![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z" is an exhibition running currently at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, one of my favorite museums that I happen to live right near. MAN that place has great exhibitions.
This particular exhibition draws on the museum's permanent collection to illustrate all the stages of picture-book creation, with each letter of the alphabet standing for something--B is for book dummy, E is for endpapers, I is for india ink, etc., followed by illustrative artwork.
A is for Alphabet, and there are a couple of gorgeous alphabets:
Alphabet broadsheet by Antonio Frasconi (1919–2013)
Note: for all these photos, you can click through to see them bigger
A Bunny's Hungry ABC, art by Leonard Weisgard (1916–2000) for Margaret Wise Brown's The Golden Bunny (1953)
close-up on the yummy rabbit food
E is for endpapers, and I liked these endpapers for Simms Taback's This Is the House That Jack Built (2000), which include actual newspaper real estate listings.
P may have been for printing, or maybe L was for letterpress--I didn't take a photo--but there was a lovely letterpress printing of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The explanation accompanying the copy says, "Beatrix Potter first drew her illustrations in pen and ink. Then she hired a printing company to etch them onto sheets of zinc, which allows for finer, more crisp lines than wood engraving."
"Wood engraving" sounds odd. I wonder how, if at all, wood engraving differs from woodblock printing. ETA--they are different! From this website "For a woodcut, the wood is sawn along the grain so that it can be carve quite easily with a knife-like tool. Wood engraving ... uses end grain wood, which is very hard. As this is more difficult to cut, the lines are incised into the woodblock with a sharp metal tool, meaning the image can be much more detailed. Wood engravings are usually also smaller than woodcuts due to them being restricted to the diameter of the tree trunk."
There was a very lovely woodblock carving by Ed Emberley for an illustration for One Wide River to Cross (1966), by Barbara Emberley. You can see it all black with ink, carved on a big old plank here:
and here is what the print looks like:
ETA: Huh. Just realizing now, looking over the entry, that the wood block doesn't quite match the print. I guess the guy must have had more than one? Maybe if I knew the story there's something that explains it? Kind of disappointed, retroactively, that they didn't acknowledge that it's not exactly the block used to make the print.
There were many more beautiful illustrations, but I took photos very idiosyncratically, so ... this is what you get! But if you happen to be passing through Amherst, Massachusetts, before June 2, 2024, stop in and take a look, and you will be able to see so much more.
Link to the museum's own info on the exhibit, which includes art by illustrators of color, which, sadly, my photos *don't* include.
This particular exhibition draws on the museum's permanent collection to illustrate all the stages of picture-book creation, with each letter of the alphabet standing for something--B is for book dummy, E is for endpapers, I is for india ink, etc., followed by illustrative artwork.
A is for Alphabet, and there are a couple of gorgeous alphabets:
Alphabet broadsheet by Antonio Frasconi (1919–2013)
Note: for all these photos, you can click through to see them bigger
A Bunny's Hungry ABC, art by Leonard Weisgard (1916–2000) for Margaret Wise Brown's The Golden Bunny (1953)
close-up on the yummy rabbit food
E is for endpapers, and I liked these endpapers for Simms Taback's This Is the House That Jack Built (2000), which include actual newspaper real estate listings.
P may have been for printing, or maybe L was for letterpress--I didn't take a photo--but there was a lovely letterpress printing of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The explanation accompanying the copy says, "Beatrix Potter first drew her illustrations in pen and ink. Then she hired a printing company to etch them onto sheets of zinc, which allows for finer, more crisp lines than wood engraving."
"Wood engraving" sounds odd. I wonder how, if at all, wood engraving differs from woodblock printing. ETA--they are different! From this website "For a woodcut, the wood is sawn along the grain so that it can be carve quite easily with a knife-like tool. Wood engraving ... uses end grain wood, which is very hard. As this is more difficult to cut, the lines are incised into the woodblock with a sharp metal tool, meaning the image can be much more detailed. Wood engravings are usually also smaller than woodcuts due to them being restricted to the diameter of the tree trunk."
There was a very lovely woodblock carving by Ed Emberley for an illustration for One Wide River to Cross (1966), by Barbara Emberley. You can see it all black with ink, carved on a big old plank here:
and here is what the print looks like:
ETA: Huh. Just realizing now, looking over the entry, that the wood block doesn't quite match the print. I guess the guy must have had more than one? Maybe if I knew the story there's something that explains it? Kind of disappointed, retroactively, that they didn't acknowledge that it's not exactly the block used to make the print.
There were many more beautiful illustrations, but I took photos very idiosyncratically, so ... this is what you get! But if you happen to be passing through Amherst, Massachusetts, before June 2, 2024, stop in and take a look, and you will be able to see so much more.
Link to the museum's own info on the exhibit, which includes art by illustrators of color, which, sadly, my photos *don't* include.
