The Calico Jungle

I was at a friend’s house recently and she had a book sitting out that caught my eye: The Calico Jungle, by Dahlov Ipcar, published in 1965.

It was one of her favorite books as a child. She kept it and then read it to her own children (now adults).

It’s a quiet bedtime story, about a boy looking at all the “strange and wonderful” animals on the quilt his mother made for him.

It ends as he falls asleep and dreams he is walking through the calico jungle.

This friend of mine is an English teacher as well as a textile artist and quilter. Perhaps this book lies at the root of her adult pursuits? I wonder…

I wish I had seen this book when I was young, but I’m glad to discover it now. I will look for other books by illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar. Perhaps for a future post!

A Child’s Garden of Images by Roger Duvoisin

Well, while I am waiting for production to continue on Where Lily Isn’t (the designer at the publishing house just left, so the search is on for a replacement, *sigh*…) I will entertain both you and myself by looking through the books in my kid lit collection.

Today I pulled out a book that was a gift from a friend – A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by Roger Duvoisin (The Heritage Press: 1944). Lucky for me she had two in her collection.

I have a few books illustrated by Duvoisin (you may know his work from his 1950 book Petunia). His drawings are joyful and loose, sometimes on the edge of silly. His illustrations are from the era when colored images were prepared for printing by separating them manually into multiple plates (as would be done in traditional printmaking). The plates were then printed in individual ink tones, usually including a yellow, a red, a blue or green, and black. The results create an appealingly limited palette of graphic shapes and patterns. I am a fan!

Below from ‘Foreign Lands’:

I love how the girl’s feet exit the top of the image in ‘The Swing’, although the flattened perspective makes me worry a bit for her safety on the way down:

‘The Cow’: Perhaps a precursor to Petunia?

‘Travel’:

‘My Ship And I’:

The illustrations for the book aren’t all in color. There are many lovely black and white images, such as this for ‘The Little Land’:

and this for ‘My Shadow”:

Also for ‘Little Land’:

‘Autumn Fires’: Do we not feel the loss of summer looming?

‘To Minnie’: That is some rug!

For all you picture book folk – ‘Picture Books In Winter’:

And finally, a peek under the jacket cover:

Perhaps for my next post I will show more of Duvoisin’s work. It is worth exploring further.

Kerlan

Last week I learned about the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. How could I not have known about it before?

by Raúl Colón

The Kerlan Collection is an amazing, world class collection of children’s literature. They have more than 100,000 children’s books, as well as manuscripts, galleys, dummies and original art. It is a book orchard, laden with tasty images and fruitful information.

by Jesse Hartland

If you can’t get to Minnesota this week, you can still explore a lot of their on-line resources. I saw work by old favorites, and discovered new artists.
Here is a link to an article exploring the many ways that picture book art has been made. You can learn about color separations. You can see examples of illustrations that were created with drawing, printing, scratchboard, paint and collage.

by Leonard Everett Fisher

by Melissa Sweet

Another part features Melissa Sweet explaining how she illustrated Balloons Over Broadway. There are sections on how she developed the ideas: her research, meandering and techniques. There are curriculum ideas. Reading about Sweet’s process enriches the experience of looking at this buoyant book. Here is a link.

A third section compares versions of Little Red Riding Hood. I found this particularly interesting because of the books by Paul Fleischman that I have illustrated which combine multiple versions of fairy tales. Here is a link to the Red Riding Hood exploration.

Ames 1901

Platt- Munk 1924

Benji Montresor 1989

I had never heard of the artist Edgard Tijtgat before seeing his version of Little Red Riding Hood.

Tijtgat 1918

I found it so haunting and beautiful that I hunted down other images by him on the World Wide Web. (I wandered away from the Kerlan for this digression.)

 

I am grateful to the Kerlan for amassing such a collection and for sharing it with the world. I liked learning more about people I already admired such as Melissa Sweet, and discovering new artists, like Edgard Tijtgat. I am honored that I might be included in the Kerlan collection in the future.
Check out the Kerlan here! Who knows where your discoveries might take you.

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