21st Century Children's Nonfiction Conference

21st Century Children's Nonfiction Conference

I've been looking forward to this conference all year. Now it's only a week away and there's still a lot to do. I'm honored to be presenting two workshops. Saturday afternoon I present "Creating a Picture Book - An Illustrator's Perspective". And on Sunday I'm co-presenting with James Ransome, whose work I LOVE! That workshop is "Surviving as an Illustrator". I'm sure his perspective must be totally different from mine so it should be interesting.

Conference faculty

And while on the subject of creating a picture book, here's a couple of new illustrations for Baby on Board, written by Marianne Berkes and published by Dawn Publications. It's a Spring 2017 release, due around the same time as all the new spring babies.

This 'possum hauls her babies from one place to another. The joeys have it easy as they all ride on their mother. 

Here's a little background about North America's only marsupial, the strange animal with the appropriately confusing name. In 1608 Captain John Smith coined the word opossum from "opassum", the Algonquian term meaning "white animal." In his notes he wrote, "An Opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignes of a Cat. Under her belly she hath a bagge, wherein shee lodgeth, carrieth, and sucketh her young."

No one really knows why the opossum's "o" was dropped, but it appears in print as early as 1613. There are true possums in Australia and New Guinea, not to be confused with their North American cousins, the opossums. I told you it was strange.

Baby clings on Mama's hair. They slowly move with ease. They sleep while hanging upside-down from branches in the trees.

And who doesn't love a sloth? Two-toed sloths are nocturnal while three-toed sloths are diurnal, which means they are most active during the day. Skeletons of now extinct species of sloth suggest some varieties used to be as large as elephants!

You can click on the first two images for details about the conference. Click the illustrations to enlarge and get a better view. Thanks for taking a look!