Artist / Picture book Illustrator Study ~ Highschool

Winter time gifts us with extra hours indoors to get the practical aspect of our artist / illustrators study up and running for Daisy.
We are not going to be going fathoms deep with this one - it's the kind of study that a planning mumma (ahem ;) ) could get seriously submerged in resource gathering.... and then we'd never start.

We signed up, briefly, to the members section on Read-Aloud Revival, as we plan to use the following interviews as a leaping off point:
Illustrator 101   members section - Workshop
Patricia Polacco     members section - Author Event  P.P      author/illustrator
Jonathan Bean   members section - Author Event  J.B    author/illustrator
Tomie dePaola  members section - Author Event  T.P    author/illustrator

Books about select picture book illustrators already read:

Tasha Tudor      Drawn From New England: Tasha Tudor ~ Tudor  

Robert Ingpen   Pictures Telling Stories: The Art of Robert Ingpen ~ Cox

Bill Peet      Bill Peet: An Autobiography ~ Peet

I'm placing these few links here for me to find again quickly:
Exploring Language: Static Images - Picture Books     NZ English
Thumb templates for writers and illustrators 

Daisy will be choosing some favourite illustrators of her choice to study, one illustrator a month, and then I'm asking that she:
1:  craft a brief illustrator biography,
2:  select various books by that illustrator to work with,  discuss techniques,
3:  recreate an illustration using the artists techniques (update: this became on optional extra, as she became immersed in working with other craft mediums.)

Both of us are really looking forward to working on this together since we are devout picture book appreciators -simple picture books and sophisticated picture books, we like both.

Favourite Picture Books ~ Pinterest link

We get asked by mums with younger children, "What are your favourite picture books?"
And so over the last few years we've been compiling a visual display of many of our favourites over at Pinterest to refer people to.  The pins are not detailing every single picture book in our home library - there are hundreds - these are just the favourites.

Some of the books,initially, made the cut just because the illustrations are amazing works of art,

or, where the story is so good that the illustrations are secondary, not the other way around;

 however,  most are on our favourties list because both the story and their accompanying illustrations are wonderful....

 

 

See the list here:  Our Favourite Picture Books  - Pinterest

You can skip to this post if you are interested in pins for our favourite New Zealand and Australia books for children.

Picture Books: A few visuals... and links

Just popping up some visuals of a few of my more favourite New Zealand picture books beneath.. so that I can pin them ;-)

For anyone is in the frame of mind to see our, very slowly growing, pins of favourite picture book covers; I'm archiving them on Pinterest.  This is not a list of every great picture book out there, just my personal favourites and mostly they are titles we own.  (Second hand book sales have been a wonderful place to find discarded gems.)

Favourite Picture Books

I count myself as very blessed ☺ as Daisy appreciates picture books too; and, she has her own small collection going.  During her high schooling years we are using picture books for art/illustrator studies.
Jay is more interested in plastic model artisans, and their painting techniques. ;-)

With the next two boards, I'm also only pinning books *we* like, not trying to create an exhaustive list of every title available.

New Zealand Book Covers

Australian Book Covers

After the War ~ Bob Kerr

Opening 2 page spread. 

We like to keep flipping back to the opening pages to note the change the years have created.

The Great Monsieur Vertelli ~ Robin Peirce

 Clicking on the picture will allow you to read the page beneath.

The Immigrants ~ Alan Bagnall (Sarah Wilkins' artwork reminds me of Rita Angus' painting style)

Opening flap.

Caesar The ANZAC Dog ~ Patricia Stroud 

The Battle of the Mountains ~ Peter Gossage.  The black line templates in the back are a wonderful go-along activity with this book, they help to make this our favourite Gossage book.