Jan Brett’s Blog

Happy April!

This is Jan Brett with my April Hedge a gram.   The time I stop to give you an idea about what I’m doing as an author and illustrator
Since childhood I have wanted to be an illustrator and I like to think my illustrations told a story — it came naturally to me and was fun and it energized me.  Writing was different, it wasn’t something I did in my free time, although I love to read.  When I first brought my portfolio around to publishers hoping to get a job illustrating a picture book, all of the editors I saw encouraged me to write the story myself.  My first attempt was FRITZ AND THE BEAUTIFUL HORSES which I wrote for my six-year-old daughter who was taking riding lessons.  I set the book in olden days and was inspired by a pony, John Steil,  who live where she took lessons and an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called the  Hapsburg Era.  Many books later, book ideas come from inspirational crossroads.  First my editor Margaret who I have worked with for 20 years and knows how much I love my flock of chickens, suggested I retell and illustrate CINDERELLA.  She has chickens too and we love to talk about what a cast of characters they can be.  Joe, my husband of 32 years and I both had children from previous marriages so the idea of the horrible step-sisters and mother in the Cinderella story made me squeamish.  I decided to soften the stepmother part and made the characters more silly and bossy than cruel.   Joe and I had been planning a trip to St. Petersburg to get ideas for a future book, a retelling of THE TURNIP a folktale.  Every time we tried to plan trips to the farms and countryside, the Russian guides would change the focus back to palaces and museums.  That’s when I decided to set my chicken Cinderella in St. Petersburg too.  Because I love snow and the North, I would have Cinderella the chicken go to a ball in a snow palace modeled after the onion domed  wooden architecture of the region.
Now, that I’ve got a story written, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought.   I’m doing a lot of long distance running and I puzzled out much of my retelling on my runs.  Also having a beautiful Phoenix cockerel showing off in my barn every day added to the fun of making up the story.  His beautiful coloration and flowing tail feathers made my mind race with ideas for a formal Russian uniform with lots of gold braid and smart buttons and epaulets.  I’ve got a new stack of books with photographs of Russian style dresses which are very colorful elegant and extravagant and I can’t wait to dress up my Phoenix hen in one.  I don’t know how I’m going to stand the wait until our trip in June, although now my turtle book is off to the printer, I have more time to do some of my favorite things, go to Boston Symphony concerts, raise baby chicks – I have 25 under hens or in an incubator, and especially visit my 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter.  We love to paint in read books together.
I am a little sad to have finish MOSSY, but with the spring weather the turtle pond we constructed for the book is coming to life.  Some of the large 3 inch tadpoles have sprouted back legs and the cattails have been growing about 1/2 inch a day.   There are lots of teeny tiny tadpoles and I’m expecting frogs and turtles when we get a warm stretch.   Spring is my favorite time of year, and this year feels even more like a new beginning than usual because I’m bursting with enthusiasm for CINDERS my new book.  I would like to encourage you to find a writing and/or illustration project that will jump-start your creativity.
Happy reading writing and drawing, your friend.

Jan Brett

Happy February,

February is the month of Valentine’s Day.  This year, my husband Joe and I will be spending February 14 in India, where I will be doing some research for a future book starring a tiger.  I have a sketch of the story, and I will be looking for some folk tales and fables that will support it.  It is a story that is deceptively simple.  A poor boy (in this case a tiger) makes his living making mud bricks, hard and dirty work.  He is always covered with mud and his hands, (in this case paws) are rough from the work.  As the tiger becomes more and more successful, he is able to enjoy the finer things in life, and he exchanges his raggedy clothes for fine ones.  He just can’t part with his slippers that were so dependable during those years of struggle.  His wife, children, and his friends scold him for wearing the slippers because they’re embarrassed by his humble beginnings.  The tiger decides to replace them, and throw them away.  But every time he does, disaster.  First they are flung out the window and they hit a donkey cart that stampedes and causes havoc.  When left in the gutter, the monsoon rains carry them down to the river where they clog the dam which nearly causes a flood and so on.  Finally the Tiger build a miniature palace for them in his garden, where they can be seen by the tiger as he walks by in his fine new slippers never forgetting his past and how he became himself.

I recently heard someone described as an “authentic”person, and remembering back to my childhood, I can think of some very curious and unique characters that lived in our town.  Often, a person would wear, or have in their home an object of clothing, a piece of jewelry or maybe a painting that would tell a story about that person’s life.  Besides the mysteries of the past, the other reason I like the story is that all of the pieces that make up our lives aren’t always happy ones – it is best to put them on a shelf so we don’t forget them, but where they stay out of the way.  My job as an author is to see how this kernel of a story morphs into a children’s book.

Besides being the time of year my husband Joe and I often go on a trip, Valentine’s Day is time for new beginnings, even more than New Year’s for me.  My chickens all start laying in response to the longer days, and I group them with champion chickens in mind.  In 21 days the baby chicks will appear and the fun of rearing them begins.  I keep several kinds of chickens who love to be mothers, they are Silkies, Buff Brahma, and Silky/Buff Brahma, crosses.  They sit on the eggs of my white crested Polish bantams, a breed that is very beautiful but rarely will sit on their eggs, except for my one hen Pippi who is an excellent mother.

On our trip to India, I will bring a little blank book that I’ve sewn together from typing paper and I’ll start planning my 2013 book CINDERCHICKEN, a poultry Cinderella.  I will leave a lot of details for when we go to St. Petersburg in June.  I always start with the manuscript so I will work on that during our trip.  I’ll also look for some Indian animals to draw and paint so I can add another “How to Draw” video to our website.  I’d like the special animal to be a tiger, but I will have to see one first.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, a retelling of the tale that I illustrated 20 years ago has been republished.  I painted new art for the jacket and worked on the story too.  I’ve always liked the fact that the “borders” are tapestries that show every scene without the enchantment that has made the characters into animals.  You can see for example the musicians, which are pictured as dogs, in their real bodies in the tapestry that hangs on the wall behind them.  The peacock is actually a fairy that has caused all the confusions, and the Beast is the handsome caring prince that Beauty almost betrays.  I’ve always loved the idea that a simple request for a rose by Beauty could lead to such a rich complicated story, just like in life, a small act can set events in motion that are life-changing.

I have three nieces, Mia, Stella and Ana who all love princesses, and between  BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and CINDERCHICKEN, there are a lot of magical palaces and princesses and princes.  It is a change of direction for me, because I love hedgehogs and trolls!  I guess the key is imagination and I hope you will create other worlds along with me, set in a castle, in outer space, or down a rabbit hole.

Happy writing drawing and exploring nature,

Your friend,

Jan Brett

Happy January,

The book that I’m working on now, MOSSY, is almost finished.  I have a few more double-page spreads to go.  I’m glad I have a deadline, as I’m forced to make decisions about my artwork and to dedicate all my time to finishing my book.  It is always a little sad to finish a book, and be done with all the characters, settings and “extras” that I’ve been painting all year.  I still feel that an Eastern Box turtle shell is a thing of beauty, and I’ve enjoyed painting it.  I’m intrigued with the miniature beauty of moss forests and they too have been a challenge to paint.  In MOSSY, because it is set mostly in an old-fashioned natural history museum, I decided to put various collections; butterflies, beetles, shells, and mushrooms, in the borders.  All my life, I have collected books on these kinds of collections, and especially the art work that showed them in the old days.  I had the most fun painting the butterflies and moths, but I had a much harder time painting minerals and gems.  One of the fun aspects of setting my book in 1913 almost 100 years ago, was dressing the characters in Edwardian fashions.  When I was growing up my mother kept boxes of old-fashioned clothes that we were allowed to go through and play with on special occasions.  I remember a top hat made of beaver that was silky and shiny, as well as ball gowns and beaded lace and fringed shawls.  My grandmother Brett had a lady’s dress shop and she dressed in a formal way that wasn’t that far from the Edwardian fashions the people in my book wear.
As always, during the more focused efforts at the end of my book the characters become more fixed in my mind.  This makes them very hard to leave behind.
This month, I’ll be showing my chickens at the Northeastern Poultry Congress, January 13 and 14th.  I’ll be taking lots of photos of poultry for next year’s book ? a “poultry” Cinderella.  The book doesn’t have a name yet, but it will be set in St. Petersburg.  It will have a large cast of poultry, dressed in opulent Russian finery from the days of Catherine the Great.  I will set my story in winter, but we will go to St. Petersburg in June to get ideas.   I will use my imagination to add snow!
If you live in New England and would like to see 2,500 exhibition poultry, make a stop at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield.  It is free, and lots of fun.  If you are looking for laying hens or examples of exotic breeds, there are birds for sale.
In my work, I have more than one story I’m working on.  There is a retelling of THE TURNIP, a rural folktale that I will also set in Russia.  We have a trip to the Russian countryside scheduled in June to get ideas and an overnight stay in a Russian Dacha ? or country house that I hope will be fruitful.  We will also stop in Sweden and look at the beautiful farms there, as well as a stop at artist Carl Larsson’s  house.
Artistically, I’ve gotten a little more layered in my painting.  I like painting one translucent watercolor layer over another with a goal in mind of reflectivity and depth.  The borders have given me a chance to play with different groups of colors too.  I like how the natural beiges and browns of shells, feathers, and mushrooms for example, contrast with splashes of red, purple and yellow in the more showy specimens in the collection.  Usually I travel to get ideas for the settings of my books, but in MOSSY I used my backyard and the Agassiz and Peabody Museums at Harvard in nearby Cambridge Massachusetts.  The building that is the museum in my book is my old nursery school, Wilder Memorial in the neighboring town of Hingham.  The most important part of my story, the turtle MOSSY, hasn’t appeared in our yard though.  The turtle pond we built is for aquatic turtles, not terrestrial (ground living) turtles like the Eastern Box turtle like Mossy.  Lots of frogs have moved in and I’m hoping for possible painted turtle sightings next spring.  Two of my friends have pet Box Turtles and the Boyce family sent me some lovely photos of their turtle, Amelia.
Happy writing drawing and exploring nature,

Your friend,

Jan Brett

Crossroads of America Poultry Show

Happy December,

My husband Joe and I are just back from the crossroads of America poultry show, where I exhibited twenty two of my white crested black Polish bantams.  There were over 10,000 poultry exhibited, from 30 states.  I’ve been raising chickens for 12 years.  I began with feed store chicks that I wanted to grow up tame enough for me to use as models for a children’s book I was illustrating called HEDGIE’S SURPRISE.  I modified the looks of my silverlaced Wyandotte hens when painting them to create a character for my story. They became tame enough to stand on my art table.  Painting them was far more difficult than I imagined!  After I went to my first poultry shows, I acquired Silkies and soon afterwards a trio of white crested black Polish bantams.   One of the Polish cockrels has a role in GINGERBREAD FRIENDS and later a buff Cochin pullet became the model for the team pulling the Easter bunny’s coach in THE EASTER EGG.

I’m just finishing up on my turtle book for the fall of 2012, and I’m planning a poultry Cinderella book for 2013.  I jump-started my imagination with a trip to the crossroads show.  Here are my reflections:

I’ve never been to a poultry show where on cooping in, someone hasn’t asked if they could help me. Mix that spirit in with the thousands of hours setting up breeding pens, hatching baby chicks, selecting and growing youngsters, and washing and preparing that every exhibitor logs, and then add the sheer beauty and majesty of hundreds of breed varieties of poultry at the top of their form and vigor and you have a start to what a poultry show is about. And, an electric current runs beneath it all, making a spectacular display into a stomach churning mega event.The birds are judged. Each and every chicken, duck, goose and turkey will be graded, it’s wings spread, it’s confirmation assessed, it’s breeds characteristics weighed and it’s vigor acknowledged. A poultry show is part celebration, part drama, part exhilaration and part whoop it up fun.

The Crossroads show, being a joint ABA and APA national virtually guarantees that the best breeders in the country will bring their best birds (with the exception of the judges’ birds which they cannot show if they are judging) . It insures that as you walk through the aisles of the show halls, you are seeing the top of the quality pyramid, the best examples of each breed and variety. You will see breeds and varieties that are so rare that you stop and wonder, “What is that?”  It makes a show of this magnitude, genetically speaking, an historic occasion.

At every show I have a ritual that never fails to please me as I think back on the show after it’s over. I clear my mind and walk through the aisles  with no agenda, just looking at every bird with focus. It’s strange how one bird will loom large. At that moment, he or she just shines. Once it was a effervescent white leghorn cockerel, another time an elegant grey Japanese cockerel, another time a standard white Cochin pullet so commanding that it drew me in like I was a fish in a line. At the last Crossroads in 2007 the special bird was a lemon blue old English cockerel. He had an unearthly beauty – each feather sculpted, the combination of breast, saddle, hackles and sickles explosively gorgeous. This year it was one of my competitors birds in the white crested Polish bantam class, a cockerel that was so eye capturing and fine that his elegant image still comes back to me when I ‘m running or trying to fall asleep. What is this spark or charisma that radiates from certain birds?  It goes beyond the instinctive behavior that birds show in courtship displays. There is a communication between bird and human that jumps the normal paths, and why it makes a big show like the crossroads seem like a treasure hunt.

I had an experience at a show when a flighty duck of mine got loose and flew crazily into the windows, thankfully missing the huge wide open door to the show hall. It flew to ground and zigged between rows in a panic. I had just about given up on ever bringing that guy home when one of our judges appeared, magically picking it up . He brought it to me as if it were “business as usual”. There was something transmitted in the judge’s hands that made me curious. How could he have first commanded my duck to give up , and then calmed him? I don’t think this ability of a great poultryman can be described, but I think it can be emulated, just like if you see a graceful runner, you feel by just observing, a little can rub off on you. I like to take a little time at a big show like this to watch and try to put into my muscle memory the way great judges and breeders handle the birds. There does seem to be moments where it seems like you can emotionally communicate with poultry by touch.

A visit to The Crossroads isn’t complete for me without a visit to the turkeys.  Maybe it’s because I can’t have turkeys myself, but I love to hear them call, and especially admire their fanned tails as they “bestow their magnificence”. Wild turkeys are very prevalent in new England where we live, and it never gets old surprising a hen with poults or a flock of jakes in the woods. To see all the stunning domestic varieties close up is a marvel, especially considering the selective breeding it took to create them.

Tearing oneself away from ones own birds and their emanate success or failure is difficult, but I usually know one or two juniors who have bought birds from me, and being a spectator at the junior show is fascinating. I see their progress as well as the “future of the fancy”. I remember being a kid and yearning for the chance to own a creature that I could nurture and believe in. It’s poignant to see the junior exhibitors realizing how steep the learning curve is. I feel even more poignant when I know I’m still trying to crack the code myself! I remember the production red chickens my sister and I bought for 35 cents from the local dairy farm, and how we trained them to ride on the handlebars of our bikes. We thought they were the most beautiful chickens in the world. There is always a little heartbreak on that road to show super grand champion.

As I walk away from a big show like the crossroads, I carry with me two strong emotions. The first is pride for my birds. They weren’t elevated to championship row this time, but they looked healthy and beautiful.  The second is gratitude for the traditions in the fancy, for respecting the master breeders and exhibitors who breed the stock we show sometimes for generations, and the judges that try so hard to amass their knowledge and hone their eye to evaluate our poultry so we can raise the bar another year.

Bye for now, your friend,

Jan Brett