Author drawn to illustrator's style

For an illustrator, getting the opportunity to land a first assignment requires patience, perseverance and good timing.

For Nancy Michaud ’06 (SFA), her posting with an established Web site for creative resources, Portfolios.com, resulted in the opportunity to be discovered by a published author of children’s books.

Poet and author Ana Monnar, a veteran elementary school teacher and reading curriculum specialist, was drawn to Michaud’s style of illustration.

Their book, Heart of Stone (Readers Are Leaders U.S.A.), a fairy tale story about the events leading to the marriage of a prince, was published in February.

“I looked through hundreds of portfolios online. The colors she uses are very rich. Her style fit exactly what I needed for a fairy tale,” says Monnar.

“It worked out perfectly. I could not ask for a better illustrator.”

A painter who works primarily in acrylics and watercolors, Michaud specializes in animal portraiture, plants, and children’s illustration.

Since graduating last year with a degree in illustration, she has been working on developing her style and expanding her portfolio of work while working part-time jobs that keep her connected to art, including serving as an assistant in the studio of Connecticut sculptor Karen Rossi and providing therapeutic art activities in a nursing home.

After reading the story and exchanging ideas with Monnar, Michaud began to break up the narrative into sections and developed thumbnail sketches for the 13 illustrations that would appear in the book, including the cover. 

She says juggling the creation of so many new works was a familiar task.

“It was pretty close to what I was going through in the program at UConn,” she says.

“Sometimes I had four studio classes and projects due at the same time. I learned how to manage my time.”

Michaud says to maintain a visual continuity through the many illustrations, she painted all of her background scenes at the same time.

She also reviewed her reference file of images in order to help create the story’s characters.

“As you work on 13 paintings, your ability level will change as you practice and learn. You want them to be consistent,” she says.

 “I used photos I had compiled over the years of people seen at different angles.  A lot of the characters are first seen up close, but then from a distance.”

Michaud says she was satisfied when she completed the book, but recognizes she is still developing as an artist.

“Illustrating a book is a significant job. Most people wouldn’t look to hire an inexperienced person. I’m trying to refine my work. Comparing my work to how it was two years ago, there’s been a lot of improvement,” she says.

“But comparing it to other illustrators, I’ve got a long way to go.” 

— Kenneth Best

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems
1959-2007Lewis Turco ’59 (CLAS)
(Star Cloud Press)

Lewis Turco is a poet’s poet. A respected teacher for nearly four decades at Cleveland State University and the State University of New York at Oswego, he wrote The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which is known as the poet’s Bible. His writing has been honored with the nation’s most respected poetry awards. Fearful Pleasures brings together Turco’s life’s work of rich imagery, captured moments, melancholy thoughts, ghosts, cats, the rooms of a house and much more. In one of his more daring works, Turco takes phrases and entire lines from letters written by Emily Dickinson and weaves them together into poems.  Through more than 600 pages, he still is offering lessons on poetry.

On Harper Lee
Alice Hall Petry ’73 (ED)
(Univ. of Tennessee Press)

Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1961 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most enduring works of southern fiction. However, as Alice Hall Petry notes, it became a “one hit wonder” for Lee, who never published another novel. While there have been essays and some critical analysis of Lee and her book over the years, there is little serious secondary literature on a book that is required reading for nearly 70 percent of public and parochial school students. Petry, professor of English at Southern Illinois University, provides a remedy with an edited collection of critical essays and scholarly works. The anthology provides familiar essays by Doris Betts, Gerald Early, and Nichelle D. Tramble, along with controversial views by Laura Fine.

Edinburgh Days, Or Doing What I Want To Do
Sam Pickering
(University of South Carolina Press)

UConn’s inspiring essayist spent the winter and spring of 2004 on a fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, resulting in his 20th book. A self-described “urban spelunker,” Pickering’s regular walks around town lead him to daily explorations around the Scottish capital, where he reflects on what he sees as well as what he feels. He offers his observations on pubs, antique shops, museums and graveyards along with soccer and boxing matches. Often his mind goes back to his native Tennessee, conjuring up humorous asides that may be real or figments of his imagination. “I have long been a traveler in little things,” he writes. Fortunately, the reader gets to enjoy the journey.