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Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Meet Johanna Wright, illustrator of THIS POEM IS A NEST

 

O frabjous day! Today marks the release of THIS POEM IS A NEST... and my day on the blog tour. Yay! So many thanks to these generous bloggers! Mwah!

Friday 9/25  Kirby Larson blog
A Word Edgewise/Linda Mitchell

Monday 9/28 Reflections on the Teche/Margaret Simon 

Tuesday 9/29  Live Your Poem/Irene Latham

Wednesday 9/30  Laura Shovan blog

Friday 10/2  Poetry for Children/Sylvia Vardell

Saturday 10/3  Smack Dab in the Middle 

Monday 10/5  TeacherDance

Friday 10/9  More Art 4 All/Michelle Kogan 

To celebrate properly, I'm delighted to welcome the illustrator Johanna Wright to Live Your Poem. Fun fact: Johanna and I are studio sibs! We share agent Rosemary Stimola. :)

Johanna's sense of whimsy and heart was the perfect match for these poems, and I couldn't be happier to share this book with her.... and her process is pretty amazing! Welcome, Johanna!

The delicious:


JW:
This book was incredibly delicious to illustrate. I felt like I had the freedom to explore and examine the poems in a way that felt a bit deeper to me than books I’ve worked on in the past. This was especially true in my favorite section of the book, Only Human. I loved diving deeper into the imagery and emotions of those poems. And I loved how each spread, each poem could have entirely new characters, settings and stories within them. There was so much freedom in that, as an illustrator.  

 

The Difficult:
JW: I think the other side of having so much freedom, created some challenges too.  I had to create my own parameters while feeling into what it meant to illustrate some complex concepts. I used the nature theme as a guide for the illustrations, along with some fantastical imagery like unicorns and mermaids. This helped to create some limits, which actually freed me up even more!

 


The unexpected:


 JW: I wanted to take some of these illustrations a bit deeper than their surface meaning and I learned a lot about myself and found new ways of working in the process. Because so many of the poems were wide open to interpretation, I learned to use my own feelings and intuition more consciously as a creative guide. 

 

Anything else: 

 JW: The concept for this book is so unique and Irene’s talent for finding nestling poems is really remarkable. I loved working on this project and I’m so proud of this special book! 

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A thousand thank-yous, Johanna! Truly, it's an honor to share this book with you.



And now, readers, you are in for a treat! Please enjoy this video Johanna created that features her talking about her process on top of some time lapse videos of the NEST artwork being created. Beautiful!



2 comments:

  1. Irene, Congratulations to you and Johanna. Your collaboration has produced a marvelous new book into the kidlit world. Nest-building, nestlings are creative thoughts that are illustrated in such a whimsical, inviting way.

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  2. What a treat! First Congratulations to BOTH of you and the whole team who made this book happen.... just gorgeous, words and art. Thank you, Johanna, for the sneak peek into your process - loved it! Happy Flying to this new creation!

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