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This week we have a real treat with Ruth Sanderson. If you don’t recognize the name, I am sure you will recognize her art.  Heck, you might even have last year’s Lenox Collector Plate with her artwork or collector’s plates with a Night Before Christmas theme around your house.

I got lost in her website for days, so you might want to stop by her site later when you have some time to browse.  I am going to do the best I can to show off her talents, but they are so many, it is going to be a challenge.

Ruth was born in 1951 in Monson, Massachusetts, where her two favorite place to play were the woods and the library.  In the woods she could imagine magical  creatures living in the tangled underbrush and if she was very, very lucky maybe catch a glimpse of one of them.

At the library. She could identify with characters that were brave and got to do exciting things. One of her treasured possessions was a battered copy of  Grimm’s Fairytales.

She fought over Black Stallion books with her best friend about who was going to be the first to read the next new adventure, when it came into the library.  After reading the stories they would gallop through the woods on their own imaginary stallions.

She decided she wanted a career in art. After spending a year at a liberal arts college where the art courses were all abstract, she transferred to the Paier School of Art, so she could take a combination of traditional drawing and painting courses and commercial courses as well.  Since she really wanted to make a living with art, she decided illustration was the  way to go. The modern fine art scene did not appeal  to her.  The illustrators she admired were Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and  Mark English.

When she graduated in 1974 from  the Paier School of Art in Connecticut, an agent in the children’s field took her on and  soon she was busy doing children’s illustrations.  After five years, she started to do some full-color covers. The books she read as a child, the Black Stallion series and the Nancy Drew  series were being put into paperback for the first time and she got the assignment for 18 covers in each series. She did some black and white picture books and an edition of The Little Engine that Could.

In the early eighties she struck out on her own without an agent and began to do a number of Golden Books and quite a few full color jackets for young adult novels.

She got her ”big break” into the “trade” market with the assignment to illustrate an edition of Heidi  with one hundred full color paintings. Up to this time she had only used fast drying mediums for assignments, such as watercolors, colored  pencils, airbrush and acrylics. Heidi had a one-year  deadline so she decided to paint it in oils, which had always been her  preferred medium. She went on to illustrate The Secret Garden and then her first fairy tale, The Sleeping Beauty, which was retold by Jane Yolen.”

In 1988 Jane introduced  her to Maria Modugno, the children’s book editor at Little, Brown, who expressed an interest in having her do a fairy tale for them, and gave her the opportunity to retell it herself. The Twelve Dancing Princesses took a year and a half of work and was published in 1990.

Rose Red and Snow White  was her next retelling for Little, Brown. She invented a dwarf. This was the first character that she painted in a realistic manner which was invented without reference materials.

Ruth has illustrated 80 books and has written