Missed Connections, Champagne and Tapas in Tribeca!

If you are in New York next Monday, please come and say hello. 

I'll be at The Bubble Lounge in Tribeca, 228 W Broadway from 7pm.

Happy Summer!

The Making of The Mighty Lalouche

I am thrilled to announce The Mighty Lalouche is finally here!
The author, Matthew Olshan and I first met competing for a cool spot at BEA in 2007, the year the air conditioning failed. We began a rambling conversation, during which I mentioned that I was an avid fan of vintage boxing photographs. Matthew, who shares an interest in early photography, went looking for portraits of turn-of-the-20th-century pugilists. What he found—proud, diminutive boxers in high-waisted shorts and booties, complete with astonishing mustaches—became the inspiration for The Mighty Lalouche, in which a tiny French postman turns out to be an invincible fighter. (It’s very nice to mention an interest on a whim and have a perfect story on the subject delivered to your inbox.)

I had to wait a few years before I could begin work and it soon became clear it would be absolutely, completely impossible to do this book without actually visiting the City of Light. (Really, any excuse to visit Paris. . . .) There I wandered the streets and talked to finch enthusiasts and postmen and took a billion photographs.

Back in the studio, I fell headlong into research. But when it came to making the first sketches, I found the images to be frustratingly two dimensional. I wanted to feel you could step into Lalouche’s world. I also wanted to try something I’d never done before, and with a perverse desire to complicate things, I decided to make the book in tatebanko, Japanese paper dioramas. I drew, painted, and cut out thousands of tiny pieces of paper to make Parisian streets and boxing-ring crowds and Lalouche’s cozy apartment. Often I sneezed and lost a bunch and had to start all over again.

Once the pieces were assembled into scenes, I enlisted the help of filmmaker Alex Rappoport to light and photograph the dioramas.

Most pictures books take me around four months to complete; The Mighty Lalouche took nearly two years. I became very fond of our small, steadfast, modest hero. He may be a boxing champion, but in his heart of hearts, he is still a postman. I like to imagine he is timeless and ageless, that even now he diligently walks the streets of Paris delivering brown paper packages tied up with string.

The Mighty Lalouche!

Click on the image for the full effect...

On the Road Again!

I have been on the road a bit lately. I visited the Gates Foundation in Seattle to open the exhibit, Let Every Child Have a Name, and was at the Western Washington SCBWI conference in Redmond to talk to - and draw with - children's book authors and illustrators, and to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, to speak about measles during World Immunization Week. The first day home I visited the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn and shared pictures and stories with first, second and third graders.
I have been fed and feted, seen such sights as the gum wall in Seattle and the Emergency Control Room at the CDC, spent time with esteemed Lions and Mac Barnett, and admired the drawings of artists aged 5 to... well... it wouldn't have been polite to ask.

And now, tomorrow I am off to India. My daughter, Olive and I will be accompanying the Measles and Rubella Initiative and Unicef on a mission to Uttar Pradesh to observe routine immunizations.
I have never been to India, but have wanted to go for ever. Mark Twain called it,
India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition... the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. 
I can't imagine all the things we'll see, but we'll be documenting with camera and pencils, and I'll try to post some of it here, (and on facebook and twitter.)

So they went off together...

After a decade, ten books and around 700 drawings, I have painted Ivy and Bean for the last time.
The tenth book, written of course by the glorious Annie Barrows, will be out in the Fall and is as funny and endearing as you would expect.
It's very hard to think of Ivy and Bean not being part of my life, they've bossed me around for so long. Maybe they'll come back as eye-rolling, leg-shaving teenagers. I do hope they won't disown us.

Ring the Bell!

When anyone in the studio finishes a book, a bell is rung. We have yet to install a proper bell, so the bell in question is Sergio Ruzzier's bicycle bell. Which means that the conclusion of a book must occur on a day Sergio rides his bike to work. Fortunately he's undeterred by flurries.
The book I just finished illustrating is a middle grade novel, The 9 Lives of Alexander Baddenfield, written by John Bemelmans Marciano, who also shares our studio.
The 9 Lives of Alexander Baddenfield is a work of genius. I think you'll like it.
Here's a sneak preview of a couple of drawings.

Happy Holidays!

Just in time for the holidays, my father told me a story about Christmas in France in a sleeping bag. It's over here.
Wherever you are in the world, however you celebrate, I wish you all a very happy and peaceful time.

McNally Jackson Holiday Window

I really like glitter. It's not even a guilty pleasure, I have no guilt where glitter is concerned. I also love a Northern Hemisphere glittery, snowy Christmas, (much as I miss the beach and bush and frangipani and mangoes of an Australian Christmas). Doing a store window display was a childhood fantasy come true and I thank McNally Jackson for letting me loose behind their glass. It's a celebration of the most recent Ivy and Bean book, of books in general, of the holiday season in New York and of glitter. I even snuck Ahab in there.