Wednesday, July 09, 2008

One Gray Mouse



From Lookybook:

The world of a little mouse is a grand and spectacular place when it is created by author Eugenie Fernandes and illustrated by her daughter Kim Fernandes. Together, this family team has brought us three fabulously vivid and charming stories—each revolving around a single mouse.

The signature of this trio of books is their three-dimensional illustrations. Each is hand-sculpted using Fimo clay—the kind often used for kid’s craft projects requiring baking to harden. Kim portrays each scene with painstaking attention to the tiniest detail and texture—like a sheep’s curly wool coat, or the golden straw piled on a barn’s wooden floor. Given the size of the mouse, many elements are grand in scale—like the bed-sized sneaker that the mouse inhabits in The Sleepy Little Mouse or her teapot house in Busy Little Mouse.

Kim has an expert fondness for plants, flowers and other garden foliage and is anything but shy about expressing nature’s rich palette—like the exploding garden in Big Week for Little Mouse. What’s so impressive is the movement that she creates with what you would think is a stiff medium. As the dog leaps into the pig’s pen, mud goes everywhere. Or the hummingbird that hovers above as the mouse navigates the turbulent sea on the back of a seahorse. And it is the adorable expressions on each of the animal’s faces that will ultimately captivate a child, (and a parent), and draw them deeper into this wonderfully believable mouseland. It will also leave you wondering a bit, “how did she make these tiny worlds with her not so tiny hands?”