Woodland Nutcracker, on the move

Woodland Nutcracker and Grandmother's Tree are up on the Etsy shop! And here are some of the Christmas fairs that we are going to with our books and cards, starting tomorrow:

November 5, 9:30-4:00, East Plains United Church,375 Plains Rd E, Burlington
November 12, 9:00-2:00, Church of the Epiphany, 141 Bronte Road, Oakvile
November19, 9:30-2:30, Appleby United Church, 4407 Spruce Avenue, Burlington
November26, 9:00-2:00, St John's United Church, 262 Randall St, Oakville.

December 2 - 24, Under The Moon Fine Arts, 217 Ottawa St. N., Hamilton

December 15-24, Arcadia Gallery, 680 Queens Quay West, Toronto, opening reception Thursday December 15, 5-9pm.

More dates to come. Woodland Nutcracker is also available at

A Different Drummer Books 513 Locust Street, Burlington
Bryan Prince Booksellers, 1060 King Street West, Hamilton and
The Acorn Card Shoppe, 221 Lakeshore RdE, Oakville.

" Woodland Nutcracker"

Our beautiful WoodlandNutcracker book, which was chosen as The Children's Picture Book of the year in 1999 by the Canadian Book Review Annual, was orphaned earlier this year when the publisher went out of business. We are fortunate to have obtained the remaining books from the publisher's warehouse, boxes of mint-new copies full of Christmas magic and adventure.


As with the earlier Woodland Christmas, the story was inspired by many camping trips and cottage visits in Canada's boreal forest, "far away from highways and city lights", where one can travel for days and not meet another human being or even a camera-shy bear. In a story that parallels the Nutcracker ballet, Clara is given a wonderful carved Nutcracker Bear who transforms into the dashing Nutcracker Prince. After settling a midnight battle between the tin soldiers and invading field mice with a Christmas Eve truce, giving the hungry mice food for their families, Clara and Nutcracker fly away to the Ice Palace of the Great Bear, Ursa Major.

At the Great Bear's palace an international cast of bears performs for Clara - juggling pandas and trapeze artist koalas and more, plus some of her dearest woodland friends. I have made two posters from the illustrations, grizzly bear Mother Ginger with her junior hockey team, and the polar bear Yuk Tuk dancing to the strains of the Russian Dance, pictured below. For the purposes of the poster I have placed a copy of the book in her gracefully extended paw!Sorting through the book images I rediscovered this little Nutcracker soldier, whom I have added to the title bar as a friendly exclamation point.

We are dedicating a portion of our sales of Woodland Nutcracker to benefit St. Matthew's House, a charitable agency in the Diocese of Niagara. We are taking the books to several Christmas fairs and the posters will show off the illustrations from across crowded rooms. The books will also be up on my Etsy shop shortly and I will be happy to sign copies or add a small embellishment for the finishing touch.

For the Bees

Further to inventions that imitate nature, here is one of a series of bumblebee-themed images I was asked to design some years ago. A "friendly bee" was asked for, one that was busy about a garden. It was a fun assignment and I eventually came up with several versions of BumbleBee, a family of them and their garden, including hollyhocks. I have been reviewing the images recently, going through the files, and this morning as I walked by the lake I came upon this:

an end-of-summer drowsy bee nestled in the hollyhocks that have naturalized along the unfinished harbour wall, among the small convolvulus and michaelmas daisies.

"And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease.. "
"To Autumn", John Keats

Monarch Butterflies

To quote Avril on the subject of Fairy, "It is difficult to invent anything for Fairy that does not already occur in nature". The description of Dr. Flora Fauna's bubblemobile travels (with fairy dog) alongside the famous migrating butterflies appears in the Winter edition of The Illustrated Fairy Gazette. This morning I stepped out into a flurry of Monarch butterflies on the move.

They dallied with my Morning Glories before disappearing over the fence.

In twos and threes, one cluster after another, they hovered over green lawns and wayside flowers

pausing for only brief refreshmentbefore moving on, along the lakefront and across the creek

east to west, on their long migratory path. They will soon reach Point Pelee where they gather in hundreds and thousands to feed on the milkweed plants before their astonishing long flight to the mountains of central Mexico, where they overwinter.
It is the first time I have seen them in such numbers locally and it was a fitting end to a beautiful, if all too short, summer.

Mermaids and Sand Castles

Some years ago it was my pleasure to illustrate Kate's Castle, written by children's book author Julie Lawson. Like many beautiful books it is now out of print, even though the author and I still get requests from parents and teachers who would like to have a copy.

It begins, "This is the castle that Kate built"and builds from there with,
" This is the moat of sandy hue
That circles the castle that Kate built."
"This is the pool of anenomes,
whose swaying tentacles comb the seas
that fill the moat of sandy hue
That circles the castle that Kate built."

Kate's castle gets bigger, adorned with shells, crowned with turrents, waves come rolling in to surround it,

and creatures from the deep, including the mermaid above, swim by for a look.

Although the book is no longer available from the publisher I do have pretty cards with the above images and they will soon be on my Etsy shop.

On Author-Illustrator visits to schools I presented this book to many classrooms of children. They always fell right in with the winning poetry and the theme of sandcastle building and carefree hours on sandy beaches - they were even interested in how an artist makes the pictures that go with the words. I'm glad to hear from teachers that the appeal of books has not diminished, even with the advent of tablets and e-readers.

There was recently a sandcastle building event in the nearby harbour area. Artists set to work and within hours had produced these remarkable sand sculptures.

"Baby's First" ornament designs

For the first weeks of summer I was busy designing ornaments for a Toronto company for Christmas 2012. Along with angels and sleigh bells were several variations on the theme of Baby's First Christmas. This was a fun assignment, bringing a new twist to a well-known theme. The designs for Christmas 2012 are under wraps for now. Here are a couple of my designs from previous years, which currently appear in the Walperts/SilverTree catalogue:

the Stork,
with a tiny cradle, baby and teddy bearand the Pram,
again with a baby and a teddy, plus a little dove on the canopy.

This week is the 17th anniversary of my own Baby's First event, but I didn't get a Pink package,

the stork sent us a Blue one.

The Apprentice Dragons

The Apprentice Dragons by Alison Baird is now in print and available from Lulu.com! Last summer I had these dragons on the drawing board, large dragons and little scampering ones that wouldn't behave. I finally pinned them down the page, chapter heading by chapter heading, merry companions for this delightful junior novel.

The sequel to The Dragon's Egg , The Apprentice Dragons picks up the incidental adventure of the goldfish, the "apprentice dragons" as they were called by the boy dragon, Lung Wang. Lung Wang returned to his ancestral home but Ai Lien's goldfish stayed in their bowl on the little girl's dresser.

Or did they?

It really is a terrific adventure,

with enough tantalizing threads for the reader to know that the story is not necessarily over yet.