The next book I worked on was Book Fiesta, and that’s the one that I’m receiving the the Pura Belpré for. What I like about Book Fiesta was that every, I didn’t have to have this story being told. Every scene was very different. It was all about showing how fantastic it is to read. That you can have books and read any time, anywhere, and you don’t have to limit it by the constraints of reality. I mean, when you read and your imagination is going somewhere, you can put yourself in many different places.
So it was again an opportunity to create the wildest things you could do, and follow these beautiful words by Pat Mora.
One of the images in Book Fiesta is actually a vertical versus a horizontal traditional way of flipping from right to left. And I think that, again, it’s maybe my lack of experience as a book illustrator, but the first time I tried that was with Our California, where I thought of the scene that we covered, and I painted in a vertical form, it was El Capitán, the Yosemite, the El Capitán is actually pretty tall. I couldn’t really convey the greatness of Yosemite in a horizontal way, so I had to do it vertically. And I thought that it was so successful that I wanted to try it again, and finish the book in some way about having the kids flipping it, and turning it, and open it up like a poster. Have this big giant moon. Just to have some variety too. I mean, kids don’t necessarily to read from left to right, they can read also up and down. We do it all the time. And a lot of people like that, maybe I can do it one day where everything is upside-down. I don’t know. We’ll try that.
