Seconda stella!

I’m playing catch-up here today with good news from last week of a second starred review for The Hinky-Pink, this one in Publishers Weekly. Says the review: “Like the text, the art hits just the right tone of tongue-in-cheek earnestness....” (You can find the whole review here. It’s the second review from the top.) Thanks, PW!

I also wanted to put up a little bit about process in this post. Part of the fun of The Hinky-Pink is how full of incident and action the story is. It’s an illustration challenge, though, when a scene contains more drawing-worthy moments than can fit easily on a page. For one especially busy passage, we (editor, designer, and I) played with the idea of using comic panels to squeeze in as much action as possible, as shown in this sketch. That didn’t feel exactly right, though. It did, however, put us on the path to a happier solution, which was to keep the idea of the panels, but to frame them with an Italian Renaissance altarpiece. (You can see how that drawing turned out here.) That device not only allowed for showing multiple moments from the book, it also reinforced the story’s themes and setting. Also, it gave us all a chance to dust off the part of our brains where we keep our art history lessons and to relearn the word predella, and that was gratifying.