{"id":5326,"date":"2021-04-20T00:01:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T06:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=5326"},"modified":"2021-04-19T19:53:52","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T01:53:52","slug":"mel-fell-a-visit-with-corey-r-tabor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=5326","title":{"rendered":"Mel Fell<\/em>: A Visit with Corey R. Tabor"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Title page spread<\/em>
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\nI’ve got a review over at the Horn Book<\/em> of Corey R. Tabor’s<\/a><\/strong> Mel Fell<\/em> (Balzer + Bray, February 2021), a book that makes me want to snap my fingers and instantly appear in a story time somewhere \u2014 because sharing this book will make a child’s day. (Instantly<\/em> appearing in a story time may actually frighten the poor children, so I’ll be sure to ease into it.) <\/p>\n

That review is here<\/a><\/strong> if you’d like to read all about the book. Corey also visits today to talk about the book’s genesis and<\/em> how he created the illustrations for it. I loved reading all about the making of this one, and I’m pleased to share it with 7-Imp readers. Big thanks to Corey for sharing. <\/p>\n

Let’s get to it …<\/p>\n

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Corey<\/font><\/strong>: Thanks for having me on the blog! I\u2019m a longtime fan and truly honored to be here.<\/p>\n

I had the idea for Mel Fell<\/em> while sitting on a bench by a lake. I wasn\u2019t trying to come up with ideas at the time, which tends to be the best way to make them appear. I was just sitting there looking up at a tall old tree growing by the water and wondering how many animals and bugs called it home. That got me thinking about how fun it would be to make a picture book where you get to flip up and down the tree as you turn the pages, and on each spread you see a different animal who lives there.
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\nThen I imagined a little bird falling from her nest at the top of the tree, and all the other animals desperately trying to catch her. I quickly realized that the bird wasn\u2019t falling from her nest. She was leaping (boldly, confidently)! The rest of the story arrived all at once, and I sketched it out in the tiny notebook I carry around in my back pocket (which is, on occasion, more than just an affectation or something for my two-year-old to snatch while joyfully shouting, \u201cPick-pocket, Dada! Pick-pocket, Dada!\u201d).
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\nI knew I had my next picture book idea. (This is a very good feeling.) And it felt like an appropriate follow-up to my previous book, Snail Crossing<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, which is about a very slow snail trying to cross a road. All the action in Mel Fell<\/em>, by contrast, takes place over the course of a few seconds.
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\nAfter I had the story roughly sketched out in my notebook, I made full-sized sketches in pencil [below]<\/em> and then scanned the drawings into my computer to make adjustments and do some additional sketching in Photoshop.
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\nUsually at this stage I make a PDF book dummy to send to my editor. For this book, though, I printed it all out and made a physical dummy in order to wrap my head around the format and the twist in the middle.<\/p>\n

When it came time to do the final art, I played around with all my paints and pencils and crayons and inks and markers and stuff until I found something that fit the story. I like to do the art a little differently with each book I illustrate, so I tested out tons of options before I settled on acrylic paint and pencil. Most of the art was made with two tubes of cheap acrylic paint I found in the back of a drawer.
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\nI painted everything in either green or red and then changed the colors digitally when I assembled it all in Photoshop. Looking back at it now, two years later, I have no idea why I did it this way, but I\u2019m sure I must have had a (good?) reason at the time.
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Painting from the squirrel spread<\/em><\/center>
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The final squirrel spread: “The squirrels tried to catch her. …”<\/em>
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The printed version<\/em>
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Painting from the water spread<\/em><\/center>
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Another painting from the water spread<\/em><\/center>
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The final water spread: “Mel dived into the water. …”<\/em>
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\nThe exception to the two-color thing is the bark of the tree, which I made by combining all of my tubes of block-printing ink. [See below.]<\/em> I used a rubber roller to smear the colors around on a sheet of watercolor paper until it got nice and muddy. Then I scanned it in and layered it into the illustration in Photoshop.
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Experimenting …<\/em>
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\nBack when I first had the idea for Mel Fell<\/em>, I remember having some doubts about whether my publisher would let me do a book that opens vertically and rotates in the middle. Luckily, I have a wonderful editor who championed the book from the beginning. (Thanks, Donna!) It was such a fun book to make. I hope readers have just as much fun reading it!
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MEL FELL. Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Corey R. Tabor. Published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins, New York. All images here reproduced by permission of Corey R. Tabor.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title page spread(Click to enlarge)   I’ve got a review over at the Horn Book of Corey R. Tabor’s Mel Fell (Balzer + Bray, February 2021), a book that makes me want to snap my fingers and instantly appear in a story time somewhere \u2014 because sharing this book will make a child’s day. (Instantly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-interviews","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","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=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}