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DiCamillo |
It's been 15 years since two-time Newbery Medal–winner Kate DiCamillo's first novel, Because of Winn-Dixie, was published to widespread acclaim (earning a Newbery Honor), and Candlewick Press is celebrating by giving her five backlist trade paperbacks a unified look. The new editions will be available in December.
"We wanted to refresh and reinvigorate the look for each cover," said Candlewick creative director Chris Paul, "and to tie them together through the treatment of her name." Each of DiCamillo's novels has light and dark, Paul noted, and the animals at the center of each book provide visual continuity, along with the consistent type treatment of the author's name.
At the same time Candlewick was creating an overall look, it went with a distinct palette for each book: summer green for Winn-Dixie and bluish night tones for The Magician's Elephant. When Chris Paul contacted Yoko Tanaka in 2008 to illustrate The Magician's Elephant, the artist had never illustrated a children's book. "I wasn't sure," Tanaka admitted, "but she told me to read it. I immediately said, 'Yes, I'd love to illustrate it.' It's difficult to explain, but the scenery, the emotions, expressed so simply, quickly, precisely--it all came to my heart." The Japanese-born Tanaka was living in Thailand at the time she accepted the project. "I made it dark and turned down the heat, and put on Mozart--which was perfect for this book," she said.
Tanaka did the sketches quickly, and Paul accepted "almost everything," the artist said. She painted the final illustrations in acrylics, which give the interiors a rich, layered look. The new cover for the trade paperback is brighter and uses more color than the original, and centers on the magician and his elephant, leaving out the bystanders of the original interior painting. "We wanted it lighter in mood and warmer in palette," Paul said.
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Stephen Walton, a British artist who works from his own photographs of life in the wild, is also a first-time artist for the cover of The Tiger Rising. "He's not really a jacket artist, but he's come up with something quite magical here," said Paul. At her direction, Timothy Basil Ering used a royal palette for his revisiting of the cover for the Newbery Medal–winning The Tale of Despereaux. "We wanted a little more excitement and angle, with Despereaux running through the courtyard," Paul said. Similarly, the rabbit hero is larger in the new version of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, "and turned more towards us, so we see a bit more of him and his little red outfit," observed Paul. "It's the same scene; it's the best scene for this story."
E.B. Lewis hadn't read Because of Winn-Dixie before Chris Paul sent it to him with an invitation to re-illustrate the cover. "The story touched me in ways you wouldn't believe," said Lewis. "I had a dog, his name was Harry. My dog Harry reminds me of [Winn-Dixie] so much, it was an opportunity to paint with my heart." Lewis said that Paul asked him to paint the dog standing up, but the artist wanted to portray him seated, the way he remembered his own dog, filled with barely contained energy. "With Harry, when I drove up in my driveway, he would sit like that, and he'd prance [using only] his front feet."
Lewis does not do sketches. "There's something about the immediacy that happens in a sketch that I want to go over into my finished art. If I try to translate that into the final piece, I can't get it." In essence, he "sketches" with his watercolor brush, and if it's not working, he starts over. The white that readers can see in the painting is the bare watercolor paper. "My gift is emotion," Lewis said. That makes him an excellent match to the words that follow. --Jennifer M. Brown