I’m breaking my holiday blog vacation to share some great news for OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW’s amazing illustrator. Christopher Silas Neal has been named a Fall 2011 Flying Start Illustrator by Publisher’s Weekly!
PW has published a great interview with Chris that starts at the very beginning of this project:
“For a graphic artist who has done posters, covers, and spot illustrations, illustrating a book should be a piece of cake, right? Not necessarily. “When I do a cover or a poster, it’s often a big figure or object that’s centered on the page,” Christopher Silas Neal says. “I hadn’t created many environments where characters were moving through space.” He was delighted when Chronicle gave him the job of illustrating Kate Messner’s Over and Under the Snow (Chronicle, Oct.). He loved Messner’s evocative descriptions of animal life beneath the snow, and he’d been wanting to try illustrating a picture book. But he wasn’t immediately clear about how best to represent the winter world Messner had written about.” ~from the PW “Flying Start interview. Read the rest here.
Congratulations, Chris!!
If you’d like to read more about the illustration process for OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW, Chris visited my blog a while back to talk about it. And finally, many, many, MANY thanks to everyone who’s helped to spread the word about this quiet book. It’s been featured recently on terrific blogs like & 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Chasing Ray, as well as in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. I know that I speak for Chris, too, when I tell you that we’re both thrilled & thankful.