Category: Pets, People, etc

Children’s Book Week! Some Favorites

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

Here are some more books that have entranced my family over the years!

Andrew Henry’s Meadow is one of the most treasured books from my own childhood. Doris Burn’s incredibly detailed and thoroughly imagined drawings seem matter-of-factly possible and yet completely extraordinary.
Andrew Henry annoys his family with his Rube-Goldberg-esque contraptions and inventions, and finally quietly runs away…

To build an amazing, transient outcast utopia for himself and his misunderstood friends. Each house is customized to the child’s quirky, frowned-upon hobby. I wanted desperately to live in the treehouse that Andrew Henry built for the girl whose farmer father hated the birds that she loved! We love any and all Maurice Sendak around here — I grew up on the Little Bear books, and Sonja loves them too… but she is endlessly enchanted and amused by In the Night Kitchen.
The surreal, kitchen-utensil cityscape of Mickey’s dreams has been a cheery vehicle for Sonja to reconcile the strangeness of dreaming with the real world.
And we love to holler the bakers’ crazy chants whenever we’re busy in our own kitchen!

The beautiful watercolors in Jon Muth’s Zen Shorts cause me to lose my place in the text and just go silent until Sonja reminds me what we are doing. These paintings make me want to drop everything and run to my easel – in fact, I’m pretty sure they have made me a better painter. The story might be about being here now, but look — here’s what color a shadow is when the sun is setting!
Three siblings befriend a panda who is fun, full of wisdom, and inexplicably lives alone in a big, bougie house in their neighborhood.
He helps them work through some familial discord by sharing some Lao Tzu… hey, doesn’t the sun almost hurt your eyes when you look up into that tree?

Lost Toy Search Service – Plush Memories

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

Did you know that if you or your child has lost a beloved toy, there are websites devoted to your search for a replacement? One such wonderful site which I recently stumbled upon is Plush Memories. This free service posts your photo and description and invites comments from anyone with helpful information. Of course I feel a real connection with the general sentiment behind preserving favorite toys, so I’ve been thoroughly enjoying perusing this site! The range of quirkiness and cuteness represented among the photos of the missing is beyond entertaining. I love painting wacky monkeys (as seen here and here,) and so I was amused to find these images posted:


And this, from a ridiculously funny and touching entry, is a DRAWING of a lost stuffed bunny:

And here’s the photo which originally provoked both my husband and me to simultaneoulsy jump up and shout “Choo Choo!” This tattered yellow… rooster? is identical to my daughter’s beloved stuffed chicken, as I mentioned in my last post.

In light of the recent string of tornados and floods, the folks at Plush Memories are making lost-toy searches for disaster victims a top priority. This site supports a good cause, and is so much fun to explore!

Children’s Book Art

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

Children’s book illustrators have such a profound responsibility! Their work can shape a child’s emotional response to the world, and affect our sense of beauty forever. Here are few of the most formative images from my own childhood.

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, this deep blue starry sky is now framed on Sonja’s nursery wall. It entranced me as a child (although I must admit I barely remember the poem) and inspired me to paint piles of night sky paintings as an adult.

I’ve been mesmerized by this image for as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, I purchased a large, oval-shaped ring because of how deeply connected I felt to the woman in this illustration. Mine was not engraved with the name and likeness of Descartes like hers, but it was close enough and I didn’t take it off for years. The book is “Story Number 1,” the first of 3 surealist tales by Eugene Ionesco of little Josette and the bizarre stories she is told by her father.

The rich illustrations by Etienne Delessert are complex in texture, but soft and excitingly strange.

Here’s another fantastic sky, and just an awesome composition by Tibor Gergely from Margaret Wise Brown’s “Seven Little Postmen.” I can physically smell rain when I look at this!

From the same book, an image that made the idea of traveling through a dark night seem incredibly cozy and atmospheric. I’ve always loved to see the lights of towns and houses through a car window and imagine the lives being lived.

And this illustration by Steffie Lerch from “The Surprise Doll” by Morrell Gipson has given me a life-long delight in putting large groups of stuffed animals or dolls together in carriages, baskets, and cribs. Only now I do it a hundred times a day just to get them off the floor!

Toy Portrait Book!

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

It’s here! You may have noticed that I’ve re-branded a bit, and to celebrate I put together this collection of paintings in a really lovely 20 page photobook. I have to give it up to Shutterfly — the reproductions in this book look somehow better than the original paintings! There are 48 of my favorite portraits and, of course, a few choice stories of the toys’ histories, relationships, and significance. If you’d like to have one, they are available for purchase here!

Studio Tour

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

Can you really “tour” one little room? Well, here’s a glimpse of my studio, which I obviously share with my 2 year old and her own art gear. Check out the awesome easel that my husband Greg built for her! The easel that I use was my mother’s when she was in art school… …which I have defaced terribly via my bad habit of wiping my brushes its ledge (not to mention my own clothes). Also, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that a sippy cup has made it’s way into my arsenal. Last year Greg replaced all five windows in here so that I don’t have to move the whole show to the dining room table for the winter! And here’s Sonja coming at me with some new portrait requests of her own.

Max and Jack

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

11″x14″ acrylic, 2010. This painting of Max and his cat is not a toy portrait of course, but is a follow-up to my painting of Max’s sister Lilly and her toy frog. Max’s mother Wendy says that Max does not have a particular favorite toy, but he is very attached to Jack the cat. She says that Max slings Jack over his shoulder and carries him around that way, and Jack doesn’t seem to mind a bit!

an early toy portrait

Posted on by Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait

29″x40″, oil on canvas 1996. I did lots of self-portraits in college and grad school because I was always available to model! Here’s one from 1996, and obviously even then I could not resist painting my stuffed animals. This picture features Tigger and a lion called Hubert — he was a give-away at a bank where my mom opened an account when I was a baby. Note the sweet mid-century modern furniture, which unfortunately did not belong to me but was fun to paint.jentiggerlionctp