Book Review: Frosty the Snowman

In many parts of the US, it is still winter. And prime snowman building season. Frosty the Snowman, illustrated by Wade Zahares with a musical CD by Kenny Loggins is honestly just year-round fun.

I'm lucky enough to know Wade and to have seen some of these amazing pastel paintings in person - note: they are BIG! He has a very unique approach to perspective and high-contrast color palettes that make his work instantly recognizable. Frosty glows almost as much as a real, crisp winter day - magically.

This is my absolute favorite spread in the book. It's a stellar point of view and captures that chase with all the fun intended. The Kenny Loggins version is upbeat but not frenetic - and there are a few other bonus tracks that you'll find your kids popping in on their own. You can find links to many videos of Kenny performing on the Facebook page, here.

Inspiration

I am completely obsessed with this song. I've fallen in love with it. If you follow me on twitter you must know this already. I apologize and will do my best to start tweeting about something else. ;o)

What does this song has to do with illustrating or writing you might ask?

The answer is: nothing and everything.

It's a song, a lovely song, but from the moment I heard it I haven't been able to get it off my mind. It lead me to enter a state of mind I was unaware of and that made me very sensitive to things around me. In the last couple of days I had two wonderful ideas for children stories and they both came to me while listening to this song.

For one of them, I had to stop working on the book I was sketching, to write the idea down before it left me. Because we all know those sparks of an idea just fly away even faster than they appear.

We all can find insipration in different things. Try to find the little things that inspire you and surround yourselves by them. :o)

Btw, this song is from the movie "Once". A little low budget film from the Sundance Film Festival that stole my heart. If you haven't seen it, you should. You won't regret it.

Knick Knack Paddy Whack

My son and I have just started to enjoy books with CDs. Luckily, Knick Knack Paddy Whack is not only illustrated beautifully by Christiane Engel, but the music by 'SteveSongs' is fun and catchy. Children's music can often be hard for parents, especially when played over and over, but this grows more on me each time. As a book set I love the layers of learning to be had - counting to 10, learning the instruments visually and audibly, and of course, the song itself.

I've admired Christiane Engel's work for a long time. She has a great blog, website, etsy shop, and some gorgeous free wallpapers. I got lost for a long time looking at her work. I enjoyed this interview on Pikaland. I love her traditional/digital style for children's work and also her oil pastel/digital? style for editorial. It's all beautiful, but quite different, as the subject dictates.