I was in Seattle a few weeks ago. You remember the library, right?
I went to Pike Place Market, because of course, but also because flying fish and dudes in galoshes are a spectacle worth checking out. And I also wanted to get up close and personal with some bluefin tuna eyeballs.
There’s a real reason for that, trust me. But they didn’t have any tuna, so this happened:
There’s not a real point to that story except that I adore that tweet (and those two Favoriters) and it’s what I did just before I wandered into Lamplight Books.
It’s like I stole something. Fifteen dollars? Sixty quarters? It still has that magical, musty smell of hidden secrets. And it was mine in a fraction of a split second. That fast.
Because…behold:
I’m in love. From the texture of a porcupine, to the form of mountains and weeds, to the repetition inside a squash, design is everywhere.
Design is a Dandelion ends like this, with truth and a charge:
Design is everywhere. It is for everyone. All you have to do is to learn to see it. Open your eyes and take a big, long look.
I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time, mostly because that cover is SPECTAZZLING. But also cause I follow Greg Pizzoli on Twitter, where he is clever and quippy and shares things like THE ENDPAPERS. And then this is what the publisher teased us with, so I was pretty much in love with this book right away:
With perfect comic pacing, Greg Pizzoli introduces us to one funny crocodile who has one big fear: swallowing a watermelon seed. What will he do when his greatest fear is realized? Will vines sprout out his ears? Will his skin turn pink? This crocodile has a wild imagination that kids will love.
Yeah. SO INTO THAT. The Watermelon Seed hits stores TOMORROW, May 14th, so you might want to go ahead and get in line. After you meet Greg, of course.
So I’ve also been looking forward to this post for almost as long. I’m thrilled to have Greg Pizzoli in for a visit. Welcome, Greg!
I call him “Kroc”. Sometimes my editor calls him “K-Roc” or “The Krocster”. Boy, does he hate that.My background is in printmaking, and I built a silkscreen shop in my studio, which is how I generate a lot of my work. I think my preference towards limited and deliberate colors comes from the printmaking. It could be laziness, but I’m going to say printmaking.
Even the first sketches of this book were in just a few colors. It just made sense to make the whole book feel like a watermelon. Plus, he’s a crocodile, so the green is already there.
Everyone at Disney*Hyperion was very supportive of my trying out different inks and paper choices to get the feel just right. We did CMYK v. Spot color tests and there was just no comparison. I think it would be tough to get that pink, and that green with CMYK. At least for me. We tried a few different paper stocks, too. I’m super picky.
Basically you make a drawing in black and use that to make a stencil on a screen. Doesn’t matter how you make that drawing – by hand on tracing paper, with construction paper, in Photoshop – whatever you can use to get a drawing in black. Your screen, which is a frame of aluminum with a fine mesh stretched across it, is covered in photographic emulsion, and you expose the screen to light. Wherever the light hits the emulsion, it hardens and becomes water resistant.
BUT if you put your black drawing between the screen and the light source, the emulsion that is blocked by your drawing (which remember, is black, thus very light blocking-y), that emulsion stays soft. And you can wash it out with water. So everything that wasn’t blocked by your drawing is water resistant, and your drawing washes out of the screen, making a water resistant stencil in the shape of your drawing. You make one of those for each layer, or usually, color. WATERMELON was offset printed obviously, but I did a lot of screenprinting textures, etc to make it feel very printy. The spot colors definitely help there, too.
I’ve been teaching screenprinting for about 4 years at The University of the Arts in Philly. It’s where I met Brian Biggs. He took a continuing ed class I was teaching in 2009. He introduced me to my agent. I dedicated a book to him, but it hasn’t come out yet. I still owe him big time. I still teach! I love it.
Humor usually keeps me interested in whatever I’m doing.
I like to work with texture for sure, too. And shapes. Shapes, yeah, shapes are good. I know this is great interview material here. Breaking news, Greg Pizzoli “like shapes”. Today on Buzzfeed, 23 shapes Greg Pizzoli likes most.
Anyway . . . I was really into shapes and texture with THE WATERMELON SEED, and the next book I’m doing with Hyperion (NUMBER ONE SAM, Summer 2014) comes from a similar place. We’re doing spot colors for that one, too. But four this time, which opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of overlapping layers and colors.
Like most people, I like lots of stuff. I never get tired of looking at Eduardo Munoz Bachs posters. He obviously had a lot of fun making his work. A lot of people you’d suspect probably, Sendak, Ed Emberly, Tove Jansson, Charles Schultz, etc.
I’m really lucky to have so many talented buddies in the Philly area, too. I host occasional drink ‘n’ draws at my studio and Zach Ohora, Matt Phelan, Bob Shea, Tim Gough, Amy Ignatow, Brian Biggs, Lee Harper, Gene Baretta, Eric Wight, and several others have come by. It’s a good time. Sometimes we do this thing where we each draw for five minutes and then pass the paper to the right and draw on top of that drawing for five minutes, until we get all the way around the circle or run out of beer. You can imagine just how bad these things look. Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, David Bowie. They’re my heroes.
No way! I love coffee. I think I quit for a while last year and it just floated around my online profile for a bit. I did stop drinking as much. I am down to like 2-3 cups a day which feels great for me. I was drinking like 8-10. Oh yeah. I’m nicer now.
Greg Pizzoli, people. Is he awesome or what?
So yeah. That’s pretty much my favorite thing on the internet right now. Did you catch the part where the period at the end of the sentence becomes a spotlight for good old K-Roc?! I love that detail.
The Watermelon Seed! Greg Pizzoli! Thanks for hanging out here! We love your book. And you are top notch, too.
Get ready. You may never have seen anything like this before. Have you ever read something that you feel like should be in a museum and not in your hands? And then you realize that’s the whole point of the perfection and portability of picture books, but still your mouth hangs open in awe?
This is one of those books.
The Enduring Ark is a retelling of the flood story from Genesis, and this line from the first page enveloped me in its storytelling.
You may have heard this story before, but great tales deserve to be repeated – and so let me tell it here again, in my way.
And so it goes, this age old story with a breath of new words. Spare text, stunning imagery. The strong lines hold bold saturated color. And I’m dearly smitten with the two crabs!
They found all forms of creatures: large and small, fierce and tame, with feet, and fins, wearing fur, scales and feathers.
The book itself can be read page by page, left to right, as you are quite familiar with. But it also extends out like an accordion, the story literally unfolding before you.
Tara Books, of Chennai, South India, calls themselves a ‘collective of dedicated writers, designers and artists who strive for a union of fine form with rich content.’ This accordion-style scroll painting is the Bengali Patua style, which historically has been used to visualize mythological stories and aid the narration of a storyteller. What a sublime medium for their mission to unite fine form with rich content, right?
Also interesting? On the cover, the artist is named before the writer. Perhaps it’s because the words are a retelling? Or because the design of the book is what makes it extra special? I’m not sure, but I found that really lovely.
The Enduring Ark releases on May 14, 2013. If you are a fan of book design, fantastic story, and clever engineering, don’t miss this innovative book!
Big thank to the publisher, Tara Books, for providing a copy of this book for review. Why not connect with them on Twitter or Facebook if you think their work is magical, too?!
I had some time to kill last weekend after the SCBWI Western Washington conference was over. Seattle was gorgeous, the mountain was out (is that what you say? It was remarkable.) and I had already seen a fish or two flung at Pike Place Market.
So I went to the library.
This is the 10th floor, looking out and down. According to the elevator, it was the highest lookout point, so it was my first stop. But oh, the elevator:
You pick your floor by Dewey classification. YOU PICK YOUR FLOOR BY DEWEY CLASSIFICATION. Blew my mind. I tweeted about it, and am still thinking about it.
And how beautiful is this? This is looking down on the teen librarians and the coffee shop, which I stopped at, obviously.
And this! Kudos to the librarian who watched me geek out over this art installation and then gave me a high five. These screens showcase four different visualizations by George Legrady, an artist and professor of interactive media at UCSB. The one in particular below is called “Keyword Map Attack” and it shows keywords of checked-out titles that are mapped back to their Dewey classification. It constantly changes and updates, because it is directly linked to the library’s catalog. So cool.
(And to whoever was searching for spinjitzu, you made me curious, so I looked it up. It’s a martial art in a LEGO universe! Art. At the library. That taught me something. MINDBLOWN.)
How about these floors? Another librarian I spoke to said they sold the leftover strips for a dollar an inch, and that she had a bunch hanging on the walls of her living room. I was in complete envy and shock and awe and wow.
And then I went to the children’s section.
The security man looked at me funny when I took this picture, and I think I mumbled something about the letters, and the circles making up the letters, and I love your library and happy Monday. Really.
A Paul Thurlby poster! Remember him? (Spoiler alert: his new book is brilliant and you’ll love it.)
But now. You have to see this. Of all the books they had, this one caught my eye first.
Shapes Book, by Sofia (to share with people at the library)
Sofia is my kind of girl.
I took her book and tried to be gentle with it and flipped through the pages. She wrote about shape! And lines! And ones that wiggle. (She might like this one?)
After I put Sofia’s masterpiece back on the shelf, I noticed what was displayed next to it:
I loved that. Maybe Sofia’s book was there because she is making math amazing, like the sign says. But also? That infographic is really lovely graphic design: clear, dynamic, and driven by color and shape. Sofia’s investigation of shapes is something I’m sure that graphic designer has given consideration to. Something was really magical about this duo, and I was just tickled.
If you get a chance to peek into the Seattle Public Library, please do! I mean, it’ll probably be raining anyway, right?
Let me introduce you to Raymond McGrath. He’s an animator and Animation Director in New Zealand, and he reads this blog. I love that. And he’s crazy talented. Not only did he write and illustrate a picture book called It’s Not a Monster, It’s Me!, but he also wrote the catchiest tune and created a stop-motion short to go along with it.
Are you awesome? Have cool things the rest of us need to see and enjoy?! Email me! I get THE BEST emails from my readers and so a GINORMO-MONDO THANK YOU for being here and reading this and hanging out in this corner of the internet. That means you, too, Figgy. You know who you are!
Also. I tweeted this truth the other day, but I have been stalking this app’s release whoa-hurry-big-time. It’s free, and it is a brilliant blend of digital and analog and it is superb. Watch this! Go there! Get it!
When I first heard of this book at SCBWI LA last summer, it was some art on a slide at the front of the room. I was in the back row, and I was hooked. I’ve been waiting for it ever since, and I love that its release was in eager anticipation of baseball’s opening days.
{Sidenote: Cano + Jay-Z? Interesting collaboration. I’ll always be a Chipper Jones girl myself. Middle school scrapbooks and everything. Really.}
But this book. It’s a visual juxtaposition of baseball traditions in America and Japan. A global pastime.
On the left, a kiddo goes to the park with his Pop Pop, and on the right, he hangs out with his ji ji.
{Sidenote again: I had the world’s greatest Pop Pop – no offense to our bright eyed young’n in this book. He always called that Chipper Jones fella Skipper.}
The sweet story arc socked me in the gut a little, because of my own fondness for family trips to the baseball stadium. Aaron Meshon’s saturated colors that are full of life vibrate with the energy of a game. The American blues and the Japanese reds contrast beautifully on each spread, too.
One of the reasons I love baseball so much is its balance of sheer intensity and quiet, and the roar of a rallied-up crowd. The composition of the illustrations echo that rise and fall – some are fully rendered to the edge, color spilling off the page. Some are contained in a quieter space, bordered by white.
And I love this – a subtle repetition of a circle, the stitched up sphere of a baseball. It even shows up on the back of the title page. I’m blanking on my librarian vocabulary – the verso, is it? That part where all the important cataloging information lives.
It’s here, too. Those cheeks!
And this – baseball is exhausting.
So get this book. It’s a home run. (And a slam dunk, too – even though that’s the wrong sport.)
Happy April! My word bank is empty, but pretend there’s an awesome April Fool’s Day pun here. It’d be good, I promise.
Besides being a month that starts out with a bang for the gullible, it’s also the start of National Poetry Month. Alyson Beecher has a great roundup of ideas, books, and events if you are looking for things to read and ways to celebrate.
And! Do you know Greg Pincus and his blog, Gotta Book? He’s hosting 30 Poets/30 Days again this year, and I got to design the logo! Check out his blog throughout the month for some brand-new-never-seen-before words from a slew of fine poets.
Fun news! Today’s post is brought to you by the lovely Emily Litman, of the blog Bing Bang Crash Boom! Emily is just as fun and zesty as that blog name, and when I first saw Ramona Quimby in her sidebar, I knew we would be friends. She finds (and shares!) the best books, and has impeccable taste.
Taking Flight. To begin, what a lovely concept. I can think of quite a few moments this afternoon in which I wanted to read, Emily Takes Flight. Emily Takes Flight to Paris. Emily Takes Flight to Anywhere But Here. Steve Light gives us this moment of escape in his beautiful book, Zephyr Takes Flight. He illustrates with pen and ink and colored pencils. I love this! It empowers the layperson, who does not have an MFA in oil paints, to take what they have at home and create. We follow Zephyr on a imaginative journey that lands her in a magical land inhabited with flying pigs.
The story has a lovely comic book feel with two or three large strips every now and then when the action moves too fast for one piece of imagery. It is a sight for sore eyes, one of those books that you can quietly walk away from and leave your young reader flipping through long after.
I first discovered Steve Light through his too-good-to-be true silver tea sets, errr… oversized boardbooks. Watercolors and Trains are quite lovely. I love the juxtaposition of the two. And now that I have made my high school English teacher proud, I will leave you with one more glorious thing. Steve Light set himself apart as a true genius when he designed beautiful, hard carved play sets to accompany select fairy tales. I want these. All of them. My life as a story teller would be complete. How wholesome of him to do this for us. Check them out here!
I’ve been meaning to write about this book ever since I met Salina at an event in December. December!
2013 has been a time warp, but at least I’ve been surrounded by lots of great books.
I love that tiny Penguin and his dapper orange scarf Salina drew for me. (She’s just as adorable, too.) And this might be one of my favorite title pages of all time. The bed of pine needles, the heart…sweet, sweet foreshadowing.
Salina’s compositions are all striking, with a calming sense of space and subtle mood-building color palettes.
Remember the Rule of Thirds? Salina’s ground to sky ratio is a beautiful example of it. And I love that she chose the cool and crystal clear sky to be the dominant feature. It’s a wide open space, but Penguin still feels chilly and at home.
Every shivering pinecone needs an orange scarf right? Which is certainly a lovely thing to use as clothing for a penguin, but doesn’t it also magnify how freezing Penguin’s world is? It makes sense, but it also plunges the reader into that arctic blast.But since pinecones don’t live in the frigid air, Penguin sets off with his friend on a sled to return him home.And this spread. So pretty, and so sweet. There’s that bed of cozy needles from the title page, see? The contrast in worlds here is magnified by the color. Penguin’s home was cool and blue, and Pinecone’s neighborhood is warm with yellows, browns, and greens. Later, Penguin returns in search of his friend, and this left hand side of the most perfect spread is a mashup of their two worlds’ color. And I can’t show you the right. Cause, spoiler alert! But it’s spectacular and you just have to see for yourself. Trust me.
It’s easy to fall in love with Penguin and Pinecone, and since you probably already have, be on the lookout for two more of their adventures! Penguin on Vacation is coming in April, and Penguin in Love is coming before the end of the year. So dear, so perfect, so chilly.
Thrilled for this book that won the SCBWI Golden Kite Award! I loved everything about it, from that dazzling cover to the gorgeous words and relationships inside. I’ve been a Joanne Rocklin fan since I read One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street, and I’m already looking forward to seeing her speak in LA this summer. She makes me glad to be a California writer.
That cover was designed by Chris Buzelli. I don’t think this one is on his site yet, but the cover for Orange Street is, and again…whoa.
Now, this book is about a cat. Not entirely, but he’s the glue that sticks all the other parts together. I’m not really an animal person at all, but this darn cat made me cry like crazy.
And speaking about animals, Random Acts of Reading asked me about a book that changed my perspective on something…anything. I talked about that Newbery-winning gorilla, Ivan, in this post. All around good suggestions there if you are adding to a toppling to-read pile like me.
Oh! I shared Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet’sA River of Words on Design Mom this week. Worth a look if you love words and pictures and Caldecott Medals! Post right here. I love, love, love this book.
Hoping to snag copies of Open This Little Book and Flora and the Flamingo this weekend. Have you seen either of these? Adoration is an understatement. I’ll show you when I get them. Good thing sharing is only virtual in these parts, because…obsessed.
And two books that I can’t wait for – like burn the roof of your mouth on hot pizza can’t wait for – this one and this one. Again with the whoa!
by Janice Lovoos
I’m in love. From the texture of a porcupine, to the form of mountains and weeds, to the repetition inside a squash, design is everywhere.
