100 books like How to Help a Pumpkin Grow

The absolutely gorgeous watercolors in Cris Grimly’s 10 Spooky Pumpkins jumped out and stole my heart! Rich color and high contrast pump up the Halloween mood, while his sensitivity to letting the washes flow in their own way shows a freedom and respect for the watercolor medium.

Grimly’s characters, including witches, ghosts and goblins to name a few, are stylized enough to balance the creepy with fun originality. Outlining watercolor with an ink line can flatten the art. But Grimly picks and chooses his sepia line work to draw you into detail, and then holds off to let the washes sing, creating great depth and space in his scenes.

This book makes me want to paint more night scenes! Thanks, Cris Grimly!

While the imagery and color palette seem simplified in Eric Rohmann’s Bone Dog, the mastery of his black line carries the art for me in this touching tale about a boy and his dog.

Rohmann uses a woodcut technique to create his black outlining. To actually carve around a drawn image, leaving the drawing raised up to ink and print on paper takes a tremendous amount of time for a 32-page picture book. The results are well worth it, these pages are stunning.

What I really love is the little bits of black around many of the carved areas having picked up some of the ink and left on the print, giving an added sense of movement, similar to cartoon motion lines. The dancing skeletons and running dogs really come to life!

The background washes of rich blue watercolor enhance the Halloween night mood, resulting in a beautiful mix of… show more.

While I am an intermediate student in digital art making, I am a big fan of digital art well done. Cale Atkinson’s fun ghosty picture book, Sir Simon: Super Scarer was a delight to discover!

Atkinson combines stylized skewed perspectives with a wealth of interesting design elements like multiple type styles, picture frame vignettes to divide up a page, hidden ghosts in wallpaper, inventive word balloons, cutaways, and active layouts to move the reader through this fun book.

What I really loved was Atkinson’s use of gravely textures over layers of saturated color favoring turquoise and terra cotta, with a smattering of purples and olives that made me smile. 

Sir Simon goes through a heartwarming change in the story, but I had already fallen in love with his simply designed, emotional charm. 

Hurrah, Cale Atkinson!

While I love traditional painting as well as digital art, I also love imaginative and unconventional mixings of media. Harriet Muncaster’s sweet book I Am a Witch’s Cat exhibits beautifully staged photos of hand-built miniature scenes complete with fabrics and of all things, flat cut-out line art with simple color.

Added elements of strong light sources pouring in through windows and doors casting shadows that enhance the 3D effects. Little details like sunlight passing through a stained glass-like door cast a charming shadow that bends around a corner.

All the photographed scenes are faced with a flat 2D illustration with the type on the opposite page. The resulting images of hand-built props mixed up with flat line art make me want to pull out the old dollhouse and dress it up.

Cheers to you, Harriet Muncaster!

Not only is this a complete history of pumpkins – it’s a fascinating history of America. There’s good, solid jack-o-lantern history alongside descriptions and photos of the gazillion ways we celebrate, decorate, grow, eat, idolize, and display pumpkins. Emerging as a symbol of lust in medieval Europe, the pumpkin became synonymous with the American wilderness, then came to stand for rustic life, and now Halloween. If you like history and Americana as well as Halloween, you’ll like this one. And if you’re a Halloween nerd like I am, you’ll love the 100 pages of footnotes.

Two adorable mice enter a contest, one to carve the biggest jack-o’-lantern ever, the other to grow the biggest pumpkin ever. It turns out that they fall in love with the same pumpkin. One waters it during the day. The other waters it at night. Neither mouse knows about the other’s efforts. When they discover that they’re each contributing to the same pumpkin’s growth, they decide to work together to win the competition. This classic book with endearing illustrations will appeal to kids who love pumpkins and who value cooperative effort to achieve success.

The simplicity of the illustrations here is so marvelous and cute! I love how this book shows that you don’t have to be just like the other pumpkins—or the other kids—to be happy and find your place in the world. This is a nice, short one (which is so needed for bedtime), and the pages where the pumpkin is getting carved are so striking and illustrated. Don’t worry, kids won’t be scared about the dear pumpkin getting carved—it’s presented as the pumpkin’s biggest dream to be a jack o’ lantern! 

Julia Henry’s third book in her Garden Squad Mysteries makes my list.

In Digging Up the Remains, Julia Henry brings readers a modern Jessica Fletcher with her character Lilly Jayne. Senior citizen Lilly is roommates with Delia, nearly forty years age difference! Somehow this works exquisitely for both of them. The rest of the characters span in age, but not in ethnicity, although there is small LGBT representation.

The theme of Digging Up the Remains is about secrets. The skeletons are in the closet so to speak.

Due to the contemporary setting this book’s way of showing the status of the journalism business is accurate. Now the world favors unsubstantiated, high-traffic live feeds of the “average” citizen hoping to get 15 minutes of fame and go viral. 

The Busy Busy Day is a lovely picture book that gently allows the children to discover for themselves the different indications that spring has arrived. I like the way it highlights the importance of caring for and appreciating nature even if it is in our own back garden. 

The illustrations are beautiful. I am always in awe of Daniel Howarth’s illustrations and have been lucky enough for him to have illustrated some of my own books. The clever way he illustrates the different characters showing their emotions makes them come to life on the page. You can laugh along with the children as Ginger the Cat and Floppy the Rabbit get into a muddle whilst gardening.

Out for a walk one day in his dreary urban neighbourhood, Liam stumbles upon a patch of dying plants growing around an abandoned railway track. Although he knows nothing about growing things, he can see the plants need a gardener, so he decides to help them. 

The story of what happens to the garden is charming, but what makes this book a favourite of mine is Liam—a little master of equanimity and confidence. Instead of feeling insecure about his lack of gardening experience and knowledge, he sees a need and gets to work. Rather than fretting about his failed attempts, he keeps trying and finds better ways. Liam embodies the power of starting small and caring for one thing at a time.