How to use this Page

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

It's a great morning. Donna Jo Napoli was up first, David Small is up now. If you haven't visited David's website, it is full of fantastic sketches from his travels and helpful links. For a hint at his demo on Monday and a quick interview, visit this post.

Besides visiting David's website, I would say PLEASE take a moment to read the posts about him on Julie Walker Danielson's Seven Impossible Things. Her review of STITCHES alone makes me tear up.

David shares this video with us:



It's pretty harrowing, be sure you've had your breakfast and a hug for the day.

David tells us making STITCHES was the therapy he couldn't get any other way.

David needed to find a way to bring his family back, to recreate and remember them to figure out if his adulthood nightmares, anxieties, and anger are rooted in his childhood or just chronic depression.

But as David is sketching and drawing and writing down his childhood memories, he comes to the conclusion:

"I had an unloving mother who wanted me dead. And I believe it's safer to keep expressions like that away from the body, and get them out through art or music..."

David is still reticent to talk about the making of STITCHES in public, so he's structured the rest of his talk about it as a Q&A.

Why the switch from picture books to an older audience/graphic novels?

David quotes Dante,  

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Deciding he needed to drop all the metaphors in his life and start looking at REAL life, David wanted some good therapy, but:

"Out on the prairie, you don't have access to the perfect psychoanalyst, so I became that for myself... by writing and drawing this memoir... and I always expected myself to get over 'it.'"

What would you like readers of this book to know?

When all is said and done, STITCHES is a warning about families with wrong-headed tradition. A long conga line of people abusing their children who go on to abuse their children... David reads Philip Larkin's poem:



Though David now has a brighter view of life than Mr. Larkin, and he's stepped out of that conga line he mentions, it's still a daily struggle for David to be sure he's treating his loved ones the right way.

"So now, after being the downer of the morning, I will try to be the upper, too."

David shows us a video called UNCHAIN MY HEART. A rousing, hilarious animatic of a typical day on an author tour. While I STRONGLY OBJECT TO THE PORTRAYAL OF MEDIA ESCOR

0 Comments on David Small Keynote - The Voice of the Eye as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment

A quick social media note: Paul is on Facebook and has a public page, so please go and Like his Paul O. Zelinsky page. And he's great on Twitter, too, see links to all of that and more in this post.

What do you need to illustrate a fairy tale?

• A personal connection to the story
• Inspiring and relevant research materials
• Willing models that won't get a restraining order against you when you try to put them in a costume
• A special calendar for timing your fairy tale dummy submission
• A wonder-full heart
• Toothpicks

Paul grew up listening to classical records with fairy tale narrations and he'd act out those tales with family and friends. His grandmother's painting of Hansel and Gretel (that hung in his childhood room above his crib) sticks out to Paul as something that was strange and wonderful and an icon he focused on. (Easter Egg Alert: Paul pays tribute to his grandmother and her art talent by hiding an homage to her painting in the last spread of HANSEL AND GRETEL.)

Dutch Renaissance painting copying, researching period costumes, collecting images that fit the desired mood and time period are how Paul started getting ready to paint the scenes of HANSEL AND GRETEL. That and studying witchcraft at the Karl Jung Museum in New York (a hot tip from Leonard Marcus!)

After these preliminary measures, Paul enlists volunteers to model the poses he needs for the illustrations. He dresses, poses them, and does sketches and photographs of the models (his editor posed as the witch! As pose only, not in demeanor!)

His next fairy tale, RUMPELSTILTSKIN, he built similarly, but Paul wanted it to look like a different and later European art style.


He's able to get lots of good examples of period costume and art for Rumpelstiltskin, but the BIG DILEMMA for RUMPELSTILTSKIN is

STRAW.

It's hard to find straw in New York, though Paul found a few photos to help. But how to draw straw, how to paint straw, that was a conundrum for Paul. So he played around, painting with tons of different techniques until he found the one he liked: it's the top left and he used a toothpick.


Some final Paul Pearl's:

"If you want to illustrate a fairy tale, the first thing to do is consult The Calendar. It's a cycle. It's related to sun spot activity, so every seventeen years or so is when the fairytale market is up."

"Fairy

Display Comments Add a Comment

Thank you very much, I'm not as well spoken as the wonderful writers here today, that's why I chose art.

GRACIAS-THANKS by Pat Mora is a story about a boy raised in a multicultural family who goes through his day noticing the small (and sometimes not so small) things he is thankful for.

I would also like to say thank you.
Thank you to my parents, who always encouraged and supported me to become an artist.
It was the early memories of my dad drawing for me and my brother that inspired me to also be an artist.
My mom, a school teacher, read to us every day.
Thank you to my wife, Maria, for her love and support... for sharing her amazing insight and ideas as my personal art director and manager.
Thank you to Lee & Low, especially Louise May, my editor.
Thank you to all my art teachers and mentors. They showed me my dreams and provided me with tools on the path to becoming a real artist.
Thank you to my peers and all the great people at SCBWI.

With dreams and ambitions, the path of an artist is rarely easy. I'm infinitely grateful for all that I've received, thank you very much.

Add a Comment

His keynote is called "Making Sense of Life Through Books"

He is happy to be here in our big group because he feels like he belongs -- and is otherwise home alone all day making pictures.

Add a Comment

Marla was interested in illustration the song "Hush, Little Baby" so she began to research lullabies.

She found there were three categories: soothing, bribery, threat. When Marla illustrated "Hush, Little Baby (a bribery lullaby) she set her book in the 1850s in her book. She added an older sister into the mix, who's helping her papa get her new little sister to sleep.

Marla showed us images of the whole book (which is wonderful). You can pretend you were here by checking out of copy of Hush, Little Baby and studying the way the illustrations and text work together.

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Display Comments Add a Comment

Illustrators, Marla says, need their pictures to be in a relationship with the text and she feels security in the text when she's illustrating books she hasn't written. If she's written the text and she finds herself in a spot where things aren't working, it's almost as if there are too many options--which Marla finds scary yet exhilarating.

She keeps hearing rules about picture books such as that a readers should be able to understand and follow the story just by looking at the illustrations, and that the illustrations should say something different than what's being said in the words. Marla disagrees with these rules.

Instead, the words and picture should work together, they should dance.

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Display Comments Add a Comment

Marla is showing the last few page turns of The Carrot Seed. She wants her talk to focus on how to make the chemistry between words and pictures happen.

Marla is showing some great example of the chemistry.

Here first editor with Linda Zuckerman after taking 12 years to break into the field. After her first book, it took her five years to get another one. Then she got the manuscript for her book The Seven Silly Eaters.

She's taking us through her process of working on Silly Eaters. For example, she added a father to the illustrations, thought there was no father mentioned in the text, but made him smaller than the mother in the story since she was more important.

We're seeing early sketches and final art. (I love that!)

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Add a Comment

(Marla Frazee has a hot pink Mac and she's wearing a super cool pair of Fluevogs.)

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Display Comments Add a Comment

Hyewon Yum won the Golden Kite Award for illustration for Last Night, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Winning for picture book illustration, Hyewon Yum spoke of how she wasn't someone who ever lifted her hand to speak in class.

And now she's before almost 1,000 people!

And she gave a very gracious thank you.


Posted by Lee Wind

Add a Comment

Where do Dan's book ideas come from?

Add a Comment

This post is about introductions in more ways than one. First, let me introduce you to the author D. Michael Lindsay who will be blogging here quite a bit this fall. Lindsay is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University and the author of Faith In The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined The American Elite. Faith In The Halls of Power draws on interviews Lindsay conducted with an array of prominent Americans — including two former presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes and other powerful figures. His book shows who the real evangelical power brokers are, how they rose to prominence, and what they’re doing with their clout.

In the post below Lindsay recounts introducing himself Karen Hughes in a bookstore. Would you have had the “chutzpah” to walk up and introduce yourself?

Sitting down with some of the nation’s most powerful figures to talk about their faith has been an exhilarating part of my life for the last five years. More than once someone said to me, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this stuff.” (more…)

Share This

Add a Comment