Cool Books by Cool Kids:)

This post is long overdue.
I have been wanting to do a post about kids MAKING books and illustrating them for a long time. So when I recently did an author presentation at the Cunningham Elementary School here in Vancouver, I really couldn't put it off any longer. After I showed them the books I made, I got to see some books that they had made and that was of course really fun for me! Here are just a very very few of some seriously hilarious but also fantastic book covers. The kids at Cunningham are great and so are their teachers. It was so cool to see so much fantastic artwork up in the halls and I loved that they had already made their own books. Very cool.

These pictures are also from a book made by a very clever kid who doesn't go to Cunningham though. His mom took one of my illustration courses and gave me this book made by her super talented son at the end of class. I really love everything about it from the way he re-purposed an ordinary journal to make the book to the use of two panels for every page of his book. Well done Kiernan and thanks so much to you and all the kids at Cunningham too for showing me your awesome books!

You guys are my inspiration!

Ezra Jack Keats

•Reproduced with permission of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

One of the things I love the most about teaching is that it's such a great motivator to expand my own knowledge of the rich history of illustration. Every time I look at my notes for the session of my class that deals with the history of the subject, I find about ten-gazillion illustrators, printing processes or other things related that I want to know more about and pass onto my students. This time around I did a little bit of research on Ezra Jack Keats. These two sites here and here have been helpful for me; one of them being the Ezra Jack Keats foundation which also shows a photo sequence taken of a little boy.. who was the inspiration for Keat's most famous Peter Stories. I love that they put this piece of inspiration up on the site because it demonstrates so clearly and perfectly how whole entire stories can be crafted out of images.

A couple of these images are taken from a fantastic blog I just found which is all about Vintage Picture books. The blog is called "My Vintage Book Collection in Blog Form" and here is a link to it. Thanks Mallory for scanning these for us! :) 

Little Nemo In Slumberland

Here is a great quote from a great site about Winsor Mc Cay, and his amazingly groundbreaking comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.

His most famous work, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Little Nemo , which ran from 1905 to 1911, is the pinnacle of comic strip art in the first decade of the 20th century. It displays an unparalleled application of Art Nouveau graphic style, translating sinewy, irregular forms and rhythms into a delightfully decorative comic strip design. The strips related the fantastic adventures which befell the child Little Nemo, who always woke up in the last panel of the comic strip.

                                         

Winsor McCay

There is no doubt that Little Nemo in Slumberland by the great Winsor McCay is amazing and completely ahead of it's time. Here are only a very few of the many many, beyond imaginative strips. There used to be a fantastic book that had a collection of the weekly strips in it but it's currently out of print. Let's hope not for long. I'll make the next entry about more on Mc Cay. Here's some art to get you interested to know moooore in the meantime and I found a really great blog entry on the prolific McCay here on this blog called Kleefeld on Comics 

Ingrid Van Nyman's Pippi Longstocking

Soon Drawn and Quarterly is going to release the original comic book versions of Pippy Longstocking which were written by Astrid Lindgren herself (!) and illustrated by the original illustrator of the Pippi Longstocking books namely, Ingrid Van Nyman. I myself grew up with the Pippi Books illustrated by Walter Scharnweber (the German version I guess) which I am quite fond of. Having said that I am super excited to find the work of Nyman and am already totally in love with her now. Such a fun feel to them, so much imagination in there and I love the colours. It's crazy to think that she ended up tragically taking her own life. What a tragedy. She was so fantastic! 

Eric Carle

This will not the be the only Eric Carle Post. Just like with all of the greats I put it off and put it off to get the perfect idea for a post... but enough with that. I will simply start anywhere and write this short but not unimportant one here. I recently made a new picture book friend and he is wanting to create a meaningful picture book. The kind that will stay with you for longer than just the time you read it. The kind that will continue to occupy your thinking and might become a part of you eventually. 

I am almost done reading Eric Carle's fantastic autobiography (autobiography and so much more) "The Art of Eric Carle" and there is a part I have come across that I find to be really simple and graceful and most of all true on the subject of 'How to make a Picture book'.

Here are a few lines from the book:

"If a recipe on How To Make a Picture Book were possible, it would go something like this: Take thirty-two pages (most picture books are thirty two pages). Confine your story within these limitations. These limitations are of a technical nature. Your creative possibilities are endless. It helps to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Here are some very basic ingredients to a few of my books:

In The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I started with the holes - accidentally, playfully. The holes were the given. Now the caterpillar needed to be invented. 

In the Very Busy Spider, the spider was the given. Now all I needed was the raised web. 

In The Grouchy Ladybug, I wanted to deal with the concept of size. Now all I needed was an interesting story. 

To these basic ingredients the following are added: Your love for animals, big and small.
Your appreciation of Nature. 

Your father's love and his sense of passing on existing knowledge.
[sic]

You include your likes and dislikes, your view of the world, your feelings."