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Snow – love it or dread it, I think most adults would agree at least that for children there’s something very special about it. And there are also some very special picture books around too. Here, in no particular order, is a small selection of snowy stories set around the … Continue reading ... →

The Snow Leopard
by Jackie Morris
(Frances Lincoln, 2008)

On her fascinating web-page about the process of creating The Snow Leopard (Frances Lincoln, 2008), author and illustrator Jackie Morris says:

Delaram Ghanimifard is the co-founder with her husband Karim Arghandehpour of the exciting Tiny Owl Publishing, which launched its first collection to great acclaim last year. Their catalogue is already bursting with beautiful picture books by … Continue reading ... →

Enter to win a copy of The Wild Swans (Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2015), written and illustrated by Jackie Morris. Giveaway begins October 16, 2015, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends November 15, 2015, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

Jackie Morris lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales, with children, dogs and cats. Her latest book is the retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans.

Dreams of Freedom: In Words and Pictures
edited by Janetta Otter-Barry, designed by Judith Escreet, with a Foreword by Michael Morpurgo
(Amnesty International/Frances Lincoln, 2015)

All royalties donated to Amnesty … Continue reading ... →

Something About a Bear

By Jackie Morris

Jackie Morris and bears; it seems from the jacket flap of this title, that they have wandered through her artistry for many years. Her overarching goal in her picture books appears to be giving young readers a renewed respect for all things wild and wonderful. And bears are both.

Eight interesting bear types are her topic here. Be they the Asian Moon bear, the fierce and huge-clawed Sun bear, the jungle Spectacled bear, the rare, white Black Bear the Chinese Giant Panda or three others, Jackie’s gorgeous paintings brings each bruin to a beautiful intensity of interest.

Each bear is unique in its habitat and habits and your young reader will enjoy poring or shall I say “pawing”, through this great picture book find.

Any of her other titles including “I am Cat”, “The Snowy Leopard” or “Song of the Golden Hare” have given nature’s inhabitants a very distinctive plug for these wild things and where they abide.

She has also written a book called “The Cat and the Fiddle – A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes” that I am anxious to have a look  at.

If your child has an interest in nature or just loves bears, as most kids do, this is a not-to-be-missed read.

She even includes conservation web sites at the conclusion of the book, along with additional information on the habits and habitats of each bear – plus their favorite chow. The Sloth Bear, for instance, nibbles on his snack; a tasty tidbit called termites! Yum! Kids will love the yuck factor here as the bear sucks them down through a gap in his front teeth. Cool!

And I love her closer:

 

“Of all the bears in the wide wild

world, the very best bear of all

is…your bear.”

 

 

Still have mine!

Jackie at a recent book signing.

If you’ve already got a copy of the book you might want to have it to hand whilst you read what she reveals, so you can go back and look at the images with fresh eyes. And if you haven’t already found a place in your home for this piece of art between two covers, … well perhaps this post ought to come with a warning notice. There’s magic in and on the pages of The Ice Bear. Prepare to be charmed and enchanted.

“The Ice Bear began with an image in my mind’s eye. It was an image of a child, kneeling. Around the child there were bears, so that the child looked like the centre of a daisy and the bears were the petals. My job was to work out how to get the child there, and probably more important, how to get him out again. This is what books are about for me, asking and answering questions, and in the process discovering more questions.

The Ice Bear began with a friend, pregnant with her first child. Something went wrong. The baby stopped moving, at full term. He died. She had to deliver a stillborn child. A tragedy for her and the child and her husband. The way people reacted to this was a shock to me. Quick, rush over it, brush over it, hide it under business, do anything but face the pain. (Not Sophie and Jon. They couldn’t rush over it, hide it, they had to face it.) I wanted to do a book about a lost child, about loosing a child. This was a thread that wove into the book. Though few would know if I didn’t say and the book is dedicated to Rhoderic, and Sophie and Jon and also to Katie and Thomas who were born by the time the book came out.

Some of Jackie’s first sketches for The Ice Bear

The Ice Bear began with a wish to do a book about polar bears, and to weave into it transformation and a legend, of the trickster and the shaman.

The Ice Bear began when the flight of a raven began to stitch together ideas with its patterned flight in the Pembrokeshire sky, because all books are like rivers, fed by streams of ideas, coming together.

The book is part of a series of books I have written about animals, each with a cover that is a portrait of the animal, staring out from the book. The covers are strong, almost iconic, and the books are often given shelf space so that the whole cover is seen, rather than being placed spine out on a shelf. I am told by bookshops who put the in the window that they work like a charm to bring people in to the shop, and one shop in Edinburgh said that people often missed their bus as they crossed the road to get a better look at the Snow Leopard when that was in the window. There’s something about eyes looking straight at you that still holds a primitive magic over the wild parts of the human consciousness. When I paint an animal in this way I am not searching for the humanity in the animal. I am searching for the soul, the spirit of the creature.

Some of Jackie’s covers, including her forthcoming ‘Something About a Bear’

Having ‘begun’ with an image the story then builds into a balance of words and images. Picture books are meant to be read aloud. The language needs to taste good in the ear, to look right where it sits on the page. A picture book is like a theatre, each page a stage set for that part of the story and in designing each page I often include parts of the stories that are only in the pictures. Once open I try to keep the words inside the pictures. I want the book to become a world where the pictures and the words tell the story. The composition is thought out right to the corners and often the corners and edges are where the main focus of the story is. (You can see this best in the picture where the child finds his mother bear. The image dominated the page but in the top right hand corner there is the figure of the father, charging in).

I paint on smooth paper, arches hot pressed, beginning with pale washes and then building and building with layers and then smaller details. The paints that I use are Winsor and Newton Artist Quality watercolours, usually tubes, and I use ceramic palettes. I know these colours quite well now after 25 years of working with them. I know when to run wet into wet and how much water to use. Now I use sable brushes. They carry the paint so well and a brush like a series 7, no. 4 will allow a wide wash but also can pull the finest line when handled right. And in the same way that writing is like finding the answers to a series of questions, so too is painting. I am constantly asking myself questions, about composition and colour and line and finding the answers is what makes the book.

In The Ice Bear the mother and the father each have a totem animal. The mother’s is the Arctic fox, and often when it seems that the child is alone on the ice you can see the fox is there somewhere, watching. The father’s is the owl, a fierce sky hunter. The boy’s is the bear and always will be. And raven, the trickster, a character who is perhaps a force for good, perhaps bad. He steals the bear child, but takes him to the hunter and his wife who have longed for a child. And when it is time he leads him back across the ice and joins the bear people with the human people forever. So is she good, or bad?

During the telling of a tale things can change. When I originally wrote The Ice Bear the raven lured the child out over the ice with small shards of sea glass. But I had wanted the book to be set long before glass was invented. The child becomes the first shaman, a bridge between humanity and the bear people. It was a time when there were no borders and people wondered the land without any border controls. There was no concept of ownership of land. The very idea would have seemed ridiculous. And so I looked for something else, something more timeless and lit upon the idea of amber. Amber is natural, not a manufactured thing. And I have a necklace of amber beads that if taken apart by a mischievous raven would look just like the broken amber heart in the snow.

Jackie’s amber necklace

The Ice Bear has been published now in many languages, French, Spanish, Catalan, Danish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese. This is one of the things I love about working with books. Words found on a hill top in Wales can travel the world. I also love the democracy of books. Paintings in a gallery are expensive and usually bought to be hung in one home. Books can be bought, translated, and borrowed from libraries. They can be shared.”

My thanks go to Jackie for so generously sharing some of the stories behind The Ice Bear.

The House of the Golden Dreams (an art gallery featuring Jackie’s work): https://www.facebook.com/TheHouseofGoldenDreams
Jackie on Twitter: @JackieMorrisArt
Jackie’s blog: http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/blog/

Jackie Morris creates breathtaking illustrations. Her books are so utterly beautiful – each picture envelops you and transports you to another time and place. Some of my favourite books by her include Tell Me a Dragon, The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems and The Snow Leopard.

One of many buttons you can buy featuring Jackie Morris' artwork

One of my favourite Jackie Morris prints. Click to find out details.

You can find Jackie’s website here.
You can read Jackie’s blog here.
And don’t forget, you can see what prints Jackie has for sale here and her other gifts in her cafepress store here.

Interview by Marya Jansen-Gruber

I'd like you to meet Jackie Morris, the talented artist who illustrated a beautiful fairy tale called Singing to the Sun.

What did you think when you were first sent the text for Singing to the Sun?

I first heard the story of Singing to the Sun at a children’s book festival in Swansea. Viv was doing an evening event and I went along to listen. The story made pictures dance in my head, and after the event Viv asked me if I liked it. When I said yes she replied 'Good, because I wrote it with you in mind.’ And from there we began to look for a publisher together. The story was originally published in a collection of stories and the others in the collection are equally beautiful.

What do you think of the message that it imparts to young, and not so young, readers?

There are so many messages in the book if you want to look for them. For children, one message is that maybe love is better than wealth and power, but it is a thing to be freely given. For fathers, a reminder that daughters have free will and are fed up of being given away as prizes in stories. For parents, the message can be that arguing is frightening for children. For women, that it is always a good idea to keep your wolves close, if you have a wolf, and that cats are smart and music can often provide answers.

The artwork that you created for the story has a magical, ethereal quality. What inspired you to create these pictures in this way?

I love medieval manuscript, textiles, animals and birds. I suppose really the words inspired the images. Each book that I do is different, each a response to a different text.

How were the illustrations created?

The illustrations were created with watercolor on hot pressed paper, after 27 years of practice and much blood sweat and tears. Firstly, I did small thumbnail drawings and sketches trying to catch the characters, then went on to the finished work, which is larger than the published work. Some pieces flowed easily, others I had to work on a few times. I loved the wolves who are very much a side issue in the text, so I brought them down from the golden mountains to be beside the princesses, ready for when the princes get the answer wrong.

This is not the first fairy tale that you have illustrated. Do you have a fondness for this genre?

I have a fondness for story. I love listening to storytellers. I love the way a really good story can live in your heart and mind and grow with you and help to make sense of the mad world we live in.

What do you think fairy tales give children?

Hope. Understanding. Courage. Insight. Pleasure. Passion. Music. A connection through history to all the people in the world who have ever told the story before, who have ever listened to it. A place in the world and in time.

Did you like to read when you were a child, and if so what did you like to read?

I struggled to read when I was a child and only persisted because I knew that what was hidden in books behind the code of the alphabet was worth knowing, worth breaking through to. What I love to read now is stories that have magic, not necessarily witches and wizards, but that magical power where an author can make you believe, make you care, for a character whose bones are paper, whose blood is the letters on a page. Discoveries this last couple of years have been Robin Hobb, The Book Thief and Stardust. Two of my favorite books I read as a child were White Fang and The Call of the Wild.

You have created illustrations for many charitable organizations. What do you like about doing this kind of work?

I like to use the work I do for good. I do not want to advertise cars, do illustrations for banks and big business. I always felt very priveleged to be able to work for Amnesty International and Green Peace and Oxfam.

You often use one of your cats as a model for your paintings. What does he think of this?

Max is a private kind of cat who likes to sleep in cupboards. He does not often come to sit on a lap and tends to keep out of the limelight, unlike the ginger brethren who dominate the house. But I think he is secretly quite pleased. He is very handsome and dark like midnight with emerald eyes.

If you could travel anywhere in the world to paint where would you go and why?

I would go to Venice in Spring. The colors of the buildings, the madness of the water-filled streets, the crumbling decay are all inspiring. I would go to the arctic where the colors play in the sky and on the land and I would wait and watch for polar bears. I would go to Bhutan or Nepal and sit quietly and watch cranes fly over high mountains and hope a snow leopard would be watching me. I would go beneath the sea where great whales sing and see them swim and leap from the water, before it is too late, before there are no more and I would go to a jungle in India and wait for a tiger to burn the emerald forest bright. And for now I will go to my studio and paint some more.

You can find out more about Jackie on her wonderful website. If you are a cat lover do take the time to visit the blog written by her cat companions. Her journal will show you what the life of an illustrator is like.

NOTE TO SELF: MUSSELS ARE NOT THE MOST VISUAL MULLOSKS


One thing for sure is that anybody hoping for some exciting viewing on MusselCam will be disappointed, but then that's the way Mother Nature works. Unbelievable as it may seem MusselCam located in Prince Edward Island, Canada, was named amongst the top 25 most interesting webcams in the world. Hey - now that's an accomplishment!

That lone blue mussel is the only one of two Canadian entries to crack EarthCam's list. A webcam tracking the lighthouse at scenic Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia
(www.peggyscovewebcam.ca/live) is also on the webcam network's list of favourites.

For the uninitiated and according to Wikipedia, "the common name mussel is used for members of several different families of clams or bivalve molluscs, from both saltwater and freshwater habitats."

Visually they aren't anything to look at being round and...round.

The message on the web page says it all: "mussels grow very, very slowly. Please check back often."

Garner Quain, the co-owner of Flex Mussels, which has locations in Charlottetown and Summerside, was surprised to hear his camera made the list.

"I didn't ever think that it would make any kind of Top 10 list, other than the fact that it's so, kind of, notoriously boring," said Quain."There's a few other ones on the internet that are sort of old favourites that have kind of always been running, so it was really kind of an homage to those, so to be included among them is a nice little honour."

Quain said MusselCam gets more than 1,000 hits a day.

Anyway, if you've got a lot of time - and patience - drop by the musselcam site here:

http://www.flexmussels.com/musselcam.html

Let us know if anything exciting happens. Yawn...