“I’ve never won an argument with watercolor,” Jon J Muth admits. The trick, he explains, is paying attention to the medium and working with it instead of against it. Muth begins each day doing giant brush drawings on the floor of his studio to loosen up his arm and generate a sense of “still-pointedness”. He then moves to the more specific tasks of painting the pages in his books. For his 2006 Caldecott Honor book, Zen Shorts, Muth repainted one page seven times before it had the exact feel that he wanted. “I don’t even know what it was,” he says, “but I knew when the page was right.”
Jon Scieszka (which rhymes with Fresca) is the playful and cheeky author behind The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. In these exclusive audio and video interviews with Reading Rockets, Jon Scieszka talks about his “weird” style and his concern about boys and reading. Read Scieszka’s tribute his dad in this essay Playing with Dad written for Reading Rockets in celebration of Father’s Day 2009.
