Last week, Beth Krommes was awarded the 2009 Caldecott Medal for her predominantly black-and-white scratchboard illustrations in The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson. It was a validation of a long process of soul-searching. After she had completed House in the Night, Krommes spent a year with no manuscript to illustrate and questioned whether to return to fine art and leave children's book illustration behind. "I had this year of figuring out, 'Do I want to go into fine arts or stay in children's books?' " she says. "I missed working with authors and other people's words, so I collaborated with Joyce Sidman, and that project is with Houghton now."
One might assume that working in black-and-white (with a judicious use of marigold) might be easier for Krommes than working with a full range of color, as she had done with her five previous picture books (one of which was a collaboration with Sidman, Butterfly Eyes). In fact it's much more challenging, says Krommes. The work for this book is more detailed than in the artist's other books, and keeping the black line crisp enough to accentuate those details is the secret to its impact. Her medium is scratchboard, and to give readers a sense of how it works, Krommes often brings Scratch Magic paper with her for presentations to classrooms or bookstores--children can scratch away an image with a sharp stick, very much like Krommes' own technique, one that has been evolving for more than a decade.
You've said that you moved from the wood engravings you created as a fine artist to scratchboard because you could move through them more quickly. Did you move to that medium in order to break into children's book illustrations?
I've been an illustrator for 20 years, but it took me 10 years to break into children's books. [The first was Grandmother Winter by Phyllis Root, published in 1999.] I thought of myself as queen of the spot illustration, for all kinds of [publications], from Time magazine to Yankee and Country Living magazines--those illustrations were all wood engravings. By the time Ann Rider, my editor at Houghton, saw my work on the cover of Cricket magazine, I was already working in scratchboard. The first 10 years I was working out how to get this technique down in a way that makes sense. I've done five books with Ann at Houghton and one at Barefoot Books [The Sun in Me].
Both wood engraving and scratchboard involve taking material away. In that way do the two mediums--wood engraving and scratchboard--share certain characteristics?
It's very similar. Wood engraving is a relief printing process known for its small scale and fine line work. An engraving is made by cutting an image into the polished end-grain of a hardwood block. They're made from small blocks and polished smooth, and you use metal engraving tools because you're cutting on endgrain. Wood engravings were first printed on letterpress and were the same height as letterpress letters, so they could print [the art] at the same time as the type. The problem with wood engraving is the blocks are very expensive to buy, and I'm not a woodworker. They're $3 per square inch, and if you make a mistake, you can't fix it.
Scratchboard allows me to get that same tiny detail as wood engravings. And the two look so much the same. It's a piece of cardboard covered with a thin layer of powdered white clay, with a layer of black india ink on top of it, so it looks totally black. You use a sharp tool to "draw" on the black, and it scratches away to expose a white line. It looks like a wood engraving. With scratchboards, if you make a mistake you can re-ink and redo your boo-boo.
How does one plan a wood engraving or scratchboard rendering? Do you sketch it out first?
I do a storyboard and several book dummies, and then a really tight pencil rough--that all takes half of the time for the project, say six months. I put the pencil roughs on the wall, so I can see how they flow one to the other. I do all the pictures [on scratchboard] at the same time--your technique gets better as you go along. Then at the very end I add the color. I photocopy the scratchboard because the photocopy black repels the watercolor, so the watercolors settle nicely between the black lines. Most of my books take a year, but House in the Night took more than a year--at least half of that was planning.
Do you mix your color at the beginning and try to mix enough for the entire book?
Yes. It's watercolor and I start with a huge clean palette and have it all there so I can reuse it.
That must have been especially important with this book, where the marigold shade has to be consistent through the entire book.
I must have seen six proofs of the book until everyone was satisfied with it. It was a complicated production. When they went to color-separate the art, the black and gold were too pale, and we had to figure out how to punch them out. [With preseparated art, each color requires its own screen, and they are overlaid on the previously printed color shade.] If I can remember correctly, we used a black and put some extra blue with it, we tried putting extra red--but because there's such tiny detail in the art, anytime you add an extra screen, the art becomes fuzzy. The detail in this book was way tighter than in any of my other books. They're printing more right now and I'm still nervous.--Jennifer M. Brown