This week: Outside In by Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby

This book!!! I don’t need to tell you I’m in love, but oh I’m so in love. A great picture book is a work of art, and while I fully appreciate the crucial part the words play, sometimes for me the pictures are everything in the experience of certain books, like this one. I acknowledge Deborah Underwood’s beautiful words, like lush ground and atmosphere for Cindy Derby’s stunning (and Caldecott Honor-winning!) visual story.

The art in Outside In makes me think about edges, middles, and print parameters—limitations, for better or worse—of the picture book form. For a picture book illustrator, especially one working with traditional/non-digital materials as Derby is here, there are very unromantic-sounding things like gutter, bleed, crop, drum scanner specs, and final printed book size to consider and accommodate. These are concerns an artist doesn’t have when creating a drawing or painting for unrestricted, wholly expressive purposes.

Yet Cindy Derby’s pictures for Outside In suggest an infinite world, almost as if they are defying the known edges. Her sun drenched, morning dewed, after-the-rain, buzzing and birdsong-filled landscapes and interiors seem to keep going beyond the given page/spread in a way that makes the book’s world seem giant and boundless. I almost forget I’m looking at a book.

Rendered masterfully in watercolor paint with graphite, the illustrations have gorgeous atmosphere. I especially love the way Derby activates open space and the in-betweens with the subtlest washes of color and other loose, beautiful visual events where the watery pigments and powdered graphite are allowed to travel and dance on the cold press paper. There’s even more magic at work here—from the illustration notes at the back of the book: “Some of the lines were created using dried flower stems and thread soaked in ink.” Wow.

Spread from Outside In, image from the illustrator’s website cindyderby.com