Book Report: Bear and Wolf

34. Daniel Salmieri (story and illustrations),  Bear and Wolf (2018) (12/28/18)

If I'm going to finish fifty books by January 29, I'd better get cracking: I may be spending quite a bit of time in the young children's section of the library the next few weeks.

This book I read about in Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, her year-end post on the "loveliest children's books." And indeed: Bear and Wolf is exquisite, right from the first meeting of these two animals in the snowy whiteness, through their quiet wander through the woods and onto a vast lake, and ending with . . . well, I don't want to give it all away. But overall, the book is very much about being present and experiencing life fully—in good company. Who can argue with that?

And the illustrations! In an interview, Salmieri says that the story itself came very quickly—in an afternoon (well, after a few false starts)—but the illustrations required many steps, starting with black-and-white sketches. It then "took me months to figure out how the final art would look. I obsessively made tests and attempts at final paintings and nothing felt right. I wasn’t getting the softness and texture of the sketches. Finally, I took a close look at the sketches to understand what was working so well about them. I imagined how I could achieve the same subtle, soft textures and values in color. Eventually, I experimented with shaving colored pencil pigments right onto the paper and rubbing them in with my thumb. That was the missing piece that helped me figure out how the book could be colored. I used watercolor, gouache, colored pencils, and crushed colored pencil pigment to make the illustrations. I approached each one as a separate painting to stand on its own and tried to get the feeling right for each spread." (You can see a few of the sketch vs. final pairings in the interview.) From start to finish, the book took four years to bring to fruition.

Here are a few of the spreads:

I will be rereading this book. It left me with a very peaceful, hopeful feeling. I can use as much of that as I can get.