked too stiff and I felt the layout lacked interest. It was too straight-forward and it was not matching the vision I had in my head of how I wanted this to look. 


So, I revamped it one more time. This time I decided to tilt the scene a bit and show it from slightly above, as if you were up in the tree with Mawleogs, looking down on the children.


To help me in the perspective and the shading of the scene, I set up two figures in Poser, which you can see to the right. As far as using Poser, I only know the basics. I don't use it as often as I use to, but it still comes in handy once in a while to help with a tricky perspective. Below, is the final pencil sketch that I worked from, based on this new viewpoint. I feel this layout works much better and gives the scene some dynamic visual interest and movement. 


One of my favorite children's book illustrators is Erik Blegvad (who I've written about before in this blog) who has illustrated many wonderful books using pen and ink.  While drawing the children in my illustration and doing the cross-hatching, I constantly referred to some of his illustrations, in particular some that he did for the Mary Norton book "Bed-knob and Broomstick." 

Pen and Ink - Digital Style Part 1

I have recently begun sending out postcard samples of my artwork to various children's book and magazine publishers. Approximately every two weeks since June, I've sent out another batch, so far a total of 59 cards. Some of the people I've addressed my cards to spoke at the SCBWI conference that I went to in New York last January. To those people, I've sent new postcards every time I've sent out another batch. So by now, if they've kept them, they have a small portfolio of my work. No word back from any of them so far, which isn't surprising considering how many submissions I'm sure they receive.

So, how does this relate to my subject heading, "Pen and Ink - Digital Style?" While going through my portfolio, selecting art to send out in postcard form, I realized that I have very little in the way of black and white artwork. I've often read that when putting together a portfolio, it's important to show black and white work as well as pieces in full color. A lot of children't chapter books, middle grade books and even some young adult books use black and white illustrations, either interspersed throughout a story or as chapter headings. The 'Harry Potter' books are a good recent example of this.  At the beginning of each chapter, there is a small 'spot' illustration. I enjoy seeing those types of illustrations in books and I always love it while reading when I come across the passage in the chapter that the illustrator has chosen to illustrate.

I am currently reading a children's book called 'The Hounds of the Morrigan,' by Pat O'Shea. It's quite a long book (over 600 pages), a fantasy with its roots in Celtic mythology and folklore. One of the things that I like about it, besides the author's sense of humor, are the two main characters, Pidge and Brigit. These brother and sister protagonists are very likable and don't have a trace of the cynicism that seems to have crept into so many contemporary depictions of children. I'm sure children are more cynical and jaded today than they were when I was a kid, but seeing children depicted without these traits, gives this book a charming, old-fashioned quality that makes it feel like I'm reading a book that came out during my childhood (which was in the late fifties and early sixties), rather than something that was written in the late nineties.

I am reading a mass market paperback edition of this book.  There are no illustrations in the book, but as I've been reading it, I've begun thinking that it might be a fun personal challenge to try and create some 'spot' chapter heading illustrations for it. I love looking at intricate pen and ink work (see my blog dedicated to pen and ink work from Dec. 12, '09 and my posting about Erik Blegvad from August 16th of this year) and I love working in the medium, even though it's been several years since I've done so.  For this project I decided to get out my rapidograph pens and see what I could come up with. But, when I pulled my pens out of storage, I found that they were badly in need of cleaning. I knew it was going to take some time to get them back into working order, so I decided to start my drawing as a digital sketch.

The first image I decided to do was of an oak tree that is described in chapter twenty-three: "At length they saw the biggest tree they had ever seen, growing at a distance of twenty feet or more in from the rim of the chasm. Its trunk was a bulk and a mass and a swelling; its branches were a billowing and a spreading and a stretching; its height was pride and power."

I knew I was going to need some reference for this drawing, so I took my camera on one of my many walks with my dog and chose this oak tree that is growing in our local park.  It is a big tree, but it is no where near the size of the tree described in the book. I basically used my photo for reference on how the branches grow and the fall of light and shadow on the foliage. In my drawing, I beefed up the tree, adding girth to its trunk and width to its span.

To the right is my original pencil sketch which I scanned and used as a rough guide. You can see that the tree in my original pencil sketch is rather squat. I didn't leave myself enough room in my sketchbook for the height of the tree, so, after scanning it, I improvised and added some additional foliage and branches to the top. I've also included some of the stages of development of the final drawing. In some of these you can see the sketch, which I had on a separate layer, showing through.

As I continued to add more and more detail to this digital pen and ink drawing, I decided to keep it digital and not try and duplicate it using my rapidograph pen.  I spent between 15 and 20 hours working on this drawing. It is the most intricate and detailed drawing I've done using Painter's digital pen brush, but I'm happy with the way it turned out, so I am already planning to do more. I already have a couple of more illustrations in mind that I want to do for my "Hounds of the Morrigan" project. I'll be posting them here as I complete them.

The Snow Book

While on a recent overnight getaway to Cincinnati, my partner Mark and I visited a used bookstore called, simply enough, the Ohio Bookstore. The website for this bookstore states that, distributed over its five floors, it has over 300,000 books and magazines in stock. I only had time to browse two of its five floors, but I believe their claim. I ended up spending a hundred dollars on used children's books and left with two shopping bags of books. Over the next several months, I'll share some of my finds on this blog.

Because it was recently requested that I feature it, I'm going to start with a non-fiction work called "The Snow Book," by Eva Knox Evans, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1965, with illustrations by Aldren A. Watson. Other than the fact that the author won the Jane Addams Children's book award in 1953 for another of her titles, "People Are Important," I was unable to find any other biographical information on her, though judging by the number of her books that are available through Amazon, she seemed to be a quite prolific non-fiction author. Though "The Snow Book," is out of print, there are used copies readily available through Amazon. If you are interested in a copy for yourself, you can click on the link in the book's title.

What convinced me to buy this book though, were the beautiful illustrations by Aldren A. Watson (Watson, who is also a woodworker has also written several books, including "The Blacksmith," and "Country Furniture"). When I first glanced through this book, it flipped open to one of several two-page spreads. I think this one of a man shoveling snow on a rural road, is the first one that caught my eye (click on any of these illustrations to see them larger). All of the book's illustrations are done in this style - black graphite or (or is it conte crayon?) lines, with the shadows colored in a beautiful aqua blue.  The snow is indicated by allowing the white of the paper to show through. The composition of this image with its curved road in the foreground, invites the viewer to enter the scene. Our eye begins with the man in the road, shoveling snow by a group of mailboxes.  The man appears to have stopped shoveling for a second and seems to be watching the truck that has just passed by.  We follow his gaze down the road to the truck that is plowing the road. We then notice a figure opposite the truck, who appears to be waving to the driver. From there we wander further into the scene and see another figure walking across the snow covered landscape. From there our eye wanders up to the snow covered hills. As our eye moves up and to the right, we come back to the foreground by moving down the tree that anchors the right edge of the scene. It's a beautiful illustration, one that keeps your eye moving and leaves you with the desire to study it and revisit it.

I'd say that the book is probably written for a 4th or 5th grade level, but it's a wonderful little book for anyone who wants to know more about this natural phenomenon. It explains what snow is, what makes it fall, how it is plowed, how people travel across it, how it is predicted, how it can be induced artificially (Chapter 8 "The Snow Gun") and what happens when it begins to melt away. Above each chapter heading, is an illustration. One of my favorites is the illustration for Chapter 4 "Snowshoes and Dogsleds." In this image, the illustrator has cleverly given us a cut-away side view that lets us see what is hidden by the high drifts of snow. On top of the snow, a man trudges along in his snowshoes. The fence he is walking towards is half-hidden by the height of the snow, and the artist allows the viewer to see just how deep the snow is, through his clever cross-section.

Here is another chapter heading illustration that I think is quite beautiful, this one from Chapter 2 "What is Snow?"

There are also images sprinkled throughout the margins of the book. In the section devoted to Wilson Bentley, the famous snowflake photographer, we see images of Bentley and his microscope, his camera and the different types of snowflakes.

 One of my favorites of these margin illustrations is this one that depicts the shadow of an airplane as it passes over a tiny figure standing beside a house that is half buried in the snow. I love the unusual perspective of this illustration. It's almost like the artist has invited us to sit alongside the pilot of the plane.

Earlier, I mentioned that the book contained several illustrations that spanned two pages. Here are several of the others. In case you are wondering where the page gutter is in these scans, I have attempted to remove the dividing gutter in all of these two-page illustrations, through some Photoshop manipulation.