Florence Turnour's Blog

Today I enjoyed reading Mr. Schu's interview with Lizi Boyd , author of Flashlight and Inside Outside , wordless picture books with room to explore. Both of these books include cutouts that allow parts of the next illustration to show through, inviting you to turn the page. Mathew Winner also interviewed Lizi Boyd in his Let's Get Busy podcast .  In the interview, Matthew suggested that Lizi's illustrations invite children to create art in her style. In particular, in Flashlight Lizi presents spreads drawn with white paint on a black background, except in the flashlight's beam, which she paints in full color.  Matthew envisioned children drawing with white pens on black paper to imitate that look. I thought that was a great idea, and stored it away for future use. Today, my mother and kids walked in while I was watching the trailer for Flashlight on Mr. Schu's blog. "Oh, I love that book!" Art project time! We cut white triangles for the parts...

There's a rancho very close to the university here in Long Beach. It's tucked away in a gated community. We went there this afternoon to look around and draw a little. The kids sat down to draw and drew a couple of pictures before I mentioned casually that they should be drawing something they saw there at the rancho, rather than cars and bears and things. While I was drawing this corner of the Rancho, a man made a few hilarious attempts to get up into the enormous tree in the garden. I overheard a woman say to him, "You jump up and I'll give you a push." I thought that was likely to be great fun to watch, but I guess he thought so too, since they didn't try it. See how big the tree is? Thanks for looking!