Hannan The Gardener

We recently had lunch with some friends of ours who are jewish. They have a little one year old girl, so it was easier for us to go to their place. One of the great things about having friends with kids is that they always have lots of children's books! I fell in love with this one in hebrew, Hannan the Gardener by Rinat Hoffer. They got it in Israel and it isn't available here, so my friend let me borrow it for a while.

Hebrew books are cool, they read right to left so they open backwards. I just loved the colours in this one, the shapes he uses, the texture from the watercolours, and that the book itself is square. And the story is just beautiful too. I can't read hebrew but from memory it goes a little something like this....


This is the cover. See that little heart in his pocket? Hannan plants it and out grows a heart-tree.


He picks from its bounty...


and gives (ok sells) them to his friends. They each buy things of their own colour (there are about 4 spreads of friends buying fruit - red, yellow, green, pink....)
He says inside each fruit is something special.


They each find a heart inside their fruit and in turn grow their own heart trees!

It's so beautiful. I'm really in love with it. I keep picking it up and leafing through it over and over again. I think the black lines were done with a pen but they're just so perfect they almost look digital. He must have had a slew of rulers and circles to trace at his disposal. I also love the textures he creates with the watercolours. You can see a detail of that in the back cover here. I'd like to try doing more of that personally.

Well I haven't painted for over a month and I'm aching for it. I just (today) finished a digital illustration project, so as much as I love my computer, I'll be happy for it to gather a bit of dust so that I can get back to brush and paper. Well, except for my blog postings of course! ;-) I'm hoping for a good I-F topic to get me back into the swing as well... so more soon....