8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. On their travels from Chicago to their Vermont vacation destination, Osh and his family were kind enough to stop into my studio so that we could all meet face-to-face! I was able to photograph the absolutely beloved Osh, a Ty beanie toy, while eight-year-old Mia stood protectively by. Despite Mia’s parents’ reservations regarding Osh’s recently acquired green shirt (reading “Adler Planetarium,”) but Mia felt very strongly that it should be immortalized along with the elephant in her portrait. Osh, who Mia tells me is a girl, was a Christmas gift to Mia when she was one month old from her aunt. As I worked on the painting this week I found myself veering into a rather old-school Richard Scarry sort of color palette, perhaps because Osh reminds me of the whimsical toys that Scarry painted for his little animal children characters…
And here is a photo of Mia and Osh at our house after his photo shoot. I wish I could meet more of my “models” in “person!” 
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Tag: children’s book art
Phoebe With Books
8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. As I’ve said before, you can choose a hand-stitched Waldorf doll or tone-on-tone felted owl from Etsy for your child, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Resign yourself to pink plastic or, perhaps, a color-blocked polyester velour dog. Phoebe was given to Arianna when she was very small by the family’s nanny, Lili. Both Arianna and her little sister Caroline adore Phoebe and love to dress her in brightly patterned outfits which further enhance her primary colors. She has lost limbs and her nose repeatedly over time, but Lili always lovingly sews Phoebe up as good as new. The books in this portrait belonged to the girls’ father when he was a child and in turn became favorites of Arianna and Caroline. This set of four by Maurice Sendak is called “The Nutshell Library,” and includes “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “Pierre,” “Alligators All Around,” and “One Was Jonny.” I have written about “Chicken Soup With Rice” in a past post, as it is the one book that I read every single night to my own daughter and was a huge part of my own childhood! This painting is one of two portraits commissioned by Heidi of her daughter’s favorite things. You can see my portrait of Caroline’s Lammy here.
Vintage Drawing Book: Make A World
It is an exciting and rare occasion in our house when my husband breaks out a mechanical pencil and starts to draw. He has always made tiny, meticulous renderings of long parades of vehicles, in recent years usually under the guise of an explanation or description of something for our daughter. I’ve always been baffled at how he can get the general abstract shape of a truck or a helicopter correct without looking at one. Well! Recently he stumbled upon this 1972 book “Make a World” by Ed Emberly and excitedly explained that he had obsessed over it as a child.
Inside are a zillion everyday objects broken down with charming simplicity and humor…
The tiny scale and blocky, basic instructional nature of these drawings appeals perfectly to Greg, who also adores models and Lego kits. So now, he has Sonja imagine a scenario for him to draw and he makes it come to life via the templates in this book. Below, “Two Dragons Getting Married.”
My sister Jill wondered how an animal drawn via this method would translate to full-page size…
Ha! I think it holds up!
Books: Babar and Father Christmas
I love Babar, but somehow I had never come across this incredibly bizarre Christmas book until this week! Let me just skip to the best part, in which we see a cross-section of Father Christmas’ UNDERGROUND LAIR. Did you know that he lives in a cave in Bohemia? 
And that his home is protected to violent, snowball-chucking dwarfs?
So, that’s weird, but the strangest thing about this story to me is Babar’s meandering quest to find Father Christmas. Along the way, the narrator provides unnnecessary but somehow comforting detail about Babar’s hotel room and digresses about the pleasures of washing up after a long journey. He then mistakes a homeless guy for Father Christmas…
…and spends several pages discussing dead languages with a “famous professor.”
Apparently in 1940, the French did not condescend to children by over-simplifying even life’s imaginary adventures!
Bedtime Books
Forget Goodnight Moon. I’m here to tell you that the most hypnotic, soothing book ever written is Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months. There is no eating of chicken soup going on in our mostly-vegetarian household, but nearly every night I knock my daughter out with this collection of twelve sweetly surreal little rhymes.
This copy survived a similar role in my own childhood. Researching the book just now, I notice that Carole King evidently made it into a song, but I refuse to listen to it! I just don’t want anything to displace the way it has always sounded to me.
I suspect you won’t often find this on the Golden Book rack at your grocery store, although it was reprinted in 2008. Another gem from my 1970’s youth, Little Mommy paints a scandalously outdated portrait of motherhood. And yet I read it to Sonja all the time. She is not at all confused or suprised by its cliches, because it perfectly mirrors our own day-to-day existence. I’m at home washing dishes, clothes, and babies, and Daddy is off at work. I was once a modern woman – how did this happen? At any rate, the pictures are gorgeous…
…so I just try to provide a little context as I read. Also, the little girl looks just like Sonja. 
I am a new convert to The Pigeon. Many friends have tried to hype the Mo Willems Pigeon books to me, but Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus was read to us at a library storytime in a very uninspired manner, and I just wasn’t having any more of it. And then, after battling later and later bedtimes with Sonja, I picked up Don’t Let The Pigeon Stay Up Late. Although it does nothing to help her sleep, we have a ball re-reading this page a bazillion times: 
Children’s Book Week! Some Favorites
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?
Children’s Book Art
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!