Children’s Books
It’s been a slice! Of Love and Pies takes the Literary Titan Award for children’s picture books.
A HUGE thank you to the folks at Literary Titan for their unending dedication to books, authors, publishers, and booksellers! And an additional gigantic thank you for bestowing the Literary Titan Book Award for Children’s Picture Books to Of Love and Pies. —Thanks for stopping by!Score your copy of Of Love and Pies Check out more…
Sweet! Of Love and Pies is cooking with all 4 of Literary Titan’s stars!
Of Love and Pies is an engaging picture book written and illustrated by Sheila McGraw. The narrator suggests that every time she says I love you a baker will bake three or five pies. It starts out with pies for breakfast lunch and dinner. Everyone loves having pie whenever they want. Soon there are more…
One helping wasn’t enough for Readers’ Favorite! They served up TWO five-star reviews for Of Love and Pies!
I can’t imagine having too many pies. But, perhaps like everything else, too much of any one thing can become overwhelming. How about too many “I love you’s”? Are the quantities of pies and the number of times someone says “I love you” connected? If so, there would be so many pies in the world…
I Love You Too, I Love You Three Slinging Paint Part 2
Technique After some experimentation with new materials, I fell back on my tried and true method. Using a fine semi-transparent rag paper, which is pretty great all-round for pastels, markers, and colored pencils. First, assembly-line style, I ruled the paper to 125% of the book’s size. (Always work larger than the final print size.) This paper…
I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Cover Story
Choosing the cover design Things I like in a book cover: I love negative-space, also called white-space (which can be any color but in this case, it’s a shiny clean white). Negative space isn’t wasted space. The functional difference between a shovel and a pitchfork is the metal that’s missing. That missing metal has…
I Love You Too, I Love You Three Slinging Paint
Adding color. A journey from. . . This. . . . . .to this! The story-boarding is done, necessary text changes have been made and all has been approved! Now comes the color. Mr. publisher says he doesn’t want I Love You too, I Love You Three confused with any previous books. Got the blues?…
I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Style
Illustrating the Book… The Choices. This sweet book, I Love You Too, I Love You Three, (written by Wendy Tugwood, with my illustrations, and published by Firefly Books) turned out to be so well-paced, so well received, that it’s hard to believe there might be a challenge or two in the making of the art… but there were….
I Love You Too, I Love You Three Storyboarding
Illustrating the Book… Storyboarding. Once the direction and general style of the images for a book are settled, step one in the art-process of illustrating a kids’ book comes with the storyboard. Storyboarding solves the most basic issues in the appearance of the book, which are a whole bunch of things: style, format, continuity, composition,…
I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Manuscript
The Manuscript Arrives Join me in this series for a tour of the creation of a children’s book from conception to bookstore shelf. Wendy Tugwood’s story I Love You Too, I Love You Three landed in my email inbox in the spring of 2014. There was something magical about her gentle rhyming story. Over time we emailed and…
Thoughts on Rhyming Books…
While rhyming text seems to fall in and out of favor, I’ve illustrated several rhyming books: I Promise I’ll Find You, Lightning Bug Thunder, and I Love You Too, I Love You Three. And they were all fun and a delight to work on. Over the last few years, I’ve found that whenever I write…
Hi! I'm Sheila McGraw. Welcome, and thank you for visiting. I began my career toiling in the “sequin-mines” of advertising and fashion houses as an illustrator and copywriter. Then, in 1986, Firefly Books approached me to illustrate a little book titled, Love You Forever.
Welcome hyper-typers and paint-slingers to my blog about writing, illustrating, and publishing books for kids and adults; art, crafting, and whatever else tickles my fancy.
