David Small Keynote - The Voice of the Eye

It's a great morning. Donna Jo Napoli was up first, David Small is up now. If you haven't visited David's website, it is full of fantastic sketches from his travels and helpful links. For a hint at his demo on Monday and a quick interview, visit this post.

Besides visiting David's website, I would say PLEASE take a moment to read the posts about him on Julie Walker Danielson's Seven Impossible Things. Her review of STITCHES alone makes me tear up.

David shares this video with us:

It's pretty harrowing, be sure you've had your breakfast and a hug for the day.

David tells us making STITCHES was the therapy he couldn't get any other way.

David needed to find a way to bring his family back, to recreate and remember them to figure out if his adulthood nightmares, anxieties, and anger are rooted in his childhood or just chronic depression.

But as David is sketching and drawing and writing down his childhood memories, he comes to the conclusion:

"I had an unloving mother who wanted me dead. And I believe it's safer to keep expressions like that away from the body, and get them out through art or music..."

David is still reticent to talk about the making of STITCHES in public, so he's structured the rest of his talk about it as a Q&A.

Why the switch from picture books to an older audience/graphic novels?

David quotes Dante,  

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Deciding he needed to drop all the metaphors in his life and start looking at REAL life, David wanted some good therapy, but:

"Out on the prairie, you don't have access to the perfect psychoanalyst, so I became that for myself... by writing and drawing this memoir... and I always expected myself to get over 'it.'"

What would you like readers of this book to know?

When all is said and done, STITCHES is a warning about families with wrong-headed tradition. A long conga line of people abusing their children who go on to abuse their children... David reads Philip Larkin's poem:



Though David now has a brighter view of life than Mr. Larkin, and he's stepped out of that conga line he mentions, it's still a daily struggle for David to be sure he's treating his loved ones the right way.

"So now, after being the downer of the morning, I will try to be the upper, too."

David shows us a video called UNCHAIN MY HEART. A rousing, hilarious animatic of a typical day on an author tour. While I STRONGLY OBJECT TO THE PORTRAYAL OF MEDIA ESCORTS, we all absolutely loved David's drawings of Hicklebee's. Because how sweet it is to be loved by independent bookstores!

And just so you know, the SCBWI store sold out of all 250 copies of David's books YESTERDAY. We're trying to get more, but if you want to organize a bus to Hicklebee's for a shopping spree, I say go for it!

Paul O. Zelinsky - Illustrating Fairy Tales

A quick social media note: Paul is on Facebook and has a public page, so please go and Like his Paul O. Zelinsky page. And he's great on Twitter, too, see links to all of that and more in this post.

What do you need to illustrate a fairy tale?

• A personal connection to the story
• Inspiring and relevant research materials
• Willing models that won't get a restraining order against you when you try to put them in a costume
• A special calendar for timing your fairy tale dummy submission
• A wonder-full heart
• Toothpicks

Paul grew up listening to classical records with fairy tale narrations and he'd act out those tales with family and friends. His grandmother's painting of Hansel and Gretel (that hung in his childhood room above his crib) sticks out to Paul as something that was strange and wonderful and an icon he focused on. (Easter Egg Alert: Paul pays tribute to his grandmother and her art talent by hiding an homage to her painting in the last spread of HANSEL AND GRETEL.)

Dutch Renaissance painting copying, researching period costumes, collecting images that fit the desired mood and time period are how Paul started getting ready to paint the scenes of HANSEL AND GRETEL. That and studying witchcraft at the Karl Jung Museum in New York (a hot tip from Leonard Marcus!)

After these preliminary measures, Paul enlists volunteers to model the poses he needs for the illustrations. He dresses, poses them, and does sketches and photographs of the models (his editor posed as the witch! As pose only, not in demeanor!)

His next fairy tale, RUMPELSTILTSKIN, he built similarly, but Paul wanted it to look like a different and later European art style.

WORDS TO LIVE BY FROM PAUL O. ZELINSKY:

"When in trouble, go to a librarian."

He's able to get lots of good examples of period costume and art for Rumpelstiltskin, but the BIG DILEMMA for RUMPELSTILTSKIN is

STRAW.

It's hard to find straw in New York, though Paul found a few photos to help. But how to draw straw, how to paint straw, that was a conundrum for Paul. So he played around, painting with tons of different techniques until he found the one he liked: it's the top left and he used a toothpick.

Some final Paul Pearl's:

"If you want to illustrate a fairy tale, the first thing to do is consult The Calendar. It's a cycle. It's related to sun spot activity, so every seventeen years or so is when the fairytale market is up."

"Fairy tales are literally wonderful stories, stories filled with wonder, if you come at them with your heart, if you believe in them, then you can do them."

Jules Feiffer Keynote Address



Jules Feiffer cutting a rug with a dance partner of his own design


Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author/illustrator Jules Feiffer has had a remarkable creative career turning contemporary urban anxiety into witty and revealing commentary for over fifty years. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award for his cartoons; an Obie for his plays; an Academy Award for the animation of his cartoon satire, Munro; and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America and the National Cartoonist Society. Feiffer has taught at the Yale School of Drama, Northwestern University, Dartmouth, and presently at Stony Brook Southampton College. He recently collaborated with Norton Juster (THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH) on a new children's book, THE ODIOUS OGRE.

Jules recently turned 82. You can find (like) him on Facebook or his website.

Children's books is a field Jules never intended to enter. He talked about when Ursula Nordstrom introduced him to "a kid named Sendak." He looked at his work, and said, "Well, I think I'll be a political cartoonist. He met Norton Juster 50+ years ago after they both got out of the service. They became roommates and  PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH sort of happened. He didn't think of it as a career move. Every illustration in the book was drawn on tracing paper (as a moving saving tactic) and most of them no longer exist. "Norton neglected to tell me he was writing a classic."



Fifty years later, the worked together on THE ODIOUS OGRE. "Everyone who illustrated for children wants the chance to draw an ogre. I wanted to draw the biggest ogre in the history of children's books. I wanted the readers to feel the weight of him." He said he learned it's important to not just get a physical resemblance of a character, but a physical feel of him, his body language. "It's all about the movement on the page," he says. (Check out the ogre drawings in the book, and you'll see just what he means.)

He says he approaches illustration fully entertaining the prospect of failure and making it work for him. It's always about trying to go through the back door, and have the reader come up onto the stage. "I don't want my readers just to react to my work--I want to make them think; I want to make them feel."  

Jules wrote a memoir, BACKING INTO FORWARD (Doubleday), which relates how persistent failure inspired him to reinvent himself as an artist over and over. (Note to conference-goers--I'ts available in the conference bookstore.)

A few other books by Jules Feiffer...

Golden Kite Awards: John Parra, Illustration

A few quotes from John's speech:

Thank you very much, I'm not as well spoken as the wonderful writers here today, that's why I chose art.

GRACIAS-THANKS by Pat Mora is a story about a boy raised in a multicultural family who goes through his day noticing the small (and sometimes not so small) things he is thankful for.

I would also like to say thank you.
Thank you to my parents, who always encouraged and supported me to become an artist.
It was the early memories of my dad drawing for me and my brother that inspired me to also be an artist.
My mom, a school teacher, read to us every day.
Thank you to my wife, Maria, for her love and support... for sharing her amazing insight and ideas as my personal art director and manager.
Thank you to Lee & Low, especially Louise May, my editor.
Thank you to all my art teachers and mentors. They showed me my dreams and provided me with tools on the path to becoming a real artist.
Thank you to my peers and all the great people at SCBWI.

With dreams and ambitions, the path of an artist is rarely easy. I'm infinitely grateful for all that I've received, thank you very much.

E.B. Lewis Saturday Afternoon Keynote - Pursue Your Passions

E.B. Lewis is correcting Lin as she does her intro for him

Lin: He's illustrated over 30 picture books.
E.B.: 50
Lin: He's won three, Coretta Scott King awards.
E.B.: 5
Lin: He's 6'5"
E.B.: 6'3"

A screenshot of his awesome website, where you can see he uses the title Artistrator (which Lin says is a nice bridging of the artist vs. illustrator conundrum.)

E.B.: Being a writer or illustrator of children's books is an amazing thing. A beautiful thing. But author or illustrator is just a subtitle, our real title is: Artists. And when we become artists, we become scary people, we observe, we are critical thinkers, we try to shape and change minds. That's a lot of power. If you look back in history, we're the kind of people that get destroyed first.

E.B.'s putting a big elephant in the room: what feeds our passion to write and create art is inspiration. What happens when you don't have any inspiration or ideas? What happens when that dries up? For E.B., he had two and a half years of not feeling inspired or turned on by the work he'd been doing.

E.B. starts his slide show:

We see photos of him as a kid. And his uncle, who he credits with turning his life around. He enrolled E.B. in painting classes, talked to him about his paintings, took him to galleries, and bought him a book of Modigliani paintings, one of E.B.'s all-time favorite artists.

Slides of his art from the 1980s when he was not not sure what to paint, so he began documenting his life. He painted children playing outside, wheelbarrows, cheesesteakeries, 19th century slave safe houses, and Philadelphia neighborhoods in flux.

He relates the very impressive story of how he got an agent and got into the children's book world followed by a brief bibliography of his early books. So many great covers and stories.

And here's the book that won him the Coretta Scott King Honor this year:

So, we've seen all these great books and art being produced by E.B., but all that hard work takes a toll. During those two and a half years that E.B. was trying to figure out how to reinvigorate his inspiration and passions, he decided, no matter what, he would:

• Go into his studio every day, even if it was just to sweep the floors
• When on school visits out-of-town, always get some Thai food
• And absolutely go to a local art museum

Two of these three practices resulted in a moment where "the ceiling opened up and a pearl dropped," E.B. rediscovered his passion.

I've omitted so much great stuff, but if you have a chance to see E.B.'s exquisite paintings that he made in response to the moment above, I think you'll be as blown away by the power of his ideas and images as the conference audience was. A true artist.

Portfolio Winners!

Check out their links!

Grand Prize

You Byun

Portfolio Honors

Anna Raff

Jen Hill

Peter Sis is on stage!

His keynote is called "Making Sense of Life Through Books"

He is happy to be here in our big group because he feels like he belongs -- and is otherwise home alone all day making pictures.

Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't

Marla was interested in illustration the song "Hush, Little Baby" so she began to research lullabies.

She found there were three categories: soothing, bribery, threat. When Marla illustrated "Hush, Little Baby (a bribery lullaby) she set her book in the 1850s in her book. She added an older sister into the mix, who's helping her papa get her new little sister to sleep.

Marla showed us images of the whole book (which is wonderful). You can pretend you were here by checking out of copy of Hush, Little Baby and studying the way the illustrations and text work together.

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't

Illustrators, Marla says, need their pictures to be in a relationship with the text and she feels security in the text when she's illustrating books she hasn't written. If she's written the text and she finds herself in a spot where things aren't working, it's almost as if there are too many options--which Marla finds scary yet exhilarating.

She keeps hearing rules about picture books such as that a readers should be able to understand and follow the story just by looking at the illustrations, and that the illustrations should say something different than what's being said in the words. Marla disagrees with these rules.

Instead, the words and picture should work together, they should dance.

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't

Marla is showing the last few page turns of The Carrot Seed. She wants her talk to focus on how to make the chemistry between words and pictures happen.

Marla is showing some great example of the chemistry.

Here first editor with Linda Zuckerman after taking 12 years to break into the field. After her first book, it took her five years to get another one. Then she got the manuscript for her book The Seven Silly Eaters.

She's taking us through her process of working on Silly Eaters. For example, she added a father to the illustrations, thought there was no father mentioned in the text, but made him smaller than the mother in the story since she was more important.

We're seeing early sketches and final art. (I love that!)

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't

(Marla Frazee has a hot pink Mac and she's wearing a super cool pair of Fluevogs.)

POSTED BY ALICE POPE

Golden Kite Awards: Hyewon Yum

Hyewon Yum won the Golden Kite Award for illustration for Last Night, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Winning for picture book illustration, Hyewon Yum spoke of how she wasn't someone who ever lifted her hand to speak in class.

And now she's before almost 1,000 people!

And she gave a very gracious thank you.


Posted by Lee Wind

Dan Yaccarino - continued

Where do Dan's book ideas come from?

From the things he loves: ROBOTS, TOYS, MASHED POTATOES.

Dan doesn't try to second guess the market and he knows that kids can smell a rat story that does not come from your heart. He makes stories that HE wants and he wants you to do the same. Send out art and manuscripts that you want to do, things that come from the heart.

Dan tells another story about seeing an editor and LYING! When Dan meets with a picture book editor to show his portfolio, the editor notices a painting in his bag that Dan had done for an editorial illustration assignment. She asks about the painting and if it has a story and he says YES (even though it didn't just yet.) He says the story is at home. She asks if he can fax it to her when he gets home. He says YES. And then on the way home he stops at Starbucks and writes the story. The kicker is only TWO words were changed from that original Starbucks story to the final published text. Maybe Dan is a robot?

Oh jeez, he's LYING to tv producers in his next story...

POSTED BY JAIME TEMAIRIK

PRO TRACK LUNCH - How Published Authors & Illustrators Can Work with Booksellers

The turkey sandwich may have been a bit lugubrious, and the potato salad combative, but there was only good cheer up at the headlining panel table: Kris Vreeland, of famed independent bookstore Vroman's, sat next to Jon Fine of Amazon who sat next to Ed Masessa of Scholastic Book Fairs.

Lin asked each of them what authors and illustrators could do to help sell their books in each particular arena, and each panel member answered in depth, giving practical tips attendees could take home and work into their marketing plans.

Just a few bites:

Kris reads at least a few pages if not a chapter of EVERY ARC she receives (Advanced Reader Copy) if she doesn't get your ARC she relies heavily on your publisher's regional sales rep to talk up the book.

Jon is a huge YA and picture book fan. He mentioned the new Author Pages now on Amazon with Holly Black's as an example.

Ed says in 2008 SBF bought 3,000 unique titles for the fair from over 170 different publishers and packagers. 50 million kids see SBF books in their schools each year.

POSTED BY JAIME TEMAIRIK

Kadir Nelson - Words and Pictures; Pictures and Words

Kadir Nelson with conference attendee Marc Akins

Providing the packed room with a gorgeous slide show, Kadir ran through a list of important elements to make your picture book art transcendent, a few of which are:

• lighting
• color
• perspective

He used examples from his books, especially MOSES and THUNDER ROSE to highlight these elements.

When speaking of THUNDER ROSE, Kadir said one of his favorite artists is Norman Rockwell because of Rockwell's fantastic facial expressions. When illustrating THUNDER ROSE, Kadir thought of Rockwell's humor, though over the top, and imbued THUNDER ROSE with similarly expressive but subtly humorous expressions. Kadir likes Bill Murray's style of subtle humor, just so you know.

POSTED BY JAIME TEMAIRIK

Allyn Johnston - Leave Me Alone With a Latte: One Editor's Picture Book Revision Process

It all starts with Allyn, sitting in a coffee shop, with an illustrator's book dummy and a giant stack of Post-its.

Allyn took us through the dummy revision of Cynthia Rylant and Lauren Stringer's SCARECROW page by page. Allyn writes her editorial comments on the Post-its which then get slapped to the dummy spread they reference.



Allyn showed many examples of Lois Ehlert's books and dummies -- from first sketch to final book. Did you know that Lois Ehlert does elaborate color dummies for each book -- as many as TEN or TWELVE dummies?!? Amazing.



My favorite line from Allyn:

A great example of one of the other roles an editor has it to believe in what you [the author/the illustrator] are doing... [to see that] fragment of your idea and go with you on that...To not panic and be able to ask calm questions...

Which relates to my favorite line from Andrea Welch (who came up to answer questions with Allyn):

Sometimes it is just a tiny sentence in a submission that captures our attention... Two words that make us want to work on something...

POSTED BY JAIME TEMAIRIK