8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. On their travels from Chicago to their Vermont vacation destination, Osh and his family were kind enough to stop into my studio so that we could all meet face-to-face! I was able to photograph the absolutely beloved Osh, a Ty beanie toy, while eight-year-old Mia stood protectively by. [...]
8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. As I’ve said before, you can choose a hand-stitched Waldorf doll or tone-on-tone felted owl from Etsy for your child, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Resign yourself to pink plastic or, perhaps, a color-blocked polyester velour dog. Phoebe was given to Arianna when she was [...]
It is an exciting and rare occasion in our house when my husband breaks out a mechanical pencil and starts to draw. He has always made tiny, meticulous renderings of long parades of vehicles, in recent years usually under the guise of an explanation or description of something for our daughter. I’ve [...]
I love Babar, but somehow I had never come across this incredibly bizarre Christmas book until this week! Let me just skip to the best part, in which we see a cross-section of Father Christmas’ UNDERGROUND LAIR. Did you know that he lives in a cave in Bohemia?
And that [...]
Forget Goodnight Moon. I’m here to tell you that the most hypnotic, soothing book ever written is Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months. There is no eating of chicken soup going on in our mostly-vegetarian household, but nearly every night I knock my daughter out with this [...]
Here are some more books that have entranced my family over the years!
Andrew Henry’s Meadow is one of the most treasured books from my own childhood. Doris Burn’s incredibly detailed and thoroughly imagined drawings seem matter-of-factly possible and yet completely extraordinary.
Andrew Henry annoys his family with his Rube-Goldberg-esque contraptions and inventions, and [...]
Children’s book illustrators have such a profound responsibility! Their work can shape a child’s emotional response to the world, and affect our sense of beauty forever. Here are few of the most formative images from my own childhood.
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, this [...]
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