Caldecott Medalists and Honor Books: Innovative Illustrations into the 21st Century
Article 7
By Lyn Lacy
8400 words
For Matthew Cordell, whose proficiency in uses of the artistic elements resulted in the simplest of shapes to convey the dramatic poignancy of a lost little girl.
The Randolph Caldecott Medal is the most prestigious award for American illustrators of picture books. In 1937 Frederic G. Melcher proposed the idea to encourage American artists to illustrate children’s literature, and he named the Medal after Randolph Caldecott, a prominent 19th-century English illustrator. The award is for illustrators who are U.S. citizens or residents, whose books have been published in English in the United States first or simultaneously in other countries.
Conversations about changing the award to become international are wrong-headed, because opening up to artists worldwide was not Melcher’s intent, international awards already exist and doing such a thing could potentially deprive Americans and residents of the U.S. of the lucrative income that is derived from having their books continually in print. Support for our American community of exemplary illustrators is paramount for all of us who benefit from their home-grown talents and hard work.
The award is presented each January by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), after a year-long selection and deliberation process involving 15 members of a Caldecott Award Selection Committee. Once a winner is chosen, the Committee decides whether to name Honor Books and how many.
The Medal is for "distinguished illustrations in a picture book and for excellence of pictorial presentation for children" in a title published during the preceding year. In ALSC accompanying information, definitions and commentary are offered for key words—“picture book,” “children” and “distinguished.” Discussions about these definitions are in Article 6 “The Picture Book Audience” and Article 5 “Artistic Elements/Page and Book Design.” Reading the two articles is suggested before turning to reviews below, since the reason for selection below of eighteen titles in the 21st century is their exemplary uses of the artistic elements, page/book design and visual literacy objectives for a picture book audience of prereaders. For purposes of these three articles about the Caldecotts, “Medalist” refers to a winning title, “Honor Book” refers to a title of merit and “Caldecotts” refers to the entire collection of Medalists and Honor Books.
20th century innovative illustrators
Starting in mid- 20th century, American Illustrators of picture books began to explore more creative uses of the artistic elements and page/book design, in large part because more fine artists had entered the field, the arts in general were becoming more experimental, families and educators demanded better books for their children and publishing had experienced cost-effective improvements here and abroad.
Among many outstanding artists, Maurice Sendak, Marvin Bileck, Leo and Diane Dillon, Chris Van Allsburg, Ed Young, David Macaulay and David Wiesner took all that had come before and envisioned something new. One at a time, in their ground-breaking innovations, these illustrators demanded new ways to look at picture book art.
In his 1964 Medalist Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Maurice Sendak opened the door to a new era of innovation. Sendak startled everyone in Where the Wild Things Are with his monsters, one of whom the illustrator himself said was right out of “King Kong,” a movie that scared him as a child. Important to Sendak’s design is his use of different sizes of illustrations and various placements for text.
Marvin Bileck was the illustrator of 1965 Honor Book, Rain Makes Applesauce (1964) that featured lyrical phrases by Julian Scheer sweeping over, around and through the art. Bileck had studied architecture as well as fine art and for this book, he played with ideas for two years, sometimes manipulating puppets and dolls as models. Intended to stir a child’s imagination, the illustrations are full of tiny details, absurd scenes and subtle surprises.
In the 1976 Medalist, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (1975), illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, the contrasts of colors, strong horizontal base line, use of multiple narratives, precise planning that avoided the gutter, and informal arrangement of shaped text within the illustrations—all signified consummate skills on the part of what the Dillons called their “third artist.”
In the 1982 Medalist, Jumanji (1981), Chris Van Allsburg took a story about two kids and a board game, gave it a monochromatic 1950s photographic look, showed scenes from unnerving viewpoints and demonstrated strict adherence to the setting sun as source of light, casting much of the interior scenes into dusky darkness.
Suspense is also high in 1990 Medalist, Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China (1989), by Ed Young, in which three little girls are threatened by a wolf whose ominous presence shows up in the landscape, in a blanket, in shadows and in a tree. Nothing is at it seems in this picture book, prompting new ways to look at pictures in this remarkable tour de force.
The 1991 Medalist, Black and White (1990) by David Macaulay also asks much of the audience with his nonlinear storytelling puzzle of four stories coming together about a family, some cows, an escaped convict, a commuter train and newspapers. On the title page is this: “WARNING this book appears to contain a number of stories that do not necessarily occur at the same time. Then again, it may contain only one story. In any event, careful inspection of both words and pictures is recommended.”
David Wiesner’s significant contribution to children’s fantasy literature is the art of wordless storytelling, as in 1992 Medalist, Tuesday (1991), in which the only words are those that tell the time of night. He has said he considers himself an author who writes with pictures, in which he creates alternate realities with engaging viewpoints, an ever-evolving variety of page designs and abundance of precise details that render the other-worldly compositions entirely believable.
The last half of the 20th century gave us such distinguished and innovative picture books to cherish for a lifetime. Into the first two decades of the 21st century, illustrators continued with the complicated task that challenged the norm in art and/or design.
21st century innovative illustrators
Caldecott artists below awaken in us appreciation for unusual and intriguing breaks with tradition. As Carson Ellis said in an interview: “I guess the illustrator’s role is to always provide a visual counterpart to something non-visual…to enhance that experience in some way—to make it a little more complex… I see a lot of daring, absurd, wonderful, totally singular books being made now that maybe couldn’t have been made fifteen years ago. It gives me so much heart!”
Picture books in this article are intended for audiences of preschoolers through age 8 unless specified for ages 9 through 14. Other articles on this blog have reviews of additional 21st century Caldecotts that also deserve attention and in a few instances, reference will be made to another title by an illustrator that is considered as distinguished as the title chosen by a Caldecott Committee.
The following eighteen Award-winning titles stand out as “most distinguished” because their illustrators’ innovations are creative, often outrageous, uses of the artistic elements and/or book and page design. These books demonstrate a desire and ability on the illustrators’ part to portray the picture book as a flexible and many-faceted art form. To facilitate bibliographic searches, titles are listed by the year published (add one year to a publication date to determine the year of an award).
1999 Molly Bang (American,–), Author and Illustrator. When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry, Blue Sky Press, 31 pp, 9.2” x 10.5”
(Distinguished uses of color) In her 2000 Honor Book, Bang floods her pages with red and orange in a demonstration of how ugly anger can be. When Sophie is told to share a toy with her sister, she kicks and screams and “wants to smash the world to smithereens.” She becomes “a volcano, ready to explode” and her tantrum bursts off the pages in “a red red ROAR”—and the illustrations are anything but pretty. When she goes for a walk outside to sit in her favorite tree, cool colors bathe every scene as “the wide world comforts her.” Bang wrote about the book: “It was interesting to notice how angry I felt while I was making the angry red and orange pictures, and how much calmer I felt when I was painting with blues and greens.”
Bold thick outlines give figures in the book a very solid look, until Sophie’s anger shatters everything and the chaos is barely contained on the pages. During her meltdown, she is on the left page outlined in red, and her rage is expressed on the right also in red—“Smash!”, “ROAR!”, “Explode!” As Bang explains in Picture This: How Pictures Work (1991) making intelligent color choices requires an understanding that, just as reading goes from left to right, so does the eye in a double page spread tend to go from left page to right page, especially “when two or more objects in the same picture have the same color. We associate the objects with each other. The meaning and emotion we impart to this association depend on context, but the association is immediate and strong. For instance, red goes with red.” Looking closely, when Sophie sits calmly in her tree, blue goes with blue and green with green.
Bang published sequels about Sophie with equal power, When Sophie’s Feelings Are Really, Really Hurt (2015) and When Sophie Thinks She Can’t…(2018).
2001 David Wiesner (American, 1956-), Author and Illustrator. The Three Pigs, Clarion Books, 40pp, 11.2” x 9”
(Distinguished uses of page/book design) Wiesner’s 2002 Medalist, The Three Pigs, starts out formally—with the original tale constrained tightly within white margins—before the illustrations become free-floating as pigs escape to explore across double page spreads that defy the spaces they are supposed to inhabit. The pigs fold a page into a paper airplane, go exploring other stories, and pick up the Cat and the Fiddle and a mighty Dragon along the way. In this freewheeling visual narrative that turns traditional storytelling on its head, the pigs change appearance according to which story they’ve slipped into and their thoughts and dialogue are sometimes in speech balloons directed off the page to the audience itself.
Such a wealth of storytelling devices is evidence of Wiesner’s consummate craftsmanship in his wordless and near-wordless picture books. The prescient Wiesner, known internationally for his phenomenal fantasies, had already firmly planted his feet in the 21st century with work he began in the 20the century, including his 1989 Honor Book, Free Fall (1988)—in which he introduced his pigs, his 1992 Medalist, Tuesday (1991)—in which pigs flew on their own steam at the end, and his 2000 Honor Book, Sector 7 (1999)—in which clouds were shaped like an octopus and many kinds of fish. Wiesner also received a 2007 Honor Book for Flotsam (2006)—in which the octopus lives comfortably in the ocean—and a 2014 Honor Book for Mr. Wuffles! (2013).
2002 Eric Rohmann (American, -), Author and Illustrator. My Friend Rabbit, Roaring Brook Press, 32pp, 8” x 11”
(Distinguished uses of shape and space) Rohmann tickles funny bones in his 2003 Medalist primarily with his outsized proportions for characters within an insufficiently small, horizontal rectangular book. The author/illustrator simply needs more space for his illustrations. How easy it would have been for him to shrink his big animals down to the size of the page—or as one observer asked (tongue in cheek), maybe just make a larger book?
The obvious discomfiture of the elephant and rhino is not simply that Rabbit is stacking one on top of the other but that Rohmann has made them so large that they do not have enough room to fit in the field of action. His black borders squeeze both enormous beasts into the pictures until finally, when the illustrator adds even more creatures, he turns the book sideways into a double page vertical spread to make enough room for them to stack on top of each other. Now they all fit to form a tower up to the tree limb where Mouse’s toy airplane is stuck, but they immediately come crashing down, once again with not enough space in the horizontal double page spread for all of them splayed across the ground. The pictures simply would not be nearly as funny if everyone fit on the pages.
The story might end with the last of the super-crowded illustrations, “The animals were not happy,” in which all of them scrunch onto the double page spread to gather around a chagrinned Rabbit. However, a second pleasant choice by the author/illustrator is the next page leading to his story’s better ending. Mouse swoops down in his plane to rescue Rabbit from their angry friends, saying, “But Rabbit means well. And he is my friend,” as shown on the back cover. Rohmann was awarded a 1995 Honor Book for Time Flies (1994). The author/illustrator’s The Cinder-Eyed Cats (1997) pays homage to Sendak’s Max with a double page spread of a boy in a boat bidding farewell to his friends on their magical island.
2003 Margaret Chodos-Irvine (American, -), Author and Illustrator. Ella Sarah Gets Dressed, Houghton Mifflin, 40pp, 9.8” x 9.4”
(Distinguished uses of color, shape and implied texture) The focus in this 2004 Honor Book stays on the shape of Ella Sarah throughout, never on faceless family members who are naysayers about her wayward wardrobe choices. The illustrator studied dance seriously when she was young and has said she tries to choreograph the figures in her compositions, “to make them appear to move…to communicate the movement, emotion and beauty of dance…Then there is my love of fabrics and crafts. I enjoy ‘making’ the clothes for the children in my books…Color, pattern and texture—the qualities that I enjoy in textiles—are dominant elements in my art.” The double page spread in which Ella Sarah’s clothes are scattered around her room is a stunning display for shades and tints of hues on the color wheel.
The sharpness and brilliance of innovative patterns, vivid colors and uniquely textured imagery were achieved by the use of various printmaking techniques, such as screen prints and linoleum block prints, which were inked with colors and separately printed using an etching press to build the images up gradually from flat layers of color. Final details were added with stencils. Chodos-Irvine carved her linoleum blocks so that colors were deliberately off-register when printed, leaving white outlines around figures to highlight them perfectly against bold backgrounds. Not a single misstep can be found in this intricate technique.
2004 Mo Willems (American, 1968-), Author and Illustrator. Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, Hyperion, 40pp, 9.2” x 13.5”
(Distinguished uses of space) Willems incorporates enhanced digital photographs of street scenes for backgrounds in his 2005 Honor Book, the first of his three Knuffle Bunny books. The author/illustrator wrote about his Brooklyn brownstones and laundromat: “"Each photograph was taken using a shot list that matched preliminary sketches of the layout of the book. The photos are heavily doctored in Photoshop software (in which) sundry air conditioners, garbage cans, street trash and industrial debris were expunged…in addition to changing the photos to their sepia tone.”
Willems then layered his own comic book art and speech balloons for Trixie and her father into the photographs, often extending outside the field of action onto green margins where text is informally scattered above, below or to the side. He explained: “The sketches were made by hand, then colored and shaded in Photoshop and placed into the photographic collages, also using Photoshop.” The resulting page design is a “melding of hand-drawn ink sketches and photography” that is uniquely suited to this story—i.e., portrayal of a toddler’s “boneless” meltdown over a lost toy is, quite honestly, funnier when it is happening to someone else and in a cartoon, but the realism of the photos reminds the audience how true to life such an event can be. The illustrations are particularly intriguing when the sketches are actually created to interact with the photography, as in scenes in which the cartoon of Trixie’s dad is rummaging in and around photographed washing machines to find the lost toy. See also Article 4 for 2004 Honor Book Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus! (2003).
2009 Jerry Pinkney (American, 1939-), Illustrator. The Lion and the Mouse, by Aesop, Little Brown, 40pp, 9.8” x 11.4”
(Distinguished uses for shape and page/book design) For the wordless fable, 2010 Medalist The Lion and the Mouse, Pinkney explained his idea “of selectively using animal sounds to gently enhance the story, while allowing the visuals—as well as the reader’s imagination—to drive the narrative.” His incomparable visuals bleed off the pages and Lion, when he is agitated, fairly explodes outside the field of action. Pinkney additionally imbues Lion with human emotions, catching him in unguarded moments when his expressions are delightful—even when it is a roar of rage as he’s caught in the poachers’ net—while elsewhere, his eyes express surprise, suspicion, curiosity and finally complacency when Mouse sits on his back. The two characters look so real they beg to be touched.
Pinkney goes above and beyond in a couple of ways to use every feature in a picture book’s design. First, for the exterior of the book, the front of the dust jacket shows an apprehensive Lion staring offstage left to the back of the jacket where Mouse sits, staring back. The front of the hardbound cover, however, has images of both of them, Lion staring right over at Mouse, again with a hint of trepidation. And the back of the cover has the similar humorous intent as animals in the African Serengeti stare wide-eyed at the audience with obvious bemusement.
Second, in the front matter, endpapers offer another scene of animals—the lion family, pair of ostriches, parade of elephants, herd of giraffes and zeal of zebras. After the title page, on which Mouse is introduced sitting in one of Lion’s enormous pawprint, Pinkney gives a reason why the panicked little gal ran into the big guy in the first place—an owl has come screeching down for her—and on the single last page, the illustrator shows where Mouse runs off to at the end of the tale—to tend to her nest of babies. In the back of the book, endpapers show Lion and his family on the move with Mouse and her family hitching a ride.
After half a century, Pinkney has become a beloved master of representational shapes in picture books, and he always brings to his art something new and different. He constantly reinvents himself and his approach, creating a library of a dozen fables and fairy tales since 2000 alone. An illustrator of over sixty books, he has been awarded five Honor Books for Mirandy and Brother Wind (1988) written by Patricia McKissack, The Talking Eggs: A Folktale from the American South (1989), written by Robert San Souci; John Henry, written by Julius Lester (1994); The Ugly Duckling (1999) and Noah’s Ark (2002).
2010 Erin E. Stead (American, 1982-), Illustrator. A Sick Day for Amos McGee, written by Philip C. Stead, Roaring Brook Press, 32pp, 9.6” x 8.8”
(Distinguished uses of line) Stead’s 2011 Medalist is a gentle, heartwarming lapbook that is a good read for any sick youngster who ever stayed home from school. Stead’s characters and objects are softly washed in tints of blue, pink or green (accomplished with wood block printing), while others in the same scene are supple black drawings on white pages. Such simple line drawings of figures in uncomplicated, familiar scenes can often be the most satisfying picture book art for the very young.
The illustrator’s talent with her pencil resulted in drawings that invite closer scrutiny for details the text never mentions. For instance, nowhere does the text state that Amos McGee is old. Yet, there he is, an octogenarian, getting ready for work with sweet smiles of utter contentment that the illustrator never changes (except later, when he has a pinkish nose from sneezing). He does not live alone; a mouse and a toy bear are shown to keep him company.
Illustrations that follow reveal more: Amos’ little house is squeezed between two high-rises…at the end of his city bus ride, a red balloon has drifted out the door of the bus into the Zoo…the balloon is seen later tagging along with an elephant, a rhino, a tortoise, a penguin, an owl and the tiniest of birds leaving through the Zoo’s gate to find out what has happened to their friend. In the exact middle of the book, two wordless double page spreads show the animals waiting for the bus and then sitting inside (the bird is on top) behind the bus driver, whose unperturbed expression gives the impression these friends might have pulled off such a well-intentioned, well-mannered and well-executed escape before.
The second half of the story has details that are enlightening as well. At Amos’ house, the only scene funnier than the elephant holding playing cards (on the cover) is Amos himself beneath his blanket playing hide-and-seek with the tortoise. He doesn’t have on his bunny slippers and has some of the best toes ever drawn. On the wordless last single page, the only detail dearer than Amos sharing his blanket with the rhino is the red balloon flying freely in the night sky outside the window. As Stead knows and shows so well, visual storytelling is all about the details. She also illustrated Bear Has a Story to Tell (2012) and Music for Mister Moon (2019), also written by Philip C. Stead. The husband and wife teamed up again for Amos McGee Misses the Bus (2021), in which Amos stays up all night planning an outing for his friends and is late for work.
2011 Lane Smith (American, 1959-), Author and Illustrator. Grandpa Green, Roaring Brook Press, 32 pp, 8.5” x 11.2
(Distinguished uses of line and color) Smith was awarded a 2012 Honor Book for what could be called a green-and-white book as well as a black-and-white one. On the same pages, his paintings show the green grandeur of Grandpa Green’s topiary garden while simultaneously illustrating in black ink the activities of Grandpa and his grandson. On the copyright page, Smith even calls attention to the differences in media he used for the two parts of his illustrations— the black-and-white “characters” were done in brush and ink while green “foliage” was accomplished with watercolor, oil paint and digital paint.
The delicate line drawings on every page convey the story of the boy helping his great-grandfather in the garden. The exquisitely shaped greenery represents the old man’s life, with chicken pox, a world war, marriage, kids and grandkids and the great-grandkid, who is the one picking up after him and narrating the story. What is surely one of the most amusing set of figures in the garden is a group from The Wizard of Oz—Lion, Wicked Witch, Toto and the Tin Woodman. The boy himself is posed as topiary of Saint George facing the Dragon in a panoramic foldout page. On the single last page, the boy is shown shaping a bust of his Grandpa into a work of topiary art.
Smith included bits of yellow or red to accent romantic details such as a soft flower or a bow ribbon or a heart or even for the violent explosions Grandpa remembers from the war. However, for the text, “Now he’s pretty old,” the illustrator’s double page spread of the boy swinging from a limb of an enormous gnarly old tree is an eloquent symbol of the love and trust between this great-grandkid and his Grandpa Green.
After Smith’s illustrations in 1993 Caldecott Honor Book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992), his hues became more and more muted, only occasionally bursting into color as in A House That Once Was (2018) by Julie Fogliano.
2012 Pamela Zagarenski (American, n.d.), Illustrator. Sleep Like a Tiger, written by Mary Logue, Houghton Mifflin, 40 pp, 11” x 9”
(Distinguished uses of color and shape) In her 2013 Honor Book, Zagarenski applied her own philosophy of illustration—“There are never any rules, rights, or wrongs in imagining—imagining just is.” The artist has her own fanciful ways of dream-world imagining in her stunning mixed-media paintings on wood that have odd, charming details—(1) inexplicably, everyone gets to wear a crown, (2) likewise, tiny bicycle wheels propel almost everything, including people’s shoes (3) triangle pennants are strung overhead like someone just had a party and finally, (4) a small coffee pot appears just about everywhere.
Intriguing as all this whimsy certainly is, Zagaranski’s color choices and expressive shapes are what her rich, sumptuous art is really about. At first, a triad harmony of red, yellow and blue attract the eye on page after page but as sleep begins to come, the calming effect of greens, darker blues, brown and subdued rusty red or pink enter into the little girl’s dreaming. The sun is seldom in its formal position as source of illumination; instead, a symbolic golden orb appears everywhere, until the gray moon rises.
Human family members are simplifications of organic shapes, with sinuous lines, very little contouring and flat, shallow depth. These form asymmetrical balance, first with structured, geometric shapes in the girl’s room and then, in her dream-world, for more modeling and textural detail of animals in their habitats. Book design is lovely with its wraparound cover and the endpapers, which set the scene at front for daytime and at the end for nighttime.
To make her complex paintings, Zagarenski uses acrylics like water colors, layering them sometimes thirty to forty times to get just the right effect with hints of motifs and faded details beneath thick brushwork. She uses collage papers and computer applications to add textures and patterns for walls and clothes.
2013 Molly Idle (American, -), Author and Illustrator. Flora and the Flamingo, Chronicle Books, 44pp, 8.5” x 10.4”
(Distinguished uses of implied motion and page/book design) The quandary at the beginning of this wordless, mechanical 2014 Honor Book is whether a short little girl can hold a pose as beautifully as a tall thin flamingo. Flora is confident because her bathing suit is as pink as the flamingo and her swimmers’ fins are, at least to her way of thinking, just like the flamingo’s flat, webbed feet. Her first mistake, however, is immediately trying to dance like the flamingo begins to do. Idle deliberately places an uneasy Flora at the gutter, but she manages to join the flamingo on the opposite page. However, in a continuous narrative, she takes a tumble back to the right page. The flamingo joins her, they begin to dance in earnest and what a glorious duo dance it is—up, up into the air, together in perfect harmony.
Starting on the title page, the double page spreads are backlit by a white background, empty except for pale hints of pink flowers and water. Focus is entirely on the incredibly elegant beauty of the two dancers once they finally get in step. Idle’s career as an animator at Dreamworks is evident as she endows the flamingo with postures, gestures and facial expressions that are almost as human as Flora’s. As in any true friendship, the flamingo learns as much from his little partner as Flora learns from the big bird.
To add implied motion, Idle incorporates flaps that lift to reveal other poses underneath. When a flap is lifted quickly up and down—similar to the way a flip book works—the pictures simulate movement, animating the scene and making the lift-the-flap feature a legitimate addition to a story about dancing. Idle ends the book with a panorama, as pages are flipped back in a gatefold to reveal the two unlikely friends crashing joyfully down into the pool. To finish this superb page design is the double page spread as finale, showing the dancers bowing on the left and dedication and copyright information placed unobtrusively on the right. Idle has created five more wordless books in her series, Flora and Her Feathered Friends.
2013 Aaron Becker (American,-), author and illustrator. Journey, Candlewick, 2013, 40pp, 9.75” x 11”
2014 Jon Klassen (Canadian, -), Illustrator. Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett, Candlewick, 40pp, 8.1” x 10.9”
(Distinguished uses of line and value) If one reads only Barnett’s text in this 2015 Honor Book, the thought might be that not much is going on in the story. However, the author’s wry understatements are exactly what lend so much humor to Klassen’s visuals that accompany the words. The text does not mention a dog, big diamonds or a bone, all of which end up driving the story. In fact, since the audience sees the tale unfold without help from the narration, the title could be considered a near-wordless picture book, with only one sentence at the beginning—“We won’t stop digging until we find something spectacular”—and only one sentence at the end—“That was pretty spectacular.” That is what the whole book is about—having a spectacular experience, even if the experience is not the one you planned with all your shovels and big boots and snacks.
Reliance on visible directional lines is dramatically evident in Klassen’s illustrations. A strong horizontal baseline from the frontispiece illustration through the next half dozen scenes keeps the boys and their dog firmly anchored in their own front yard. On the title page, firm vertical lines in the figures of Sam and Dave draw attention, along with five vertical fixtures in their environment—which are attractive against a white background but are purely ornamental, or so we think: the boys’ house, a chicken weathervane, red pot plant, cat with pink collar and small apple tree. These figures can be compared with the same – but not really the same – figures in the double page spread at the end.
Over the next several pages, the horizontal baseline begins to rise as the boys dig their straight vertical shaft into the earth, until finally they and the audience are totally underground. The boys change from digging a vertical shaft to a horizontal one, then they split up to dig diagonal ones, dig diagonally the other way, continue with another horizontal shaft and finally another vertical one, before falling asleep in the deep hole they have made.
The oppressive darkness of the double page spread, with the strong vertical shaft of light shining down on the sleeping boys, is a pivotal scene in the story. When the page is turned to the stark contrast of a blinding white double page, the image of the shaft in the darkness on the previous page remains as an afterimage—but are the boys still underground? They fall with the dog down the center of the page as if in the shaft but after a couple of pages, we see that they are home again. No shaft. No hole.
A time-worn plot construction in fantastic fiction is that when a hero goes to sleep, what happens next is a dream. So it might be said that when the dog digs for the bone, the earth opens up, the boys fall down, down, down, only to land in their own front yard, where no hole is evident in the solid horizontal baseline. The adventure must have been a dream. After all, no piles of dirt were ever excavated and anyway, how could two small boys dig such an elaborate maze in the first place.
However, can two boys have the same dream? Admit that the boys are a lot dirtier than they were before. Plus, the dog has the bone from its subterranean hiding place. And what about those subtle changes in the five aboveground vertical figures that were mentioned at the beginning? Like Dorothy when she returned from Oz, was digging the hole really a dream? Or an alternate universe? The implausibility of the whole adventure and the mysterious joke the illustrator is playing on the audience may have to be pointed out to young children who often think in a literal, linear fashion.
Other Barnett and Klassen titles are The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse (2017) and the minimalist Shapes Trilogy—Triangle (2017), Square (2018) and Circle (2019). Klassen also won a 2013 Honor Book award for the collaborators’ Extra Yarn (2012). Klassen has also created his Hat Trilogy—I Want My Hat Back (2011), 2013 Caldecott Medalist This Is Not My Hat (2012) and We Found a Hat (2016) in addition to The Rock from the Sky (2021).
2016 Carson Ellis (American, 1975-), Author and Illustrator. Du Iz Tak? Candlewick, 48pp, 10.1” x 12.1”
(Distinguished uses of line) Ellis has posed at the beginning of her 2017 Honor Book a triple narrative for the audience to figure out—a female caterpillar is on a mission, some curious insects discover a new plant and the text is in an invented language—all equally important in this ingenious multi-faceted tour de force. All her figures are backlit on a white background of negative space. The illustrator explains, “I don’t like making cluttered compositions. I want things to feel airy and spacious, not busy. I don’t want elements of the composition to compete.”
The entire plot unfolds on a firm, unwavering horizontal baseline that leads the audience from page to page. Drawn lines in ink and painted line effects in gouache form rounded shapes for the gentle figures, such as the cocoon, the moon, the insects themselves, pill bug Icky, Icky’s doorway into the hollow log, smoke rings coming from his wife’s pipe inside and the circular pattern of the plant’s leaves as well as its glorious blossom. Diagonal lines are drawn and painted for figures that bring action onto the stage, like the spider, its web, the bird, the ladder, the wounded plant when it tilts over and the broken limb sticking up from the log, from which some of the action originates. The geometric shapes of the ladder and fort against the organic shape of the plant are hints of discordance to come.
As the enormous bird slices across the page to devour the spider, wreck the fort and cause the weakened plant to fall over, the predator’s visible lines are so strong against white space that they overpower all other figures and structure the entire scene on the diagonal. A similar but more subtle effect occurs in the first two nighttime illustrations, first, in which the cricket plays his violin on the limb of the log and the ladder leans against the plant and, second, as the plant tilts over. In the third night scene, the patient moth finally makes her appearance and her flight against the black sky swoops in circles as well as on a diagonal, up and down, left and right, creating a dynamic structural arrangement.
As winter comes, the scene reverts to emptiness on its horizontal base but with springtime, new plants sprout and a new bug arrives, hinting at a new story. The last single page is the copyright page with a vignette of a male caterpillar on the limb, calling “Ta ta!” before he disappears into his cocoon. The incomparable triple narrative is complete.
2016 Javaka Steptoe (American, ), Author and Illustrator. Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Little Brown, 40pp, 9.5” x 11.1”
(Distinguished uses of line and color) Steptoe in his 2017 Medalist was as driven as Basquiat—the young graffiti artist who ultimately achieved world-wide fame for his paintings—to create art that was “not neat or clean and definitely not inside the lines, but somehow still beautiful.” Like Basquiat, in Steptoe’s work some collage with photos and words is evident but mainly the story is told in his original paintings on textured pieces of wood discarded around New York and fitted together to make his canvases. Basquiat himself was a self-taught street artist who painted informal graffiti images on walls and found items throughout the city.
Lines of the wood pieces as they join up often form borders and geometric shapes in the pictures, such as frames for windows and doors; other times, colors are used to shape figures. When the artist’s organic figures cross over these geometric shapes, an unusual style of composition results, creating tension that is striking in its intensity. His framed double page spreads planned in this way are perfectly executed with text formally placed at the bottom.
Steptoe interprets Basquiat’s paintings, designs and motifs to make a resplendent display that, again like Basquiat’s, “is more than just bright colors or intriguing composition or text. It is thoughtful, powerful, and interesting, and like all artwork, it is not something that is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ His art was his voice.”
In illustrating and writing Radiant Child and then writing again about Basquiat in his “Note from Javaka Steptoe”, the illustrator offers not only a look inside the mind of the artist “who went after his dream with all his heart” but also a look inside the mind and heart of the young picture book illustrator himself. As Steptoe explained about Basquiat, “The traditional art world was looking for something new, modern, and connected to street culture, and Basquiat arrived at the perfect time.” The same can be said about Steptoe and Radiant Child in the 21st century world of picture books.
2017 Matthew Cordell (American, ), Author and Illustrator. Wolf in the Snow, Feiwel & Friends, 48pp, 9.9” x 8.7”
(Distinguished uses of shape) Cordell in his 2018 Medalist has a wraparound dust jacket, a front hardbound cover of five scenes showing the human family and a back cover with five scenes showing the wolf pack. The story starts before the title page with a three double page sequence as the girl goes off to school before the snowstorm. A combination of sequential vignettes combine with single and double page spreads that bleed off the pages. The only words in the book are the onomatopoeia of animal noises and a few solitary action verbs splashed across illustrations. With each turn of the page, this picture book has exciting new artistic surprises for art and design.
Cordell demonstrates a stunning new departure for the element of shape. Seen at the beginning is a little girl with face, arms and legs sticking out from the triangular shape of a hooded red coat, but by the middle of the book, the child has become an abstraction within the simplified red triangle, trudging in a storm all alone, vulnerable but brave, weak but still determined, persevering as best she can and in need of help. With a spare but animated drawing style in the endless expanse of white, Cordell captures the brutality of a great wintery northland that threatens both the child and the wolf cub she finds.
The illustrator studied extensively about wolves and wolf behavior before he began to draw. He represents the adults as menacing at first but after the mother gets her cub back, the pack becomes protective as it circles the freezing girl and begins to howl, alerting the family’s dog. The author/illustrator has explained in his 2019 Caldecott Acceptance Speech, “I hadn’t ever thought much about wolves before. They were kind of creepy and dark and vicious. Or so I thought. So I drew some more wolves. And I liked doing it. So I drew some more wolves. Then I drew a wolf and a girl. This drawing was very minimal, but very dramatic. The girl and wolf were standing in a white, snow-covered field, facing each other, close in proximity. The wolf was solid black and mysterious. The girl was in a bright-red, triangle-shaped coat, also mysterious. I liked the graphic quality of the red, the white, and the black. I stepped away from drawing and read about wolves. I learned about wolves. And what I learned was that much of what I thought about wolves was wrong. The truth is, wolves want much of the same basic things that humans want. Family. Companionship. Safety. Survival. But because of misinformed ideas, people distrust wolves. And we hurt them for it. Wolves distrust people. And they fear us for it. All of it is wrong. But on it goes.
“Suddenly, the story I was searching for between the girl and the wolf presented itself. A story of fear and misperception, yes. But one that ultimately leads to kindness and redemption. These are unfortunate, ugly times we are living in. But it needn’t be that way. It can be better. We can all do better. We have to open our ears and eyes and hearts to the people and things we don’t know or understand. If we stop listening and seeing and learning, we will surely miss opportunities to bridge our differences.”
The minimalistic shape of the fallen girl is so dramatically eloquent, and the watercolors of red coat, bluish-white snow contrasted with pen and ink drawings of the black wolves are so mysterious that one’s heart reaches out to help the child just as she had reached out to help the cub. However, the wolves are the ones to save the red-coated girl, the story of Red-Riding Hood in reverse because in this picture book humans and wolves help each other, despite their differences.
2018 Oge Mora, (American, -), Author and Illustrator. THANK YOU, OMU!, Little Brown, 40 pp, 9.4” x 11.4”
(Distinguished uses of shape) Mora’s warm and mellow cut-paper collages come to life as each character’s sweet face appears at Omu’s (“Grandma’s”) door after catching a whiff of her thick red stew in a big fat pot. The 2019 Honor Book reads like a folktale similar to “Stone Soup,” but Mora’s original story came from strong female role models in her life. The author uses repetition to pattern events into a familiar type of cause-and-effect story, using large cut-paper lettering to emphasize the “KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!” each time at Omu’s door and then the large “THANK YOU, OMU!” each time a bowl of stew is offered.
The story is foretold in the front endpapers, which portray a bird’s-eye view of a city neighborhood rendered in cut-out paper blocks, with sinuous paper that is shaped like a ribbon representing the wafting scent of the stew as it leaves Omu’s pot in her window and extends across the scene. To start the story, on the title page is a double-page spread in which the illustrator takes a step back to show Omu in a street scene, heading home earlier with her ingredients from the market. On the first double-page spread with text, a handsome cut-out of a contented Omu, smiling as she cooks, is accompanied by the organic, wandering shape of the scent that will continue as a lovely winding line from page to page until the pot and its yummy smell are gone.
For every character—be it hot dog vendor, construction worker, baker or female police officer and lady mayor—Mora demonstrates her adroit ability with cut paper art to create bold, expressive, diverse individuals in a variety of skin tones with sensitive finesse. The vibrant collages were created with acrylic paint, china markers, pastels, patterned paper and clippings from books, newspapers and maps. “I really love that I could combine Nigerian and American traditions and create a book that exists in a third space like I myself do… I have a lot of influences! Jacob Lawrence, Aminah Robinson, Faith Ringgold, Sophie Blackall, Melissa Sweet, Ekua Holmes, and of course Ezra Jack Keats. This list can go on and on…I really love that I could combine Nigerian and American traditions and create a book that exists in a third space like I myself do….Collage wise, I always start with a mood board and work on multiple collages at the same time. I like to place everything unglued and then shift things around over some weeks…I organize my paper scraps by color in a system of drawers, and I never throw scraps away.”
2018 Grace Lin (American, -), Author and Illustrator. A Big Mooncake for Little Star, Little Brown, 40pp, 8.9” x 11.4”
(Distinguished uses of color and page/book design) Lin uses the features of page and book design to their full potential in her 2019 Honor Book, starting with the front dust jacket with its bold, bright yellow Mooncake on the black background that is used throughout the book. Front and back hardback covers have different art that shows twelve phases of the moon as Little Star nibbles away at the Mooncake. Front and back endpapers portray an identical kitchen scene since, at the end of the story, Mama starts over to make another Mooncake after Little Star has eaten the first one.
After the kitchen scene, almost every double page spread focuses on just two images: Little Star in her pajamas covered with bright yellow stars balanced with the brilliant golden Mooncake, resulting in a sharp, straightforward contrast on the shiny black paper throughout the book. The result is that Lin’s vibrant gouache paintings of child, mother and moon appear to jump off the pages—floating without a baseline on the negative space of the background— and Little Star’s black pajamas often meld with the black space itself. Even bits of the Mooncake turn into a delicate “trail of twinkling crumbs.”
Text placement is informal and perfectly shaped to fit within the field of action. Lin has written: “There are many inspirations for this book, but the one that began it was when my daughter was three and we celebrated the Moon Festival for the first time. The Moon Festival is an important Asian holiday—kind of like Thanksgiving here in the U.S.—but the way you celebrate it is by eating mooncakes and telling stories about the moon…Hazel said some mooncakes were just like the real moon, and the seed of an idea just kind of popped into my head.”
The illustrator has explained in her Vimeo Book Chat that the endpapers are an homage to Blueberries for Sal (1948), which “sums up the Americana she wanted to be a part of.” “Since Robert McCloskey had centered his daughter as the All American Girl, I used my own daughter, trying to do the same. So you will see a lot of nods to Blueberries in my book: the bowl of blueberries, the polka dotted towel like McCloskey’s curtains, the mother and baby bear toys on the shelf (that are actually the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor constellations). Also lots of constellation references are hidden in the illustration—the spilled milk making the Milky Way, “Orion” flour, the Big and Little Dipper, the Seven Chinese Sisters book (2003) because of the seven star constellations. In Mooncake, I’m using my art to claim my American birthright.” In A Big Bed for Little Snow (2019), Lin changed to a white background for another bedtime story of mother and child and included cameo appearances of Little Star as well as Peter from the Caldecott-winning classic, The Snowy Day.
2019 Rudy Gutierrez (American, ), Illustrator. Double Bass Blues by Andrea J. Loney, Knopf, 32pp, 10.2” x 10.4”
(Distinguished uses of color) In his 2020 Honor Book, Gutierrez uses pulsating, gyrating swoops of primary, secondary and tertiary colors that explode on the pages along with sound words that swoop across the double-page spreads and make the audience want to “clap-clap-clap” or get up and dance. His color contrasts and shades produce an extravagant “jazz symphony” of hues that form his shapes.
When little Nic improvises on his “bull fiddle” at his granddaddy’s jam session, the colors are the rhythms and tempos of street sounds the boy has heard on his laborious journey (much like the blaring taxi horns and chugging train George Gershwin incorporated in “An American in Paris”).
Gutierrez offers an extraordinary vision not only of what joyful improvisation sounds like but also what it looks like and even feels like to Little Nic. The artist also illustrated what love looks like in Mama and Me (2011) and Papa and Me (2014), both by Arthur Dorros.
Ordering Bibliography
Aesop. The Lion and the Mouse, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Little Brown, 2009,
ISBN-10: 0316013560, ISBN-13: 978-0316013567
Bang, Molly. When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry, Blue Sky Press,1999,
ISBN-10: 0590189794, ISBN-13: 978-0590189798
Barnett, Mac. Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, illustrated by Jon Klassen, Candlewick, 2014,
ISBN-10: 0763662291, ISBN-13: 978-0763662295
Becker, Aaron. Journey, Candlewick, 2013, ISBN-10: 0763660531, ISBN-13: 978-0763660536
Chodos-Irvine, Margaret. Ella Sarah Gets Dressed, Houghton Mifflin, 2003,
ISBN-10: 9780152164133, ISBN-13: 978-0152164133, ASIN: 0152164138
Cordell, Matthew. Wolf in the Snow, Feiwel & Friends, 2017,
ISBN-10: 1250076366, ISBN-13: 978-1250076366
Ellis, Carson. Du Iz Tak? Candlewick, 2016, ISBN-10: 0763665304, ISBN-13: 978-0763665302
Idle, Molly. Flora and the Flamingo, Chronicle Books, 2013, ISBN-10: 1452110069,
ISBN-13: 978-1452110066
Lin, Grace. A Big Mooncake for Little Star, Little Brown, 2018, ISBN-l10: 9780316404488,
ISBN-13:978-0316404488, ASIN: 0316404489
Logue, Mary. Sleep Like a Tiger, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski, Houghton Mifflin, 2012,
ISBN-10: 0547641028, ISBN-13:978-0547641027
Loney, Andrea J. Double Bass Blues, illustrated by Rudy Guitierrez, Knopf, 2019,
ISBN-10:1524718521, ISBN-13: 978-1524718527
Mora, Oge. THANK YOU, OMU!, Little Brown, 2018,
ISBN-10: 0316431249, ISBN-13: 978-0316431248
Rohmann, Eric. My Friend Rabbit, Roaring Brook Press, 2002, ISBN-10: 1435233298,
ISBN-13: 978-1435233294
Smith, Lane. Grandpa Green, Roaring Brook Press, 2011, ISBN-10: 1596436077,
ISBN-13: 978-1596436077
Stead, Philip C. A Sick Day for Amos McGee, illustrated by Erin E. Stead, Roaring Brook Press, 2010,
ISBN-10: 1596434023, ISBN-13: 978-1596434028
Steptoe, Javaka. Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Little Brown, 2016,
ISBN-10: 9780316213882, ISBN-13: 978-0316213882, ASIN: 0316213888
Wiesner, David. The Three Pigs, Clarion Books, 2001,
ISBN-10: 0618007016,ISBN-13: 978-0618007011
Willems, Mo. Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, Hyperion, 2004,
ISBN-10: 9780786818709, ISBN-13: 978-0786818709, ASIN: 0786818700
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