2007 Finalists - Children's Literature (illustration)
Wallace Edwards, Yarker (ON), for The Painted Circus (Kids Can Press; distributed by University of Toronto Press) (ISBN 978-1-55337-720-7)
Wallace Edwards’ The Painted Circus both charms and astonishes with its ingenious, detailed, colourful and excellently rendered picture puzzles. The viewer becomes a participant in the effort to solve the book’s complex mysteries.
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Joanne Fitzgerald, Orton (ON), for The Blue Hippopotamus, text by Phoebe Gilman, based on a story by Joan Grant (North Winds Press, an imprint of Scholastic Canada; distributed by Scholastic Canada) (ISBN 978-0-439-95260-6)
Joanne Fitzgerald’s beguiling, warmly-toned and decorative series of illustrations perfectly reflects the text, helps it to tell its story, and displays the artist’s painstaking research, as well as her efforts – both in her use of colour and in her choice of detail – to accurately render the ancient setting of this tale.
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Jirina Marton, Toronto, for Marja’s Skis, text by Jean E. Pendziwol
(Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 978-0-88899-674-9)
Jirina Marton’s vivid, painterly illustrations expertly and touchingly create both of the moods required by the text – the chill, snowy, shadowy exteriors of the winter scenes, and the warm, lamp-lit interiors.
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Dušan Petričić, Toronto, for My New Shirt, text by Cary Fagan
(Published by Tundra Books; distributed by Random House of Canada) (ISBN 978-0-88776-715-9)
Dušan Petričić’s humorous, dynamic and vividly expressive pictures perfectly complement the text of My New Shirt. The device of arranging the illustrations as a series of snapshots allows the figures to move as in a flip book, and the colour choices – both subdued and vibrant – are an unusual technique for portraying the realistic but comic events of the story.
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Duncan Weller, Thunder Bay (ON), for The Boy from the Sun
(Simply Read Books; distributed by Publishers Group Canada / Raincoast Business Services) (ISBN 978-0894965-33-0)
Duncan Weller’s The Boy from the Sun, with its striking mix of techniques, lures the unsuspecting reader away from a dark, gloomy and featureless industrial-urban milieu into a brilliantly coloured alternative world of light, colour and hope.
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