Illustration © D. Yael Bernhard
This illustration from my picture book While You Are Sleeping: A Lift-the-Flap Book of Time Around the World shows a girl in England milking goats before leaving for school. Though it may look like a scene from bygone centuries, every page in this multicultural book shows a contemporary child engaged in an everyday activity. It was my intention to provide a window into lesser-known lifestyles – each page a circular portal that allows young readers to see children in other time zones tending farm animals and steering canoes, picking fruit, carrying water, and bathing a sibling under an outdoor water pump.
Writing and illustrating this book required a lot of research, and my editor and I dialogued extensively over the many choices the book presented. Especially tricky was the prospect of depicting poverty. By contemporary American standards, many of the children shown in the book live in what is considered substandard conditions. Yet having traveled a number of times to one such culture in West Africa, I understood that material deprivation is relative, and does not preclude spiritual and cultural richness. The three children in Haiti who share a mattress on an earthen floor enjoy a familial closeness that many a privileged child does not have. This is not to say they don't suffer – only that as an illustrator, I must tread carefully in what I convey to young readers. I want my children's books to offer a bright view of life in other cultures, without whitewashing the truth.
Illustration is the art of visual communication, always bearing in mind the reader, the viewer, the childish mind that will absorb the message of an image. Each spread in this book opens on a different world, and tells a story through details such as the bird nest on the crossbeam, the weathered stone wall of the barn, the girl's school clothes, and the two goats that stand neck to neck outside, having just been milked. Adding to the scene for me was the thought of my own daughter, a goatherd and milkmaid herself who has worked on numerous goat farms. Oh, those early morning chores! There's nothing like slanted sunlight on fragrant hay, and the eager bleating of goats waiting to be milked, fed, and turned out to pasture. Any experience or observations of my own that I can gather help enrich the illustrations.
While Your Are Sleeping also featured circular flaps designed like clocks that serve as teaching tools about time zones, and a global time zone map at the end. Alas, the book is out of print, as those flaps were pricey to print – but it has been reborn as an ebook. Printed copies are still available on Amazon.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
children's books • fine art • illustration
posters • cards • calendars
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D. Yael Bernhard is a professional illustrator, fine art painter, writer, arts-in-ed teacher, and health & nutrition coach. She has illustrated and/or written over forty children’s books, many with educational and multicultural themes. Her work has been featured by religious publishers, environmental causes, and healers and midwives all over the world. Find her art at the links above, and visit her illustrated nutrition newsletter, The Art of Health, here.