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Category Archives: Picture Book Crafts
playing with food by louise lockhart + emily neuburger plays with food
Playing with Food by Louise Lockhart (2016).
Louise Lockhart is the illustrator behind The Printed Peanut. Her style is retro, lively, and joyful and she brings all those qualities to this super fun activity book.
It’s the kind of thing that would’ve kept me occupied for weeks as a kid and thus, it’s perfect for summertime.
There are prompts for writing, for drawing, for experimenting.
Spot the difference on grocery shelves! Cut out and play a food memory game (yesss)! Learn about the types of pasta and follow a spaghetti maze! Tell food-related jokes to your friends! Draw faces on vegetables! Bake easy no-yeast bread! Design a bento box!
It goes on and on like that!
Draw toppings on pizza, one for you and one for your mom.
Color in ice cream and popsicles and design your own perfect lolly.
Learn about breads eaten in different parts of the world.
Write poems about eats using descriptive details.
Think of foods that start with each letter in the alphabet.
Experiment with eggs.
See what I mean? Food fun to sustain hours of exploration and entertainment.
Big thanks to Cicada Books images!
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I’m absolutely delighted to have artist, author, and educator Emily Neuburger on This Picture Book Life. She’s here to play with food!
Emily will take it from here:
When Danielle asked me to collaborate with her on a book review for this super fun book, it was an immediate yes, yes, yes! And, of course, I chose the project with the potatoes.
Oh, I love printing with vegetables. I really do. It is a perfect way to play with color and experiment with form and shape. Potato printing is one of my favorite kinds of vegetable printing. There is something so magical about turning a brown lump into a bright, colorful bit of art. I am always captivated by the way in which the print contains echoes of the original form, but with its own new, mysterious botanical shape.
What you need:
Potatoes
Knife
Small circular biscuit cutter (optional)
Sharpie marker
Acrylic paint
Paint brush
Paper (trimmed cardstock)
Slice the potatoes in half. This is a nice way for older children to practice using a knife. Of course, adult supervision is important as is teaching children proper knife safety.
Leave some potatoes as is because you can print with the halved potatoes just as they are. In fact, this is one of my favorite kinds of vegetable printing! I love when my paper is filled with imperfect, textured, colorful, wonky potato rounds.
Find a tiny biscuit cutter, and press it into one of the potato halves. This will create a perfectly round circle. Use your knife to trim away the excess potato.
Use your Sharpie to draw shapes on the potato halves – diamonds, squares, and triangles were fun to experiment with! Once the lines are drawn, use the knife to cut out the shape. Be sure to carefully trim away the excess potato. This will leave nice, clean lines.
Mix-up some punchy, fun paint colors. I like to experiment with adding white and black to my chosen colors. This creates lots of different shades of the same hue.
Use the paintbrush to coat the potato with a thin layer of paint. Then, place the potato down on the paper, and press firmly and evenly. The wobbly lines and grainy texture is what that makes it interesting to look at, so don’t feel the need to be exact when you cut and press and print.
Experiment with pressing very firmly and also very lightly. Try coating the potato with lots of paint, and then make repetitive prints until the print disappears. This will create a series of ghost prints.
Make Potato Kebabs in Playing with Food because this is outrageously fun and satisfying!
Print on small squares of cardstock, and you will have a new stash of gorgeous, curious gift tags and note cards.
Print, print, print everywhere.
Box up your potatoes, and share them with a neighbor or friend.
Many thanks to Emily for stopping by to make geometric, colorful potato kebabs! You can visit her full post here.
Emily Neuburger is a writer, artist, and freelance art and creative writing teacher. She is passionate about encouraging people to get pumped about creativity, especially when it comes to the intersection of words and art. She is the author of Show Me a Story (Storey Publishing) and an upcoming creative journaling book for kids, titled Journal Sparks (Storey Publishing). She writes regularly about creativity and unexpected treasures on her website, as well as in print magazines and around the web. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three children.
the girl with the parrot on her head + doodle cookies from the decorated cookie
The Girl with the Parrot on her Head by Daisy Hirst (2015).
This picture book is zany and perceptive, a very good combination. Mostly, I loved Isabel, the girl with the parrot on her head—her emotions and her imagination.
It starts with a friendship: Isabel and Simon, “who was very good with newts.” They played together in the most imaginative ways, something we know only from illustrations of their treasure maps and pirate hats and funny props. But one day, Simon moves away.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
“For a while, Isabel hated everything.”
Isn’t that how it is after loss? Even the parrot leaves her head “to sit on top of the wardrobe.” Once she’s quieted herself, Isabel develops a system. And this is where things get really interesting. She puts all the items in her room into different boxes: castles, hats, cars, the wolves, the dark, a monster. We hear that the parrot is worried about the stuff in those boxes, especially the biggest wolf and we know the parrot is a proxy for Isabel’s own fears. Fears brought on by her best friend moving, by change, by being alone.
So Isabel must find a box big enough for that big wolf. But when she does, she finds another friend in that box too. Chester. Chester helps, the way friends do when you’ve got a big problem (or wolf) you can’t figure out how to solve on our own.
And so the box is no longer necessary. It can become something a lot more imaginative, a lot more fun, a lot more…zany.
Big thanks to Candlewick for images!
THE GIRL WITH THE PARROT ON HER HEAD. Copyright © 2015 by Daisy Hirst. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, London.
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Cookie expert and children’s book lover, Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie, is here to share her doodle cookie recipe and craft inspired by The Girl with the Parrot on her Head. So lucky to be hosting her again!
She’s made doodle cookies(!), which are perfect for this book in so many ways. They mirror the illustration style and the endpapers, which have little white circles with doodles in them (one with a cookie). They encourage creativity and imagination, right in line with Isobel. And they offer a place to draw the stuff a kid might like and even the stuff she might be afraid of (e.g. wolves).
What you need:*
Cut-out cookie dough AND royal icing
Circle cookie cutter
White food coloring
Disposable decorating bags
Size “3” decorating tip
Rubber bands
Food coloring pens
*Here are some helpful hints for cookie decorating supplies.
Prepare cookie dough according to the recipe, chill it, roll it out, cut out circles, bake and let cool. Prepare royal icing according to the recipe. Tint some icing white. Prepare a decorating bag with the tip and fill it with some of the white icing. Tie closed with a rubber band.
Pipe a white outline on the circle cookies and let set. Thin the remaining white icing with drops of water until it’s of flooding consistency (that is, when overturned with a spoon, the icing slowly folds back into itself and the lines disappear). Fill an empty decorating bag with the icing, tie closed with a rubber band and snip the tip. Pipe to fill the circles of cookies with white icing. Let dry OVERNIGHT.
The next day, use food coloring pens to draw designs and doodles.
Gift idea! Package some cookies topped with dried icing in a cellophane bag, add a couple black food pens, and a copy of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head.
So lucky to host Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie again! See Meaghan’s post here.
You may be interested in my last collaboration with Meaghan on One Word from Sophia too! Giraffe marshmallows!
a hungry lion + lion cake craft
A Hungry Lion or A Dwindling Assortment of Animals by Lucy Ruth Cummins (2016).
I don’t want to say too much about this book because it’s full of surprises. But I think it’s safe to say it’s mischievous, brave, and oh so much fun!
(click image(s) to enlarge)
A Hungry Lion plays with our assumptions, with page turns, with wordless or nearly wordless spreads, and with a spunky narrator. And then it turns everything on its head. Possibly more than once.
The beginning spreads set up a pattern. There’s an assortment of animals. And it’s dwindling. We can all imagine who the culprit is. Just look at his fangs! His angry orange mane!
Look how he hums, innocently, but how pig looks quite nervous nonetheless. But need she be? That is the question this book asks. One of them anyway.
Here’s a surprise I referred to! A cake and party surprise, one of the best kinds! Oh, but the story doesn’t end there. Not at all. There are more surprises in store, along with an answer to the question of who’s king of the animal kingdom after all. It might have less to do with fangs and an angry orange mane than was first assumed.
Big thanks to Simon & Schuster for images!
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Those dwindling animals as cake toppers immediately came to mind for this picture book craft. There’s even a cake in the book itself! So, cake it had to be. As such, I enlisted the help of my dude, Todd Davis, to whip up a lion cake with a ribbony mane. Because he’s the guy to ask for stuff like that. Come see what we made!
That’s a hungry lion cake. And that’s a dwindling assortment of animal cake toppers.
What you need:
A cake! If you make it like we did, you can go homemade or boxed in terms of cake and frosting. For eating, buttercream is best (and mentioned in the book). We used three cake layers for the base/mane, and one layer for the face.
Three 9 ” cake pans
One or two 6 ” cake pans
Cake ingredients
White frosting
Bowls
A spatula or butter knife
Pastry bags
Decorating tips (104, one small round one, and a large round one—or whatever you choose)
Food coloring (red, yellow, and black)
Skewers or slender candles (we used these candles in white)
White paper
Colored pencils or markers
Tape
Plate or cake platter
We made our animal cake toppers first. We eyeballed the animals in the book to draw them, colored them in, and cut them out imprecisely. We taped one or two to each slender cake candle, and done! This is a great thing to do while your cakes bake. And when you’re ready, mix your food coloring with frosting (it takes a lot of red to make that deeper orange) in three separate bowls (two oranges and one black for face details).
Frost between layers and stack them, then frost the entire surface area. Next, decorate, face first! Frost with orange and add features. Play! Our nose is made from part of that extra small cake we made and set on the face. But you can do it however you like. For the mane, Todd used a 104 petal decorating tip and went around and around with it making a thick squiggly line.
Voila!
You won’t be hungry after eating this cake! And you will be satisfied after reading this book, making this craft, or both.
Huge thanks again to Todd Davis of Davis Handmade (my husband)!
ursa’s light + cookies from kellie at the kaleidoscope
Ursa’s Light (2016) by Deborah Marcero.
This picture book is out this month, coincidentally the same time of year the Ursa Major constellation is most visible in the night sky. And a bear who shines is another way of describing this main character. A gleaming debut all around!
“There were all the bears. And then, there was Ursa.” Ursa is different. Just look at her lying in the green grass, rainbow sweater-adorned. She’s a dreamer. Even on the first spread, she’s already looking at the sky.
Ursa goes big and thinks out of the box with every undertaking. When her focus turns skyward again, she decides she wants to fly! She applies all her other attributes—observing, making, trying—to the dream of flight.
There are many fantastic details in this book. Ursa’s little sibling who serves as sidekick, for example, whose shirt says what’s on big sister’s mind. Ursa’s own spirited outfits. And I love how her name reminds us of the bear constellations, how it brings us immediately to the clouds and stars above.
I also love the illustrations. Aren’t they delightfully engaging? The book alternates from dark spreads to light, spanning all the times of day in beautiful ways. And the texture of the dark bits, including the night sky and the bears own faces has a speckled quality that gets me thinking immediately of stars in the city.
Ursa takes cues from pigeons, dandelion seeds, and bats, all fly-ers. But it’s only when she finds her own medium, her own opportunity, that she truly learns to soar in her own way.
I’ll let you read the book to find out what that is! And as Deborah Marcero reminded me when we talked about this post, there’s always a “feeling of ‘flying’ when you do something that’s totally YOU and you do it well.” That’s it’s own kind of flying as well and sometimes, as in Ursa’s case, it takes some trial and error to get there. Which makes the feat that much sweeter.
I think you’ll want to read Deborah’s blog post about the process of creating the artwork in this book. She has a lot in common with Ursa herself!
Big thanks to Peter Pauper Press for images!
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We are so lucky to have Kellie as crafter in the picture book kitchen today! She’s an artist and book lover I admire. You may already follow her on Instagram, but if not, I highly recommend her delightful feed: The Kaleidoscope. (She made some fantastic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland cookies too!)
Over to Kellie!
With four little boys, reading and snacking go hand in hand. Thanks to Danielle, I am excited to share a fun little project inspired by Ursa’s Light.
Ursa is a unique little bear. I didn’t think my regular bear face cutter would do her justice, so I sketeched a little picture of her onto a heavy card stock paper. After cutting her out, I used this recipe for the cookie dough.
While the dough was setting in the fridge, I decided to make salt dough stars. I used this recipe and a small star cookie cutter. I used a paper straw to make holes in the dough for stringing after. By the time I had finished baking the stars, my cookie dough was ready to roll out.Once you have rolled out your cookie dough, I used a butter knife to cut along the paper shape.
For painting the cookies, I used icing sugar, a splash of milk and the most important part is cream of tarter, which helps it set. I used a paintbrush, just small plastic brushes you can get at any dollar store. The most important part of painting your cookies is waiting for the icing to dry before you add on details. I started with my base coat, in this case it was black and red. Once the icing has set, you can add the eyes, and pink for the ears and nose.
After the stars had cooled, and while I waited for my icing to set, I painted the dried stars with some glow in the dark paint and strung them together with some bakers twine.
We hung them above the bed, and it’s the perfect inspiration for reading and dreaming about how we can dream big like Ursa.
About Kellie:
In University, she studied children’s literature, minored in child development, and went on to complete her fine arts degree. She is fond of picture books and painting. She’s always sharing her love of books in her community and through the online community (where we were lucky enough to meet!).
Thank you, Kellie for these Ursa cookies! I’m in heaven gazing at them!
You may want to check out Kellie’s Frida Kahlo peg doll from last year’s Viva Frida post too!
normal norman + tissue paper collage craft from homemade city
Normal Norman by Tara Lazar, illustrations by S. Britt (2016—out today!).
This is a book about trying to define “normal” by way of science—measurements and observations and interview. And I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that, well, normal is not so easy to pin down. In fact, there may be no such thing as normal at all.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
The narrator, lab coat on and clip board in hand, proceeds to examine Norman, an orangutan. What I love is that the reader can already tell Norman isn’t normal. I mean, he’s purple and, I adore this detail—he’s wearing glasses. It’s like the reader already knows where this is going and we get to watch as the narrator figures it out.
Norman doesn’t like bananas (he likes pizza). Not normal. He doesn’t make animal noises (he speaks English). Not normal. He doesn’t live in the jungle or sleep in a pile of leaves (he sleeps in a bunk bed). Could that be normal?
The more we find out about Norman, the more he surprises us. And so do his animal friends. And this is when S. Britt’s illustrations start to remind me of Jolly Roger Bradfield‘s wonderful, imaginative books from the 60s! Those spreads match Norman—they’re colorful and offbeat, full of pizazz and unpredictability. A tiger on a motorcycle, a rhino painting a portrait.
The narrator herself abandons her project and makes music and dances and has a rambunctious time with the others.
One last thing I love is how the narrator’s science teacher stands by in many scenes. He appears at first to be the arbiter of the narrator’s performance while her project falls apart. But in the end, it’s as though he’s orchestrated this whole thing. He wasn’t looking for a definition of normal—he was looking for her to illustrate its elusiveness. Its absurdity as a notion at all.
There is no normal. Just look at Norman!
Thanks to Sterling Children’s Books for images!
Reprinted with permission from Normal Norman © 2016 by Tara Lazar, Sterling Children’s Books, an imprint of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. Illustrations © 2016 by Stephan Britt.
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I’m so pleased to host Margaret Muirhead of Homemade City as craft-maker extraordinaire!
Margaret loves both picture books and crafts, so mixing the two together sends her over the moon. She is the author of Mabel, One and Only (Dial Books for Young Readers) and a devoted maker of wacky, colorful crafts at Homemade City. By day, you can find her wearing cat glasses and cardigans as the children’s librarian at Hardy Elementary School in Arlington, Mass.
Over to her!
Norman is my kind of guy. A dune-buggy-driving, jet-pack-flying, tiara-toting, out-of-the-box orangutan dude.
Norman’s multi-hued self is decidedly not orangutan normal, but it is fun-loving, just like the big guy. And tissue paper collage seemed the best way to capture Norman’s coat of many colors. Tissue paper collage is also great because it’s very forgiving in less experienced kid hands–you can smudge, rip, and layer exuberantly, and still the results are delicious.
What you need:
Tissue paper in fun colors
Paint brush
White card stock
Stick-on googly eyes
Paper fasteners
Popsicle sticks
Trim the tissue paper into 1″ squares. (We sorted our tissue squares for easy use: purples, blues, and greens in one bowl, yellows and oranges in another.)
Next trace Norman’s orangutan bulk, his adorable eggplant-shape head, and his two longish arms onto card stock. (If that step seems onerous, we traced some basic shapes for you here.)
Brush a layer of Mod Podge onto a small area of your shape and cover with tissue squares. Make sure to overlap squares to create new hues. Seal the squares by brushing another layer of Mod Podge over the top of them. Continue in small areas until you’ve covered the shape.
Give your collage time to dry. Once dried, cut along the outlines of each shape. Adhere the face with glue or Mod Podge and attach the arms with paper fasteners (to give them a little orangutan swing).
Now for the best part: accessorize!
Add goggly eyes, brown specs, a teeny tiara and tutu, or even a dual-rocket jet pack (Norman’s preferred not-normal way to get around). Attach a popsicle stick to the back of your creation to make a puppet. Do not forget to make some friends for Norman: a magenta clarinet-playing hippo, a rollerskating giraffe, a top-hatted snake!
Big thanks to Margaret for contributing this incredible, colorful craft! You can see more photos of tissue-papered Norman and other wonderful stuff over at Homemade City.
Come find me on twitter for a giveaway of the book! (@writesinla)
Check out the other blogs Normal Norman is visiting this month too:
