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Liftoff: when books leave the page.

Article Excerpt
It has been said that if Gutenberg came back today, there's little he would recognize. Our mass transport, mass communications, and mass media have completely transformed the world. But he would recognize a book. It's one of the few things that haven't changed in five hundred years.

I'm a picture book writer and illustrator. I had the great good luck to study with Maurice Sendak at Parsons School of Design and to find a mentor in Trina Schart Hyman--two artists who are pillars of the tradition if there ever were any. Because of them, I love everything about the traditional picture book art form. But when I discovered a hidden world of picture book artists who are creating traditional books in radically nontraditional ways, I was fascinated and hooked. As I played with these new computer programs (and loved what I was creating), it dawned on me that my very thinking was being re-wired. Story ideas came that didn't work well on paper. I know I'm not the only creative person in the children's book community feeling this lift under the heels, this pull in a new direction, but I don't hear much conversation about it. I'd like to start that conversation here.

I'll begin by describing what's changed in art-making. Artists who work digitally may begin with a sketch on paper, but with one swoosh of the scanner, it's sent into our computers, where the monitor becomes our drawing board and canvas. Our art glows more warmly onscreen than it could ever do on paper. Sketches are e-mailed to art directors as JPEGs; finished art is burned to a CD and sent by FedEx. Because the software is so sophisticated...

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