We’re lucky, here in Peterborough, to have the thriving Macdowell Colony. Writers, artists, composers, photographers, filmmakers and sculptors come to Peterborough to live in one of the 32 studios at the retreat. Once accepted, an artist can stay for as little as a couple of weeks, or as long as a couple of months. When they arrive, they find a kind of isolation — there’s no phone, no internet, no fax, and no family. It’s just a cabin in the woods.

(Alexander Studio at Macdowell Colony. Photo credit: Victoria Sambunaris)

And there’s a famous tradition: every day your picnic basket lunch is silently delivered to the doorstep of your cabin.

( Photo credit: Victoria Sambunaris)

In the history of the colony there have been over 6000 supported artists in residence, and in 2007, the colony celebrated its centennial with a yearlong celebration.

About once a month the Macdowell Colony sponsors a current resident at a downtown event. And this month it was Brian Selznick! Brian gave a very visual and entertaining talk and covered some of our favorite books, including The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, Walt Whitman and, of course, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

It was great to see a huge turnout and variety of age groups — very young, medium young, young and old. As a finale he showed the movie A Trip to the Moon, by Georges Méliès, and he provided the words while a cellist from the colony (I missed her name)  performed accompanying music. It was quite funny, and fantastic!

He also talked about what he’s working on while he’s at the Colony (I’ll repeat here what was in the announcement for the talk):

Familiar now with the rewards of risk-taking on the heels of Hugo’s success, Selznick remains interested in seeing what else he can do with books. “I like taking what I’ve learned and doing something new with it.” His current novel-in-progress, Wonderstruck, is a fitting example: Though it will feature visuals in a prominent and inventive way (much like Hugo), it will also weave together two separate stories that take place in two different time frames. “One story, which takes place in the 1920s, will be told entirely in pictures,” reveals Selznick, who is hesitant to give away too much about the book’s plot. “The other, from the 1970s, will be told with words.” Wonderstruck is scheduled to be released in 2011.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Lita and I just returned from England and jumped back into the world with last week’s release of Pennies for Elephants!

We’ve seen a few nice reviews so far in the local paper, at The Miss Rumphius Effect, and in the Concord Monitor.

But let’s go back to England for a moment. We pulled the plan together quickly after Lita got the green light on a new book. The book is about Walter Rothschild, a member of the famous banking family, who as a 7 year old announced to his parents that he was going to build a museum. He was born a few years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and, like Darwin, he collected bugs, butterflies, birds, fish, reptiles, plants, live animals and animal specimens. He eventually did work for the family bank, but he also followed his dream of opening his museum, and with the help of two curators and many explorers, Walter created the largest natural history collection ever gathered by one person. It became one of the most important collections for proving many of Darwin’s theories, and is still used extensively today for DNA studies.

The trip was part research, part vacation. We started our England trip at Kew Gardens to get some visual reference of strange plants and Victorian greenhouses.

Then we spent a few days at the Walter Rothschild’s Tring Museum, which is now part of the British Natural History Museum.

And finally we spent seven beautiful days up in the Lake district where we hiked about 7-10 miles every day, enjoyed afternoon teas, and visited Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, and the Beatrix Potter gallery in Hawkshead. The picture below is from a glorious hike above the Borrowdale Valley. I’m not sure there’s ever been such perfect weather in northwest England!

Lita has a busy summer schedule. In July we’re hoping to get down to Manhattan, then she’ll be at ALA in Chicago, then an SCBWI conference near Baltimore. And we’ve got a bunch of other events in the works for the summer! We’re ready for another vacation…

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Lita just finished her last couple of classroom visits for this school year and we’re heading to England tomorrow! I was unloading pictures off the digital camera and found these images from our November 2003 trip to England.

That trip was to the Cotswolds and then up to North Yorkshire. We had a lot of rain but also some beautiful, moody weather. We were also in England about 18 months ago. I remember lots of miles of hiking (I think we did 100 miles in 10 days) and also lots of scones and clotted cream on that trip! This time we’ll be near London for a few days of research for a book, and then we head up to the Lake District.

When we get back, Pennies for Elephants will be released! Lita’s doing a talk and book signing event at our local Peterborough Toadstool Bookshop on June 13th at 2pm, so if you’re in the area, please come — we’ll bring some pictures of England too!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We just put the finishing touches on a mini website for Pennies for Elephants.

One of the main characters in the story is a little newsboy so we’ve put together some great Lewis Hine photographs of newsboys (and newsgirls). Luckily these images are all in the public domain and available through Flickr — really amazing photographs.

The research section includes several pages of headlines and pictures from the Boston Post Newspaper. Pennies for Elephants is based on true events that occurred in 1914. The Boston Post covered the story from March to June, with several articles and pictures every day. We captured these images (back in 2007 when Lita was researching the story) by taking digital pictures of the screen of the microfilm reader — they look better than I expected!

And we’ve included some fun old pictures of Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox in 1912. The guy on the top-left is Smoky Joe Wood who won 34 games for Boston in 1912, and had 3 wins in the World Series (which Boston won against the old New York Giants).

We’re expecting the first shipment of Pennies for Elephants to arrive this week at the New Hampshire Educational Media Association Conference (NHEMA) where Lita is giving the luncheon keynote on Friday.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

One Thousand Tracings has been added to several 2009-2010 State Reading Award lists including the Prairie Pasque Award in South Dakota, the William Allen White Children’s Book Award in Kansas, and the Misouri Show Me Readers Award. It was also on the list for the 2008-2009 North Carolina Children’s Book Award (NCCBA).

Most of these are lists of about 10-12 books—I believe all of these are voted on by school kids from 1st to 5th grades (varies by award). It’s great that so many kids will be reading Tracings! I added some links to the award logos above for more information on each of these. It’s really an amazing honor for Lita and Tracings to be included on such fantastic lists of books! Thanks Missouri, North Carolina, South Dakota and Kansas!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Lita just returned from a fantastic two day school visit in Danville, NH where she received a nice write-up in the local paper. Just last week we finished her new 2009-2010 School Visit Packet. It has all the information for planning the perfect school visit!

Lita has added three new talks to her school visit program:

• Pennies for Elephants—Connecting students to local news by becoming a part of it
• Digging Deep to Find Interesting Sources for Historical Stories
• Yellowstone Moran—Journaling and Sketching

And she will continue to offer these three talks:

• Path to becoming an author and illustrator
• The Story Behind One Thousand Tracings
• Daydreams, Digs and Dinosaurs!

For all of the new information, including descriptions of all the presentations and how to tailor them to meet the needs of diverse groups, download and print the school visit packet here or check out the School Visits section at LitaJudge.com.

Danville: Danville Elementary School third-grader Jacob Post, 9, listens as author/illustrator Lita Judge shows how rough sketches become finished artwork in a presentation Monday at the school.
Jan Seeger /Eagle Tribune Staff Photographer

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We got the news the same day my lovely editor, Kendra, sent me the first F&Gs! This is a story I’ve wanted to do since I was 4 years old so I’m really excited to know that JLG liked the book. Yellowstone Moran will be a September 2009 release with Viking.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Our 175 year old Peterborough Town Library had a fun event a few days ago to celebrate Beth Krommes, the 2009 Randolph Caldecott Medal winner. Beth is a good friend of ours and lives in Peterborough, just down the road from us. She and Lita usually drive together to our two annual southern NH children’s book events: The Keene Children Literature Festival and the SCBWI Nashua Conference. (This year they’re both featured speakers at the Keene Festival.)

The House in the Night is such a beautiful book—here’s our new copy with the Caldecott sticker:

I spent most of the night talking with Beth’s husband, Dave, about software and websites and blogs. Dave designed Beth’s new site last summer.

We’re looking forward to Beth’s ALA speech—I’ve heard it may have some reference to the ice storm and 10 day power outage we experienced in Peterborough in December. Lita will be at the ALA conference this summer …

but we’re not sure if she’ll be able to attend the awards ceremony.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We recently heard that an organization called Wisconsin Braille has transcribed One Thousand Tracings and made it available for free to Wisconsin School Libraries. This sounds like a fantastic program and we’re honored that Tracings was included.

Here’s some information from their website:

Once again, Wisconsin Braille, Inc. is pleased to offer a selection of braille books for your school library because of grant money awarded us. As in the past, the committee has chosen books that are not already brailled. We searched the on-line catalog in our local library, as well as other sources, to locate recognized books of excellence.

Wisconsin Braille Inc.’s Special Book Project was started in 1998 with the production of one braille book offered at no cost to school libraries in Wisconsin. In co-ordination with teachers of the visually impaired and school librarians across the state, the Special Book Committee solicits possible titles for transcription. The books selected for transcription represent a wide range of reading levels, fiction and non-fiction material, and poetry.

Every effort is made to select books that are not already available in braille. In collaboration with the Oshkosh State Correctional Institution (OSCI), book selections are transcribed by transcribers certified by the Library of Congress/National Library Service (NLS) under the direction of the coordinator of the OSCI Braille Program. The books are available in hard-copy or on disc.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We’ve been working on this Pennies for Elephants video trailer over the past few days — I think it’s ready to premiere.

We included some of the original newspaper pictures from the Boston Post in 1914 so you can see that the characters in the story are visually based on real people. Lita is giving a presentation this Friday at the Wisconsin State Reading Association (WSRA) Conference in Milwaukee and will be discussing the visual research she does to create characters for her stories. She gave a similar talk last April at the Nashua SCBWI conference but this new talk is really expanded based on all the work she’s done recently for Pennies for Elephants and Yellowstone Moran.

Anyway, let us know what you think of the video!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

To get ready for Lita’s new book, Pennies for Elephants (out in a June’09), we just put the finishing touches on our new website design and uploaded it last night. We hope you’ll take a look.

There are lot’s of new images of illustrations and sketches, information about books, school visits, and upcoming appearances. Lita and I had lots of fun designing new banners for all the pages. (I think they look fantastic!)

We’re already planning lots of new things to put on the site including activities for Pennies for Elephants, video trailers for Pennies and for Yellowstone Moran (out in September’09), and some images from the current work in progress. Anyway, please check out the site!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

I am still on cloud nine after my school visit at Gilbert H Hood in Derry, NH! Thank you to all the students, teachers and especially Kathy Lane, for welcoming me to their school and making it such an incredible day. Thank you also for the wonderful letters on foot tracings that several students gave me. I loved our lunchtime conversation about writing and am still thinking about many of the questions and comments that were posed during that time. I’ve been working so hard on my current book, and a day with motivated, bright students really got me reenergized about writing and illustrating.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Continuing the discussion on developing characters in my picture books, I wanted to mention the importance of secondary characters. All characters that appear in my stories are important, even if they aren’t the main characters of the story. I gather reference, do complete sketches, and then do color studies for these minor characters. Sometimes they only appear once in the book. But their role is crucial. They must have the same sense of life—the same uniqueness—as the main characters.

Here is a short series, sketches to final art, of five figures (including the dogs) who appear in “Pennies for Elephants.”

The role of the husband and wife, the “Snooty Couple”, is to ignore the little paper boy. Their gestures and clothes wordlessly portray people who aren’t interested in what the little boy is saying. Even their dog can’t be bothered to notice the paper boy’s dog. These characters add some humor. And even though they have no dialog, they convey meaning just by their attitude.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

The kids at the Darien Library in Connecticut just finished a quilt making project after reading One Thousand Tracings.

Back in the summer, our Bookmania kids listened to the reading of ONE THOUSAND TRACINGS by Lita Judge, the story of an American family during World War II who helped supply German families with shoes. In keeping with the theme of the book of helping people in need, the kids decorated fabric squares to be made into quilts for needy children through Project Linus. The squares have been assembled into two quilts, which are being delivered to Yale-New Haven Hospital for sick children to cuddle up.

For more info on Project Linus, look here:   http://www.projectlinus.org/

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

Lita and I just set up a new website for our friend Kim Cunningham at KimWebsterCunningham.com.

It was a fun process because Kim completely designed the site with paper and pencil and scissors, and Lita scanned, cropped and adjusted all the images and did all the fancy Photoshop work on the banner. And I did the rest — it’s all been done just in the nick of time because Kim’s new book, Absolutely Wild, published by David R. Godine, has just been released, and she’s doing a signing at our local Peterborough NH book store, The Toadstool Bookshop, on December 13th.

The book is gorgeous, so check it out, and check out the website too!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We’ve recently discovered a very nicely done website that is about books for young readers with a special focus on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. But this month they feature several articles on the themes of “war, peace and social justice” in relation to children’s books. And they’ve included an article written by Lita!

In the introduction to the articles they ask, “How can we help children to cope with the divisiveness and contradictions at play in the world today? And how can we help them to feel that they have the power to change things for the better?… At no other time in recent history have these themes been more relevant or their challenges more urgent than they are now. ”

Here are links to the articles:

Books for Thought and Action: A Taste of Jane Addams’ Legacy
by Jo Montie

Learning That War Is Not a Game
by Kathy Beckwith

Finding One Thousand Tracings
by Lita Judge (reprinted with permission)

… and from the PaperTiger archives: Strengthening the Good, Stamping Out the Bad: Children’s Books & Good Causes

They also have a blog here so please take a look.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

For the second part to my series on developing characters, I thought I’d discuss the process of developing my animal characters for Pennies for Elephants. As I mentioned before, this book takes place in Boston, 1914. I demonstrated how I developed my little girl in the first part. This story also has three elephant characters. The children in the story are painted in a style which is not realistic, but rather reminiscent of an old fashioned style. Because they weren’t realistic, my elephants couldn’t be realistic either. I needed to make them slightly anthropomorphic to fit with the style of the children, but still real enough so my readers feel they were true characters.

I started as I always do by gathering reference. I found an elephant named Dinde, and her trainer was happy to work with me. Dinde did tricks and took poses that I needed for the book.

And since the characters in my book got to ride elephants… so did I! That’s the best part of creating my characters - immersing myself into the role so I can bring life to my sketches.

After working with Dinde, I was ready to begin sketching. I did hundreds, searching for the proper style to fit the children in the book and finding enough expression in the elephants faces to bring them to life. The sketches often start very crude and simple, then slowly build in character and detail.

Once sketches are done and I have found the style that works, I am ready to begin painting!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

As part of my series on creative process I thought I’d share, over my next three entries, how I develop my characters for a picture book story.

The first character is a little girl named Dorothy in my book Pennies for Elephants (due out next spring). The book is set in Boston 1914. I wanted to create a sense of nostalgia with the book and with the characters. I also wanted it to be a younger story, not as realistic as One Thousand Tracings — that meant developing a new style for depicting my figure work. I find it’s actually easier when I do work that’s realistic, because I just hire a model and paint what I see, but for this book I worked to develop a style which captured the proper mood and period of the book.

I began by looking at examples of illustrators from the early 1900’s to immerse myself in the period. I also looked through clothing catalogs to see what people wore.

Then I drew lots of sketches! Hundreds of drawings of children. My style swung from too representational to overly cartoony. I experimented with putting different types of clothes on my characters, and used different gestures to create the personality I wanted. At last, I started focusing on the look of my character.

But the work wasn’t done. Translating a pencil drawing into a painting is often the most difficult step for me. There are still decisions to be made in the final paintings that the pencil drawing doesn’t cover. How could I paint my character to capture the flavor of fun and nostalgic early 1900’s. I did a series of color studies, experimenting with different colors to capture the right mood. I also experimented with different qualities of line and paint to find the right balance of emphasizing the getup of my little girl through line, but softening the look so the art felt warm and inviting. I did all these steps before the manuscript was even complete. Because I’m so visual, I often need to get my character down on paper as an illustration before I can complete the writing. After I ‘m happy with the look and personality of my character in the illustration, I can move toward finishing the story.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

I did it! I gave my speech at the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony. It was pretty exciting to see all the flags lined up in front of the UN. I was really impressed with everyone’s speeches, particularly Emily Arnold McCully.

My wonderful editor, Nami, came to the ceremony. Below we’re admiring the Jane Addams doll that they gave each of us.

I’ll be posting another Creative Process entry soon on developing a strong character.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We’re heading down to New York City tomorrow. On Friday Lita is accepting the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Honor at the United Nations Plaza!

Here’s some information from the Jane Addams Peace Association.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.