Some of you might already know that Matthew has taken all three kids and headed out to Kansas City for the next two weeks. Part of the reason for the trip was to visit Matthew’s dad and stepmom, and part of it was so that I have two solid weeks to learn how how to animate.
Ha ha ha!
I am trying to learn how to animate because apparently the new thing is for books to have book trailers (like movie trailers) go out before the books are actually published. A little video teaser. Of a book. You can tell I’m getting old because I think this is a weird idea. Our book Ten Thousand Stories is being published by Chronicle Books and will be released in October.
Here’s a book trailer of one of my favorite books:
We couldn’t afford this guy who, by his own admission, does “awesome book trailers,” so instead I am going to have to throw together some hinky thing by myself and see how it goes. If I fail, I fail, but I won’t know until I give it a try. And so, I’m trying.
Though the time alone to focus is great, it basically means that my house is EMPTY. No kids to wake me up in the morning. No Matthew to feed me at appropriate times. So far I’ve only spent about half a day learning animation stuff and the rest of the time cleaning the house, filing old paperwork, wasting a lot of time on Facebook, watching terrible romantic comedies, staying up till four in the morning and eating banana splits for dinner. In spite of all that, I must admit that I miss my family.
So it was lucky that yesterday some old (and young) friends stopped by to say hello and purportedly to get me to sign their copy of Bobby and the Robots.
Mostly, it was an excuse to take a nice walk in the park and then hang out in the studio a bit. Marley and Suki (whose full name is Sakura, the japanese word for cherry blossoms – which makes me so happy!) decided they not only wanted me to sign their book, but they also wanted to return the favor and draw me some pictures.
So, they sat down at the table with some Bobbledy Blobs (and Kato’s art kit) and did some drawing.
They both started off with a portrait of me.
Suki’s version of me is lean, with hairy legs (how on earth did she know?):
Marley’s version of me is round and jolly, with blue cheeks and a blue nose (it was rather brisk out yesterday):
I especially like how I can seem different to different people, even when I’m the same me. That really is what is so wonderful about art – everyone sees things differently, and it comes out in how we draw.
After portraits were done, the girls couldn’t be stopped.
Suki drew me a mouse:
You’ll notice the mouse also has hairy legs. Perhaps that is why I feel such a kinship to it. That and his jolly face. Who couldn’t love a mouse with a face like that?
Marley discovered the scissors in Kato’s art kit, and decided to create a deconstructed work of art.
My favorite bit was the little tiny sliver of paper. “A hair,” she revealed.
I could barely see that hair! I got out a magnifying glass so we could all get a closer look. We looked at the paper “hair” and then thought it would be fun to have a look at some of the pieces of drawn-on paper too. Suki did a thorough investigation.
And Marley reported that the crayon marks looked like dust. Which they do, kind of, when you see them up close.
And that’s another thing I like about art. Depending on how you look at it, it can look like an entirely different thing than how you meant it to look. Like a hair instead of a sliver of paper, or dust instead of a drawing.
So – thank you, Suki and Marley (and, yeah, you grown-ups who tagged along too). Thanks for reminding me how much fun it is to make art and how much fun it is to look at the world in different ways. It was a nice interruption to my newfound bachelorhood, and your creativity has inspired me to get back to work. My days of procrastinating are over—I’ve got to start learning how to do this thing. I’ll let you know how it works out.
Basically, each page has a simple question at the top for the kid to answer. There are 365 questions. The cool part is, after you’ve done a year’s worth of questions, you start over again. And there is room for three years worth of answers on each page. So on any given page you can see how your answers were different between one year and the next.
Alden started out pretty much at the beginning writing in the answers to her questions. We usually “do questions” right before bed, and she actually really enjoys it. She considers her answers very carefully, and since she’s just learning to write it usually takes a while for us to get through it each night.
The questions can be very specific (what did you have for lunch) or quite broad:
Alden’s great hope for this year is that Kato still plays friends with her. That’s my great hope too. If they stop playing friends, my job is going to get a whole lot harder.
Kato, on the other hand, started out being much less enthusiastic for the project.
A lot of the time he refused to answer the questions at all – I think he felt a lot of pressure to come up with an answer, which is tricky, especially in this stage of his life, when his answer to almost anything (even, “Would you like some ice cream?”) is “NO!” Saying no to ice cream is just crazy talk.
But, when he chooses to answer, his answers can be quite revealing:
Yeah, cute, right?
Here’s Alden’s response to the same question:
Oh, and then there was this question for Kato:
And this one for Alden:
That went from cute to sickening really fast, didn’t it? AND WHERE’S THE LOVE FOR MAMA?!?! COME ON!!!
Oh, here it is:
Thanks for throwing me a bone, Alden.
The exciting thing is that just recently, Kato has decided he really likes doing questions, and has taken up the pen himself.
I am comforted to know he has one foot firmly in the world of gross materialism and the other firmly in the world of the mind.
So, needless to say, it’s a fun little bedtime ritual and the kids really love it. Part of what I like is that it’s a pretty quick project – it isn’t super involved, but is a nice check-in with the kids at the end of the (often chaotic) day. If you’re interested, you can buy the book HERE. And it’s not mandatory to start on January 1, like we did – you can pretty much pick up wherever you’d like to in the year. Go to it!
Last night when I was reading to the kids before bed, I happened to come across an old picture book of mine, published in 1962.
I imagine my parents picked it out because of its content and not because if its awesome LOWER CASE sans serif title (!!! That would never happen in this age of screaming book covers!). The illustrations were done by Aliki, whose list of published books is about seven miles long.
Anyway. The kids were interested in reading a book about alaska (and not ALASKA!) so I cracked that baby open. And totally fell in love.
There is some magic in 2-color printing. And that magic lies in the paper becoming the third color. Look at how that whale is made up of the water surrounding it, and a couple of simple black lines defining its most basic features. Look at how that grizzly bear is given so much dimension by putting the yellow behind the black, and letting the black be a furry texture on top of it. And let’s not even get into how frickin’ cute his little face is.
And then there’s this page:
Look at the sky! The sky, being yellow, makes the snow snow, and not just empty white space! Look at how that airplane is thrown into the third dimension by not just being white, but by having a shadowy patch on the tail and on the pontoon below. And if you look really closely, you can see that the propeller of the plane is just a circle of black dots! Brilliant! And you’ve got to love the way she’s drawn the water – a pretty heavy pattern that keeps from being overwhelming because it’s yellow (whose value is close enough to the white of the paper that it isn’t distracting), and is de-emphasized by that heavy boatload of black fur-lined hoods and coats. Genius!
And let’s not even get into how frickin’ cute the little sled dogs are (the one with the white face! Get those cute little eyes and ears to pop by just not drawing all the fur on its face! Holy cow! Amazing!!).
I also like this page because it talks about the Alcan Highway, which we drove on quite a few times to get from Maryland to Alaska. When I was a kid, it was still 90% dirt road. For some reason, I feel nostalgic for the many many hours spent bumping along in the back of a (covered) pick-up truck, stretched out on sleeping bags with my brother and sister, stuffing rags in the cracks of the windows to keep the dust out and trying (unsuccessfully) not to vomit every 10 miles. These days it’s all paved, so the soft spot in my heart is partly due to the fact that it will never be as I remember it.
But back to these illustrations. Check this one out. Perhaps the greatest coup in the whole book:
A swarm of mosquitos! Flying across the sun! But do any of those little flecks actually look like mosquitoes? NO! But we know exactly what it is a drawing of! I can’t stand it!!
But here’s the rub: I hated these illustrations as a kid. I mean really, really hated them. I liked my illustrations detailed, tight, and in full glossy technicolor. This 2-color nonsense was for cheap magazines with crummy paper or for babies who didn’t know any better. Well, I suppose “less is more” is a hard concept to really grasp as a kid. I’m glad I’ve come around all these years later. It really does take a certain genius to be able to pare anything down to the basic, most important elements.
In the meantime, the kids’ assessment was, “But where’s the part about our house?” This 1960s version of alaska is different from the current version of ALASKA in more ways than one.
We live upstairs in the hayloft, where the farmer used to store the hay a long time ago when animals lived downstairs. Now the only animals that live here are Iggy the dog…
…and Oscar and Lily the cats.
For the most part, we live in a big room on one side of the barn.
And work in another big room on the other side of the barn.
Here’s where I sit and write stories.
And here’s where Robbi sits and draws pictures.
This is where we sit together and talk about ideas for books.
And here’s where Iggy sits all day long and does the important things she does.
