About a year ago I talked about picturebooks centered on
French trees. At the time I'd just come across a ton of them, and it seemed appropriate to write about them. I recently bought Britta Teckentrup's Tree, and thought I'd revisit the subject, though this time opening it up a bit.
Depictions of trees in picturebooks can have a range of dynamism—with the changing seasons we get different colors, styles, and interpretations. Today we’ll be talking about Marc Martin’s A Forest, Britta Teckentrup's Tree, Julia Rawlinson’s and Tiphanie Beeke’s Fletcher and the Falling Leaves, and Carin Berger’s The Little Yellow Leaf, all of which showcase a wide range of artistic styles and techniques that reflect the illustrators’ strengths and breadths of technique.
First on today's list is Marc Martin's debut picturebook A Forest. I found this book when I was in the UK for work and the second I saw it I knew I wanted it. You guys, this book is BEAUTIFUL. Although the illustrations are technically mixed media, Martin primarily uses watercolor. And he does it in the exact right way, intensifying destructive moments with dense, heavy brush strokes and then calming things down with sparse, light coloring. A Forest recounts the tale of a nameless forest that's torn down by greedy industrialists and replaced with a city. Nature wins out in the end, essentially drowning the city and washing it away, leaving one tree to eventually turn into a forest. The text is sparse and carefully framed by the illustrations, amplifying the message on each page.
