Pumpkin Coloring Sheet

"I've got my eyes on you!"

Print them out, color them in, send me a photo, and I'll post them on my blog! 

Upcoming Autograph Party

I'll be signing books at 4Kids Books & Toys, a super cute little store, on Saturday, Nov 10 with some other nice children's book authors. Please stop on by if you're in the area - it'll be a great time to buy personalized books as Christmas presents and to chat. Our SCBWI region is hosting this Autograph Party to celebrate our members' books that were published in 2011 and 2012. I love that we get to celebrate each others' books! Help us spread the news by copying this announcement to your own blog or Facebook:

I just created a Facebook page for my art and books: https://www.facebook.com/kvaliant

Time to put on a snuggly sweater and make some hot chocolate!

Illustration Friday - "Sky"

From book #4, THE ONE AND ONLY WILLA BEAN, in a chapter book series called Little Wings that I'm illustrating for Random House. This series is super sweet and fun! Here's the summary for book #4:

Every cupid has a one-of-a-kind flying friend, right? Wrong! Willa Bean has Snooze, an owl, but the new girl in school, Lucy, has an owl, too! And Lucy's owl is bigger, and maybe even smarter, than Snooze. What if Mr. Wingston overshadows Snooze at Noble Nimbus Day? Nope, nope, nope-ity nope. Willa Bean has to make sure Snooze is the best owl at Cupid Academy!

Mom's Pumpkin Pie Recipe

My mom's pumpkin pie recipe is in my recent interview on Jama's Alphabet Soup blog, but I thought I'd copy it here too, since it's the time of year to eat, eat, eat pumpkin pie. Pumpkins play a role in the picture book I illustrated called THE GOODBYE CANCER GARDEN, and pumpkin pie is one of my all-time favorite foods. Not just any pumpkin pie, though. It has to be my mom’s recipe. The spices are just perfect in hers, and seem off to me when I try other pumpkin pies. I may be a bit biased, but try this recipe and see.

MOM’S PIE CRUST:

1-1/3 cup sifted regular flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup Crisco shortening
3 tablespoons water

Spoon the flour lightly into measuring cup. Combine flour and salt in mixing bowl. Add Crisco. With a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut in Crisco until uniform; mixture should be coarse. Sprinkle with water, a tablespoon at a time; toss with fork. Work dough into a firm ball with your hands.

On a floured surface, roll dough to a circle about 1.5” larger than inverted pie plate (9-inch deep-dish for pumpkin pie). Gently ease dough into pie plate without stretching. Fold under the top edge to make it double thickness around the rim and flute it with your fingers.

FRESH PUMPKIN FOR PIE

“Pie pumpkins” are sweeter and less grainy than the usual jack-o-lantern type pumpkins. Grocery stores or your farmer’s market should carry them during pumpkin season. One pie pumpkin yields more than enough for one pie; I’ve gotten over 5 cups of pumpkin out of a bigger one.

Cut the pumpkin in half. I’ve found the best tool for this is a cheap, little, jack-o-lantern carving knife. Scrape the insides out using an ice cream scoop. If you’d like, save the seeds and roast them in the oven with a bit of salt, oil, and/or cinnamon or any spices. Mmmm…

You can cook the pumpkin several different ways: steaming, baking, pressure cooker, or microwave. I stuck mine in a microwave bowl on high for 15 minutes or until it’s soft enough to scoop out easily.

Scoop it into a blender or blend it using a stick blender until it’s smooth. Use 15 oz for the pumpkin pie recipe below. It comes to about 1 2/3 cup if you don’t have a kitchen scale.

MOM’S PUMPKIN PIE

15 oz puréed pumpkin (you can use fresh or canned pumpkin)
2 eggs
¾ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ginger
1 cup fat-free evaporated milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Mix well sugar, salt, and spices in a small bowl. Beat eggs briefly in a large bowl. Stir in pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture. Gradually stir in evaporated milk. Pour into unbaked 9-inch deep-dish pie crust. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350 degrees; bake 40 minutes or until butter knife inserted near center comes out clean. Sometimes it takes a lot longer to bake if you use fresh pumpkin. Refrigerate leftovers. Yum…

Interview & Book Giveaway

Have you seen Jama's Alphabet Soup blog? It's a blog combining food and children's books. What could be yummier!

I've illustrated a picture book called THE GOODBYE CANCER GARDEN by Janna Matthies. Since October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Jama interviewed Janna and I on her Alphabet Soup blog about the book.

The interview is full of photos, heartfelt questions and answers, a video of Janna singing at our Bookfair, and of course recipes (including my homemade pumpkin pie!).  There's a delicious giveaway you can enter by commenting on the post - the publisher will give away 2 new copies of THE GOODBYE CANCER GARDEN. Head on over!

Highlights Illustrators' Party

Every year Highlights invites their illustrators and our families to their headquarters in Honesdale, PA for a delicious weekend. It's a lovely little town, and this is a gorgeous time of year to hit it with the falling leaves. The folks at Highlights magazine and Boyds Mills are so friendly and generous - what a neat company to illustrate for!

They fill our weekend with fun activities, but the highlight is definitely the costume party. These are illustrators creating costumes, right? So the costumes are creative and fantastic and totally overboard! This year the theme was Superheroes, and boy, we illustrators sure fancy ourselves Superheroes.

My last name is Valiant, which means we are Superhero Royalty.

When contemplating our outfits, I knew I wanted custom capes, belts, masks, and so on, but I don't sew. Instead, I found this magic tape called Stitch Witchery to secure the edges of the fabric without sewing; you iron the seams together. It can be washed, but I doubt it would hold up to too many washings. It worked great for all 4 of our belts and the girls' capes.

I cut our V logos from stiff felt and sparkly gold foam (about a dollar per sheet at Michaels) and hot-glued and hand-stitched them to our capes, belts, masks, and crowns.

For our masks, I bought a couple soft microfiber washcloths from the dollar store and used that instead of elastic - so much softer! I downloaded a free template for the shape of the masks.

To get double wear out of the costumes, we used them a couple weeks ago for our daughter's first birthday party and made it a Superbaby party!

Midsouth SCBWI Conference

The Midsouth SCBWI Conference last weekend opened with an Autograph and Dessert Party. I shared a signing table with Dan Yaccarino, and we chatted about building a career in children's books (really, he gave me advice and I nodded my head and tried to remember everything he said as I sipped wine and nibbled dessert).

Some tidbits from the conference:

Dan Yaccarino views sketchbooks as a place to dump ideas. Don't hold back and don't be afraid to fill it with mistakes - it's not precious.

In one breakout, Martha Mihalick commented on the first page of our picture book manuscripts. Something that came up a number of times was that we need to convey what's at stake for our main character. In a picture book, we should know what the conflict or problem is by about the fifth sentence.

In a panel on marketing: If you're interested in doing school visits, write the descriptions of your presentations to appeal to curriculum-based teachers. A lot of states have their core curriculum standards online for each grade. Use that same language in describing what your presentation can do for the students. Dan said he makes it as easy as possible for schools by listing everything on his website: fees for school visits, equipment needed, a high-res author photo, videos, ordering info for his books, and descriptions of his presentations. I found this especially helpful since I plan on marketing my school visits more next year when my PENGUIN CHA-CHA picture book comes out.

For something different than what I write and therefore different than what I normally hear at conferences, I took a breakout by Sarah Davies on How to Write a Great Thriller. Some of it could definitely apply to picture book writing. Sarah told us that a book could have all the action in the world, but without heart, it's dead. So true in writing for any age. And another great Sarah tidbit: The best fiction doesn't just tell us more about the character, it tells us more about ourselves.

In Martha Rago's breakout, she gave us questions to ask ourselves about the work in our portfolio. A few I want to look into are:
Does my portfolio show my passions?
Does my portfolio reflect where I want to go with my art?
Is all the work in my portfolio the kind of work I want to get?

Kristin O'Donnell Tubb and her editor, Liz Szabla, gave a most informative talk, and I think everyone in the room came away with pages of helpful notes on revising. Wow, those two were great. Revision Tip #2) Sum up your story in one word. For Kristin's novel, THE 13TH SIGN, her word was "change". For her novel, SELLING HOPE, her word was "hope". Do all your details throughout the story support that word? Do your setting and your turning points portray that word?

Julie Danielson from the blog, SEVEN IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST (love her blog!), gave an inspiring breakout on picture books. Quote from Charlotte Zolotow, "Writers writing about children are looking back. Writers writing for children are feeling back." Children have more immediate and intense emotions than adults. They're trying to make sense of the world. We have the wonder taken out of our lives as adults. Everything is new to kids. And yet, as Maurice Sendak said, "Children know everything."

My favorite part of the weekend was seeing old friends - writers and illustrators whom I've grown up in my craft alongside - and celebrating their professional and personal successes with them. What a neat group.

Indiana SCBWI Illustrator's Day

This last weekend, Indiana SCBWI hosted an Illustrator's Day. Our Illustrator Coordinator, Sharon Vargo (in purple and black in the photo), did most of the work for it and it was a lovely time!

We have dozens of illustrators in Indiana SCBWI (20-some came), but we feel like we don't them very well, so we started with having everyone introduce themselves and show us a bit of their work. What great artwork! Throughout the day we had 4 speakers:

Nathan Clement (the tall guy in the photo) spoke on how his first picture book was acquired and working with his publisher on the next 2 books. We also got a peek at his process for illustrating in Adobe Illustrator.

Michele Farley (sparkly blue shirt front and center) was on the 2012 Caldecott Committee. I could listen to her for hours! She gave us a humorous and insightful glimpse into how it all works and why she loves certain picture books. We also heard why some beautifully illustrated books ended up not being eligible for the Caldecott (on one they found out the illustrator resided outside the US, on another they decided it was more of a book with pictures rather than a picture book, etc.)

Patrick Girouard (other guy) shared about the various markets that children's illustrators can find work in. He's done just about everything, and urged us to look at anything that has an illustration similar to our style on it and contact the people who made it. Easy enough way to market.

Jennifer Zivoin (dark hair) discussed the process of finding and working with an art rep and how to figure out if you're ready for one or even if you need one.

4Kids Books in Zionsville let us use their meeting room, and because of a regional grant from SCBWI, we were able to offer this Illustrator's Day including lunch for free for our SCBWI members. How cool is that!

SCBWI Baby Quilts

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) is a huge organization started by Lin Oliver and Steve Mooser. Now, Steve's daughter and Lin's daughter-in-law both work at SCBWI and are both pregnant. So some of my fellow, sneaky Regional Advisors asked some children's book illustrators to create art pieces to be made into quilts to give to the new mommies this weekend at the SCBWI International Conference. They turned out simply gorgeous! 

I was thrilled to illustrate a square on each and stunned when I received the photos and saw my humble penguins dancing next to Strega Nona (illustrated by Tomie dePaola - yes, THE Tomie dePaola) and Grover (illustrated by Laurent Linn who worked on Sesame Street). Whoa!!!

I'm sure you can figure out some of the other contributors by their well-known characters. Here's the full list from Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld, the head secret organizer of this:
Dan Yaccarino, Fred Koehler, Frank Remkiewicz, Henry Cole, Kristi Valiant, Mark Teague, Paul Zelinsky, Dan Santat, Marla Frazee, Priscilla Burris, Linda Shute, Kathy Blackmore, Janeen Mason, Laurent Linn, David Diaz, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Richard Jesse Watson, Christina Tugeau, Jeni Reeves, Loreen Leedy, Mary Ann Fraser, Jamie Temairik, Julie Paschkis, Elizabeth Dumbela, Pat Cummings, Leeza Hernandez, Brian Pinkney, E.B. Lewis, Ethan Long, Tomie de Paola, and Yuyi Morales.

Won a Marketing Grant from SCBWI!

Whoa, just found out tonight that I won a Marketing Grant from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for my picture book, PENGUIN CHA-CHA, that's coming out next year! How totally sweet!! I have loads of fun ideas for marketing this book (book launch, blog tour, dance days, etc), and will post about marketing tips as I go along. I'm so thankful for SCBWI; they've been a huge helping hand in my career and now are even helping with marketing my books. What a smily night!