{"id":4120,"date":"2016-08-12T06:00:45","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=4120"},"modified":"2016-08-12T06:00:45","modified_gmt":"2016-08-12T12:00:45","slug":"what-im-doing-at-kirkus-this-weekplus-what-i-did-last-week-featuring-jonathan-bean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=4120","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019m Doing at Kirkus<\/em> This Week,
Plus What I Did Last Week, Featuring Jonathan Bean"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Real cowboys are as many different colors as the earth.”<\/em>
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\nYou won’t find me writing about magazines … well, ever<\/em>. Until today. This morning over at Kirkus<\/em>, I take a look at Illustoria<\/em>, a promising new children’s magazine with a focus on children’s book authors and illustrators. <\/p>\n

That link is here<\/a><\/strong>. <\/p>\n

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Last week, I wrote here<\/a><\/strong> about Kate Hoefler’s Real Cowboys<\/em> (Houghton Mifflin, October 2016), illustrated by Jonathan Bean<\/a><\/strong>. <\/p>\n

Today, Jonathan shares some process images and final art, as well as some thoughts on creating the illustrations for this book. I’m happy he’s sharing that today, so let’s get right to it. <\/p>\n


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\nJonathan<\/font><\/strong>: First, I have to say that it took no time for me to decide to illustrate this beautiful text by Kate Hoefler. Having grown up around farms and farmers and having spent a little bit of time now in the picture-book field, I\u2019ve seen that there is a scarcity of picture books that depict rural farming or ranching life with both realism and poetry. Kate\u2019s text does that, and then some!
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Storyboards and in-progress work<\/em>
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\nFor the art, I leaned toward flat and, for me, more basic geometric shapes. I think of the cowboys, cattle, and landscape in these images as being \u201creal\u201d in the sense that they are composed of more visually basic shapes; there are lots of horizontals and verticals and, at times, smoothly arcing curves. However, I didn\u2019t want the flat shapes to feel cool or chilly; I wanted there to be warmth, because the text overflows with warmth. That\u2019s where the stencils came in. Nearly every shape in this book, including those filled with a flat color, were formed by hand-cut stencils that I used with sponges, potatoes, spray paint, toothbrush splatter, and other techniques to give the shapes a warm, earthy texture. I then scanned all of those stenciled shapes and composed the pre-separated, color images in Photoshop.
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\nHere’s a photo of some of this book\u2019s paper trail:
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\nI won\u2019t say too much about the color, except that I chose a bright palette so that I could, in many spreads, stay away from the sepia-toned images of cowboys we have come to expect. Also, I knew from the start that I would use a bright pink, because I wanted to dress some of the cowboys in pink shirts and hats!
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“They’re on cattle drives for hours, or days, or weeks, but they don’t mind.
Real cowboys are patient. Even on a fast horse, they have to move with the slow rhythm of a herd, and it can take a long time to get places.”<\/em>
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“Real cowboys ask for help. …”<\/em>
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“Real cowboys are artists. They create. They dream. They make up stories for their friends, and horses, and dogs—stories about the world that are bigger than moving cattle to Stillwater or Red Town. They sit under skies so big, the stars take shape on the ground, and they wonder what’s past the horizon.”<\/em>
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\nFinally, this is the first book I\u2019ve illustrated that doesn\u2019t have a traditional story line. I spent a lot of time deciding how to visually tie the spreads together and ended up with a very long storyboard that I slid over my desk one way or the other, depending on what section I was considering.
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(Click to see the very long storyboard that is so long it’s a bit hard to see)<\/em><\/center>
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\nA careful observer will notice that a small stream of cattle begins on page five and continues to snake and grow until the reader reaches the stampede spread, in which the cattle completely take over the image. I\u2019ve included a jpeg of the entire storyboard, joined spread-to-spread, so that your readers can look for other ways I attempted to join the visual stanzas of Kate\u2019s beautifully-written song. <\/p>\n

[Ed. Note: I’m breaking that very long storyboard up into two parts, so maybe we can all see it better.]<\/em>
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\n[Ed. Note: And now here’s some more final art from the book. Thanks again to Jonathan for sharing.]<\/em>
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Title page (sans text)<\/em>
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“Real cowboys are quiet in the morning, careful not to wake the people who live in little houses in the hollow, and up the mountains, and at the edge of fields in the distance.”<\/em>
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“Their work is to think of others: of the calf stranded on the ridge, and their dog coaxing it down—of how hundreds of moving cattle will feel about
the sound of distant thunder.”<\/em>
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“Real cowboys are gentle. …”<\/em>
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“Real cowboys are safe. …”<\/em>
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REAL COWBOYS. Copyright \u00a9 2016 by Kate Hoefler. Illustrations copyright \u00a9 2016 by Jonathan Bean. Preliminary images and some illustrations reproduced by permission of Jonathan Bean. Other spreads reproduced by permission of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Real cowboys are as many different colors as the earth.”(Click to enlarge spread)   You won’t find me writing about magazines … well, ever. Until today. This morning over at Kirkus, I take a look at Illustoria, a promising new children’s magazine with a focus on children’s book authors and illustrators. That link is here. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etcetera","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120","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=4120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}