Monthly Archives: November 2007

Robert's Snow

Robert’s Snow: The Timothy Bush Snowflake

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149_snowflake

Hello, Snow by Timothy Bush

This is the final week of the Blogging for a Cure effort to raise public awareness of the Robert’s Snow snowflake auctions. As you know, I wrote a lot about the auctions in this post. The first auction begins November 19th, so get ready to go snow shopping!

Today it is my great pleasure to feature another one of these amazing snowflakes. When the list of participating illustrators was presented to children’s book bloggers a couple of months ago, I zapped back immediately with my request to host Timothy Bush’s snowflake. We are very, very big Timothy Bush fans around here. We quote James and the House of Aunt Prudence almost as often as we do Monty Python. ("When the bear arrived, of course, there were not enough macaroons to go around.")

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Timothy is a gifted storyteller, and his picture book illustrations are enchanting. Each page offers a story in itself. Here’s a list of his books. In addition to illustrating his own stories, he has illustrated the work of such kid lit heavy hitters as Eve Bunting and Marilyn Singer.

Those Capital Mysteries he is illustrating are new to me—they look totally up my kids’ alley. I’ll have to check them out asap.

At the top of this post, what you see is Timothy’s Robert’s Snow snowflake. It’s called "Hello, Snow," and it makes me a bit nostalgic for the East Coast winters we so recently left behind.

Timothy was kind enough to answer a few questions for me about his snowflake, his work, and his taste in books and music.

What was your path to illustrating children’s books?

I always loved drawing as a kid, which I don’t think is unusual. Most kids draw when they’re little. They just give it up as they get older. I had this great teacher in fifth grade who gave me extra credit for my cartoon stories. I think she kept me drawing at that transitional age by providing me with an audience and a motivation (I really needed that extra credit). Telling stories by combining words and pictures is pretty much what I’m still doing.


How did James in the House of Aunt Prudence come about?

I had a meeting with an editor to show her some stories I was working on. She wasn’t much interested in the stories but liked a piece in my art portfolio of a very small boy sitting in a very large, fancy chair. She suggested that I try writing a story about him. JAMES was the result.

Who are your favorite children’s book authors and illustrators?

I think in this field, you get to have two sets of favorites: the old ones you loved as a kid and the new ones you love as a fan of the form and as a practitioner.

In the first category, pride of place goes to Bill Peet, the first author I can remember looking for by name. The easy, loose-elbowed energy of the drawing—an animator’s way of drawing, I later recognized—captivated me. I sent him a copy of my first book when it was published and of my most prized possessions is the letter I got back from him thanking and encouraging me. There were lots of other books and book creators, of course: the manic quality of PD Eastman’s Go Dog Go echoes pretty loudly in my action scenes and there’s no getting away from Dr. Seuss. But the Peet books—unslick as they are to contemporary eyes – were special to me in a way that nothing else was.

In the second group, well… where to begin? So, so many people working now are doing such beautiful work. The spectrum of styles is probably bigger right now than it’s ever been and the level of accomplishment within those styles is extraordinarily high.

Where do you work? What is your studio like?

I work at home, which is a tiny, tiny studio apartment in Manhattan. I’m on  the third floor, on the back of the building, which means I get a view of the gardens between my building and the houses on the next street. If you’ve ever seen the movie Rear Window you can imagine the sort of what it looks like. For an urban setting, it’s very quiet and pretty. People can never believe it but New York City is a major stopover for migrating birds in the spring and fall. I get dozens of species coming through. Checking the trees and identifying what I find is always a nice little work break at those times of year.

Do you listen to music while you work? If so, what kind?

Everything. This work can get solitary, so I like to keep a wide variety of voices around. This week’s playlist has included Bollywood soundtracks, Handel operas, medieval chants, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, some hardcore, arty hip-hop a friend gave me and an audio book of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography. And it’s only Tuesday.

What was the inspiration for your snowflake?

I thought it would be interesting to take the basic snowflake shape I was painting on and repeat it a bunch of times to make a snow scene. In the same way that one snowflake in winter isn’t all that exciting, my one little painting isn’t that big a deal. But a whole bunch of snowflakes at once is cause for celebration, whether they’re outside the window of my building or inside the window of my computer screen. So my piece is kind of an illustration of my feeling about the whole Robert’s Snow project.

The boy on your snowflake is alive with joy and wonder. I’ve seen that expression on my own kids’ faces during a snowfall—the upturned face, the utter delight. Were you a big fan of winter as a kid?

One of my earliest memories is a snowstorm in Chicago that buried the whole first floor of our house: we had to come and go through the second-story window. Big excitement, weird behavior, suspension of all the usual rules. What kid wouldn’t love that? New York City in a blizzard is also amazing. Everyone’s out, skiing down the avenues, but the snow muffles all the sound and the quiet of it is incredibly strange and lovely.

Disney has optioned Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter! Congrats. Anything you can tell us about that?

I got a call from the producer a while back. Her son had the book and it was a family favorite. She wanted to know if the rights were available and a conversation started. We signed the contract back in the early spring. The project is in active development, or at least it was until the writers’ strike began. I’m not involved in the day-to-day part of it at this point, but I did get to visit the studio when we were putting the deal together, which was a lot of fun. They really do run around in those little golf carts. There are some pretty amazing people involved and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

You work mostly in watercolors. Watercolors often come across as soft and dreamy, but one of the things I love best about your work is how crisp, vibrant, and lively it is. Your characters have such personality and every page is crackling with energy. Can you tell us anything about how your unique style developed? Who were your influences? Where did you study?

I never really studied art. I just sort of made it up as I went along. I try to find something in every new project I can concentrate on and learn about: contrast or outline or perspective or whatever. Lately I’ve been trying to explore color in a more systematic way.

What are you working on now?

This week I’m finishing up a magazine illustration, then starting the final art for the latest title in the Capital Mysteries series by Ron Roy. I’m also squeezing in time here and there to bring along a new original picture book, the first I’ve written in ages. That’s my baby right now and I’m crazy excited about it.

Ooh, I can’t wait to hear more about that!

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Many thanks to Timothy for granting me the interview, and to all the illustrators who have donated snowflakes to the Robert’s Snow auctions. Here’s a list of the entire week’s lineup of snowflake features:

Monday, November 12

Tuesday, November 13

Wednesday, November 14

Thursday, November 15

Friday, November 16

Saturday, November 17

Sunday, November 18

 

Home and Hearth

Hiding from My Kitchen

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I just finished cleaning out the fridge. Allll the way out. The problem turned out to be a broken starter. We found out a day too late to save the food.

Kids: "Mom, isn’t that all the stuff you bought at Trader Joe’s the other day?"

Me: :::groan:::

But to keep it in perspective, one need only recall that over 1200 families in this county lost their homes and everything in them just a few weeks ago. There are harder burdens than having to pitch a brand new tub of Blue Cheese and Pecan Dip.

There is one defrosted item that need not be thrown out. When the weather got too hot for baking last summer, I froze my sourdough starter. It woke back up yesterday, so we fed it and returned it to its countertop crock. Now we must wait to see how our little bacteria buddies survived cold storage. There’s been some bubbling action in the crock, but only a little so far. We fed them some more. We’re hoping for another vigorous starter this year.

Mmm, I can almost smell that fresh-baked sourdough now.

Art

Some Questions about Art Supplies

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Martha asked:

I
have a question…
Why use watercolors? Do you also use other art mediums for painting?
Oils? Pastels?
Also what about lead in the pigments? After all the issues with
products from China, I’m being more vigilant about this and it’s nearly
impossible to find non-china art supplies in my price range!
thoughts?

Wow, good point about the question of where our art supplies are coming from. I’ve been on the toy watch for a long time, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me to look at where our paints were made. I know you can get German-made watercolors from Stockmar, but as you say, those are pricey, and I have an uneasy feeling about Stockmar anyway. (Edited to add: There’s a long story here! This is a shift for me. I have enthusiastically recommended Stockmar many times in the past.)

Hmm, this bears looking into.

As for "why watercolors"—for me, there are lots of reasons. I’ve never used oils, but my sense is that they’re expensive and messy and harder to clean up…don’t you have to clean your brushes with turpentine or something? You see how ignorant I am on that subject.

We do use tempera paint sometimes, and my kids love the little jars of acrylics for painting those unfinished wooden things you can pick up cheap at Michael’s. (More made-in-China stuff? Probably. Sigh. Hadn’t occurred to me.)

But we like watercolors best for painting pictures, because of the luminous, swirling colors, the easy blending, the pleasure of watching the heavy paper absorb the translucent paint.

Oil pastels are a rare treat: again, their mess factor is too high for regular use.

My three oldest girls are taking an art class right now, and the medium for many weeks has been chalk pastels. They are really enjoying using them, and they’ve learned an awful lot about tone and shading and texture. I think chalk pastels are an easy medium to use for experimenting with shading techniques. And the cleanup is a snap.

(You can see where my priorities are.)

On the same post, Amy asked another excellent question.

Where and how do you store/display the finished artwork? I find this
even more daunting than the creative process. How do you (any of you)
respectfully manage the output of your oh-so-productive junior artists?
I’d love to hear any thoughts.

Ha! On this topic, my thoughts amount to a dull buzzing in the head. Our current storage method is: pictures hung on the fridge, and a large and ever-growing pile of beautiful finished work on the laundry-room counter, waiting to be hung or stored or something.

When we moved last year, I had to sort through boxes and boxes of such treasures. I tried to pare down to the best or most adorable work, but it was sooo hard to part with any single painting or drawing, you know? The masterpieces that made the cut are now languishing in a box in the closet, most of them.

So I’d love to hear other people’s answer to this question.

Related post: Watercolor Painting: How It Happens Here.

Uncategorized

Chillin’ (Not)

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Our fridge is on the fritz. At first it was just the freezer side, so yesterday, with all our frozen food rapidly thawing, I cooked all afternoon. The fridge was still working. I filled it with parmesan drumsticks, pork chops, cooked chicken breasts, tortellini salad, and a meatloaf. That’s more than I usually cook in a week. Ha! That’s more cooking than I’ve done some entire months! I felt positively Betty Crockerish.

Then I zipped off to a baby shower for two beautiful friends. Had I realized the fridge was going to go kaput as well, I would have taken all those nice meals with me. Wouldn’t that have been perfect? Some nice meals for the ladies about to give birth?

Alas, Betty Crocker’s vision did not extend past bringing the bag of defrosted strawberries to the shower to puree and serve over the scrumptious almond pound cake we were serving. (It was a Tastefully Simple catalog party as well as a double shower; that was our cover story. Yum.)

Ah well, I’d been needing to clean out the fridge anyway.

Blerg.

Books

Catching Up

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I haven’t been online much lately.

Busy days here, lots going on. Also, I have a whole bunch of great materials to review here, but that means reading them or trying them out first. It’s good stuff: more day planners, the sewing books, a cool art curriculum I’ve had since last year (we needed to give it a good try before I could blog about it), some Latin materials, the delightful new Nancy Brown adaptation of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, the new N.E. Bode novel, a bunch of other books. Some of these reviews belong over on Bonny Glen, so I’ll let you know when they’re up.

Right now I’m tackling email. It, too, has piled up. Some of the questions in my in-box are of a general nature, applicable to broader circumstances, so I think what I’m going to do right now is post some of that Q & A here as I go along. (Names withheld, of course.)

A reader asked for suggestions for comic books suitable for young children. My answer:

I’m afraid there isn’t much to choose from nowadays. Most of the superhero comics are far too adult.

What are good are the new book-length collections of superhero
comics reprinted from the 60s and 70s. They’re called Showcase
Presents. My kids LOVE them. Batman, Superman, Teen Titans, etc.

My hubby occasionally writes an issue of Scooby Doo, and he’s always careful to make it appropriate for our 6 yr old. 🙂

I blogged about Showcase Presents at Bonny Glen here.

Whoops, my time’s up. Didn’t get very far, did I? Well, I guess that leaves more for next time!

Hearing Loss, Special Needs Kids, Speech Delay, Wonderboy

Speech Therapy Games

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As I’ve mentioned before, mommyspeechtherapy.com is a good source of tips for how to work on specific speech sounds with your children.

As I work (and play) with Wonderboy, I’ve come up with a few games of my own that are helping him practice the new sounds he is learning to produce. One particularly sweet one is how we practice the p sound, which is still relatively new for him. I thought it might help if he could feel it, feel how the air explodes from one’s lips during the puh sound. I touch my lips to his cheek, like a kiss, and say words like piano, pizza, apple, emphasizing the p. He has begun to reciprocate, pressing his little face to my cheek and puhracticing his puhlosives. It’s so cute, I want to eat him up, like pizza or an apple.

We also use the Visual Phonics signs to help make consonant sounds pop for him. Since sign is Wonderboy’s other language, having signs connected with sounds makes a lot of sense to him. If I make the visual phonics sign for the first sound in a word, and then follow with the whole word, both in English and ASL, he gets that the sound itself is something that can be broken out of the word and made on its own. So: buh, buh, baby. The "buh" is the Visual Phonics sign for the sound made by the letter b: you hold the ASL sign for b up to your mouth, and as you say "buh," you move the b sign rapidly away. That’s the phoneme sign.

We do this over and over, all through the day. Guh guh go, kuh kuh car, puh puh pizza. (Yes, more pizza. If you spend much time at my house, you know that we are all about the pizza here. I don’t cook for people. I invite them over for pizza. Can’t make it? Eh, we’ll order that pizza anyway.)

We’re working on developing his listening differentiation skills with a game we play with Rilla. Wonderboy thinks he is teaching things to Rilla (and he is), and this makes it loads of fun for him. He doesn’t realize he’s making big leaps himself.

We have a stack of pictures of objects with sounds we’re working on. Right now it’s the f sound, so we have fish, frog, fire, phone, etc. I lay out two or three of the cards and give Wonderboy or Rilla a block to hold. Then I’ll say the name of one of the items on the cards, and the child whose turn it is puts the block on the right card. It’s a very simple game and both the little ones eat it up.

For Wonderboy, what the game is doing is helping him hear the subtle differences between similar-sounding English words. With his hearing aids, he can hear a good deal of speech, but not everything—not some of the soft, unvoiced consonant sounds. So I lay out pictures of phone and bone, or fish and dish, and the game—which is great fun, especially because of the antics of little miss Rilla—hones his listening skills.

I think he is doing a lot of lip-reading. He’s a crackerjack at the game when he can see my mouth, and has more difficulty if I hide my lips behind a hand. When he sits beside me and chatters away, as is happening almost constantly these days, he cups my chin with one determined little hand, turning my face toward his. This is indescribably sweet, I have to say. At a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, a friend’s mother was watching Wonderboy talk to me, and she said, "That is so dear! The way he studies your face! He can’t take his eyes off you."

It is dear. It’s a good idea, though, to help hone his listening skills without visual clues when we can. So we play another game, also with Rilla, in which each child hold a little ball up to his or her ear, and I cover my mouth and make a sound. The game is simple: when the child hears the sound, he or she drops the ball into a container. We use an empty tennis ball canister. The main purpose of this game is to get Wonderboy into the groove of what happens in a hearing test when we go to the audiologist. In order to accurately test his hearing (and therefore ensure that his hearing aids are calibrated correctly, in the way that will give him the best possible amplification), we need him to respond to each sound he hears. The ball-in-canister game is one we can easily duplicate in the sound booth.

It’s also great fun. Rilla thinks it’s a hoot! Her excitement is infectious, and Wonderboy and I are usually in giggles the whole time. They hold the balls up to their ears just to reinforce that they are going to listen. Wonderboy thinks Rilla jumps the gun a lot; he doesn’t realize that she is hearing sounds that don’t exist for him. He doesn’t seem to hear S or SH at all.

Nature Study

Almost Time for Another Season of Project FeederWatch

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When Scott and I moved out of our little 2nd-floor Queens apartment to a rental on Long Island with a real back yard, the first thing I did was buy a bird feeder. And when we moved to Virginia two years later, the box with the bird feeder was—I’m not kidding—the first one I unpacked.

I am nutty that way. We love to feed the birds.

We’ve been participating in Project FeederWatch since our very first Long Island winter, paying an annual $15 for the privilege of helping track bird populations in North America. It gives the kids experience with collecting and tabulating data, hones their powers of observation and perseverance, and provides our whole family with the immense joy of getting to know our local feathered friends. Even baby Rilla is part of the fun; standing at the patio door watching the birds is one of her favorite pastimes.

The new FeederWatch season begins November 10th, so if you’re interested, flit on over and sign up!

Books

The Daring Book for Girls: One Slight Problem

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Daring_girls
I’m supposed to be posting a review of The Daring Book for Girls here tomorrow. The problem is, I haven’t read it yet because I cannot get it away from my daughters.

Jane just may have to be the one to review it. She snatched it up the moment it arrived, and that’s the last I saw of it.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen much of her either. She surfaced briefly, brandishing a roll of packing tape, to ask if we had any old newspapers she could use to make a waterproof cushion for sitting on out-of-doors.

"It’s from the book," she explained.

She’s asleep right now…maybe I can sneak into her room and snatch the book from her bedside table. Because that’s the kind of daring girl I am.