{"id":3761,"date":"2015-06-09T00:01:09","date_gmt":"2015-06-09T06:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=3761"},"modified":"2015-06-09T08:02:02","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T14:02:02","slug":"have-you-seen-what-steve-lights-up-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=3761","title":{"rendered":"Have You Seen What Steve Light’s Up To?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThere is something about the intricate and beautiful pen illustrations of Steve Light<\/a><\/strong> that makes my eyes very happy — and would have made kid-me very happy too. He’s visiting today to share a tiny bit of final art from his latest book, Have You Seen My Monster?<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (Candlewick Press, April 2015), as well as a handful of early sketches from the book. (Pictured above is one of his beginning character designs.) Steve drew the illustrations in ink (using a Mont Blanc 149 with a B nib that “flips” to a fine line), and he colored them using inks as well. <\/p>\n

This book is a follow-up to last year’s Have You Seen My Dragon?<\/em> (see this<\/a><\/strong> 2014 7-Imp post), and hidden in this book, as a young girl tries to find her monster friend at the county fair, are color-enhanced shapes of all types. We’re talkin’ parallelograms, nonagons, curvilinear triangles, and more. These aren’t the typical shapes you see in most concept books for children. <\/p>\n

And here’s a special treat: Steve shares below some sketches from two forthcoming books, both out next year. <\/p>\n

Let’s get right to it, and I thank him for sharing. <\/p>\n


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Have You Seen My Monster?<\/em>
A Final Spread and the Cover:<\/font><\/strong><\/center><\/p>\n

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“He loves the fun house …”<\/em>
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Have You Seen My Monster?<\/em>
Early Sketches:<\/font><\/strong><\/center><\/p>\n

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Beginning character design<\/em>
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Sketches<\/em>
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Endpaper sketch<\/em>
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Steve<\/font><\/strong>: This [below] is work from a book coming out next year from Powerhouse Books [POW!<\/a><\/strong>], called The Bunny Burrow Buyer’s Book<\/a><\/strong><\/em>. It’s about a rabbit family looking for a new burrow, and every burrow they look at has a dragon or Gryphon or something living in it — until they find an Oak Tree that has an nice big burrow for them all. They start out with just one baby bunny, but at every turn of the page, they have more and more babies — just like real bunnies!
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Steve<\/font><\/strong>: These are sketches from my next book with Candlewick Press. (I love them!) It is called Swap!<\/em>, and is about a pirate boy — and a pirate who is down on his luck. His ship is all broken down, and then<\/em> his button falls off! So the pirate boy says, “Lets SWAP!” and they trade the button for teacups, the teacups for rope, the rope for sails — until they have everything they need to fix up their ship. This book will be out April 2016. Yippee!
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Color studies<\/em>
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Proposal art<\/em>
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HAVE YOU SEEN MY MONSTER? Copyright \u00a9 2015 by Steve Light. Published by Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA. All images here published by permission of Steve Light.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Click to enlarge)   There is something about the intricate and beautiful pen illustrations of Steve Light that makes my eyes very happy — and would have made kid-me very happy too. He’s visiting today to share a tiny bit of final art from his latest book, Have You Seen My Monster? (Candlewick Press, April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}