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Mary Azarian (born 1940) is an American woodcut artist and children's book illustrator. She won the 1999 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. It tells about the life of Wilson Bentley. She lives in Calais, Vermont. She produces original prints and has illustrated over 50 books.
Azarian grew up on her grandfather's farm on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Her grandfather’s farm had thousands of chicken along with geese that would bother the customers that came to buy his eggs. Azarian’s uncle grew vegetables. Being around her family gardens sparked her lifelong interest in nature. When she was young, she would spend her time exploring the woods and fields with her pony named Pasty. [1]
She began drawing and painting at an early age. In 4th grade, she did her first relief print of woodcuts. This piece of art was a 3 in × 4 in (76 mm × 102 mm) lino block of an angel with the name NOEL at the bottom. She ran into a problem and learned a valuable lesson from this project; words must be reversed when doing a woodcut. Her finished product read LEON. [1]
Azarian continued to lino cuts until she later attended Smith College, where she studied printmaking and painting with one of the great 20th century printmakers, Leonard Baskin.
After she graduated from Smith College, she moved to farm in Vermont. Azarian and her husband raised horses, oxen, chickens, a jersey milk cow, a sheep, and a goat with the help of their three sons. [1]
Before beginning her career as a full-time artist, Azarian taught in a one-room schoolhouse for three years. After she finished her three years of teaching, she decided she wanted to make a living selling woodcut prints. She began producing her prints by hand and in black and white. Eventually, she began adding color to her prints by hand. Finally, she found an old Vandercook proof press and began using it to produce the prints. [1]
In the 1970s, Azarian began illustrating children’s books. In 1999, the American Library Association awarded Azarian the Caldecott Medal for her illustrations in the children's book, Snowflake Bentley. [2]
Mary Azarian has three sons with folk musician and artist Tom Azarian, also known by the name of Tom Banjo. Though she took his last name, the two never legally married, and separated in 1982. She also has four grandchildren. [1]
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink, while characters or images at surface level carry the ink to produce the print. The block is cut along the wood grain. The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas.
A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images.
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, also known as Snowflake Bentley, was an American meteorologist and photographer, who was the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated, and elaborated the theory that no two snowflakes are alike.
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and novelist, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Although strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister, political organizer and radical social activist Harry F. Ward, the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union on its founding in 1920.
Evaline Ness was an American commercial artist, illustrator, and author of children's books. She illustrated more than thirty books for young readers and wrote several of her own. She used a great variety of artistic media and methods.
Many Moons is an American children's picture book written by James Thurber and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin. It was published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1943 and won the Caldecott Medal in 1944. The book centers around a young girl, Princess Lenore, who becomes ill, and only one thing will make her better: the Moon. The book was Thurber's first picture book.
Barbara Cooney was an American writer and illustrator of 110 children's books, published for over sixty years. She received two Caldecott Medals for her work on Chanticleer and the Fox (1958) and Ox-Cart Man (1979), and a National Book Award for Miss Rumphius (1982). Her books have been translated into ten languages.
Marie Hall Ets was an American writer and illustrator who is best known for children's picture books.
Gail E. Haley is an American writer and illustrator. She has won the annual awards for children's book illustration from both the American and British librarians, for two different picture books. She won the 1971 Caldecott Medal for A Story a Story, which she retold from an African folktale, and the 1976 Kate Greenaway Medal for The Post Office Cat, her own historical fiction about a London post office.
May "Nonny" Hogrogian was an American writer and illustrator, known best for children's picture books. She won two annual Caldecott Medals for U.S. children's book illustrations. From childhood she preferred folk and fairy tales, poetry, fantasy and stories. The New York Times attributes her for bringing multiculturalism to children's literature by evoking her Armenian heritage. Another children's author describes her approach to American culture as that of a patchwork quilt, rather than a melting pot.
Snowflake Bentley is a children's picture book written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian. Published in 1998, the book is about Wilson Bentley, the first known photographer of snowflakes. Azarian won the 1999 Caldecott Medal for her illustrations. In 2003, the company Weston Woods Studios, Inc. adapted the book to a film, narrated by Sean Astin. It was released on DVD in 2004.
Earl Bradley Lewis is an American artist and illustrator. He is best known for his watercolor illustrations for children's books such as Jacqueline Woodson’s The Other Side and Jabari Asim’s Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis.
Edmund Evans was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. He specialized in full-colour printing, a technique which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Little is known about his life, although he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London.
Toy books were illustrated children's books that became popular in England's Victorian era. The earliest toy books were typically paperbound, with six illustrated pages and sold for sixpence; larger and more elaborate editions became popular later in the century. In the mid-19th century picture books began to be made for children, with illustrations dominating the text rather than supplementing the text.
Beth Krommes is an American illustrator of children's books. Her work has won several honors, including the 2002 Golden Kite Award and the 2009 Caldecott Medal.
In the children's picture book Chanticleer and the Fox, Barbara Cooney adapted and illustrated the story of Chanticleer and the Fox as told in The Nun's Priest's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, translated by Robert Mayer Lumiansky. Published by Crowell in 1958, it was the recipient of the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1959. It was also one of the Horn Book "best books of the year".
Mary Buff and Conrad Buff II were married creators of illustrated children's books. Between 1937 and 1968, they collaborated on both text and illustrations to produce 14 books; four times they were a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal or Newbery Medal. They had a profound impact on children's literature in the middle of the 20th century.
Holly Meade was an American artist best known for her woodblock prints and for her illustrations for children's picture books.
Ethel Mars was an American woodblock print artist, known for her white-line woodcut prints, also known as Provincetown Prints, and a children's book illustrator. She had a lifelong relationship with fellow artist Maud Hunt Squire, with whom she lived in Paris and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Jacqueline Briggs Martin is an American author of children's literature and a teacher of creative writing. Her books have received several awards including, Caldecott Medal (1999), Golden Kite Award, Lupine Award, Award for Excellence in Children's Literature from the Sterling North Society, and the Green Earth Award (2018). She has taught at Cornell College, University of Iowa, The Loft Literary Center, and is on faculty at Hamline University.
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