The best illustrated books packed full of snow

Growing up, I was enchanted by Jill Barklem’s detailed watercolour illustrations of this miniature world of mice. The cosy, fire-lit interiors—crammed with furniture, food and flora—are so intricately drawn as to give you the feeling you could walk through them.

Barklem also makes liberal use of one of my favourite devices for visual exploration: the cutaway. It’s used to excellent effect here as the mice carve out even more real estate under the snow, namely an Ice Hall for their winter ball.

These illustrations instilled in me a love of detailed artwork, and faithful rendering of a three-dimensional environment, that persists to this day in my own style.

Shepard’s roughly-hatched illustrations are a symbiotic match for the scruffy charm and humour of Milne’s stories.

Only a couple of chapters feature snow, but they loom so large in my imagination—Pooh and Piglet following their own footsteps in search of the legendary Heffalump; and building Eeyore’s new house at Pooh Corner to shelter him from the snowstorm (unwittingly using Eeyore’s existing house as their source of wood).

As Eeyore gets buried in the snow, I can feel the cold wind with each economical scratch of Shepherd’s pen nib.

One reason I love snow so much is the way it muffles the world, making everything soft and fuzzy around the edges.

The essence of that feeling is distilled perfectly in Lewis’s beautifully-lit pastel and pencil illustrations, squeezing so much colour into every inch—even of “white” snow.

It’s a lovely story about a little boy taking responsibility for his action. I love a children’s book with a final illustration that undercuts the sentimentality of any preceding message, and this does that hilariously.  

This story is a great exploration of FOMO for young children.

Two best friends are split apart when one moves a long way away. Herman the bear feels increasingly left behind and obsolete when he reads Henry the racoon’s correspondence (actual letters pasted into the book) describing new friends in his sunny new home. Herman feels too miserable to write back; when he finally does, deep snow has set in and the post office has closed for the winter.

So he sets off into the swirling blizzard to deliver the letter himself—up steep cliffs and frozen waterfalls, over creaking crevices and the tallest mountains, all gorgeously painted by Percival in a perfect balance of three-dimensionality and looseness. At the end, the pictures do the talking: Herman and Henry are still best friends.

Like millions of others, I grieved when the magnificent Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip came to an end. So, this last published collection was one to savour.

I loved how Bill Watterson would draw snowy scenes, bringing them to life with a few ragged strokes of India ink, and there are few better examples than the last strip he ever created, which closes this book.

“Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new!… It’s like having a big sheet of white paper to draw on!” declares Hobbes (that connection with an un-started picture’s potential is one reason I find snow so visually compelling).

“A day full of possibilities!” replies Calvin. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…”

The final huge panel sees them launch into the expanse of white on their sled, whose tracks trace the topography with glorious minimalism: “… Let’s go exploring!”

What an end to ten years of cartooning brilliance from Watterson. It’s up to us to imagine the journey from here on in, just as our imaginations fill in all the blank space within his beautiful snowscapes.