The “Crow Made A Friend” TLC Blog Tour

I like rainbows and I like birds. Put the two together and you’re bound to get something just like author/illustrator Margaret Peot’s beautiful, vibrant-colored crow in her “I Like to Read” picture book Crow Made a Friend, published this year by Holiday House.

The story is sweet and simple. It’s about a lonely crow who literally tries to make a friend, first from leaves and sticks and then from snow. He soon learns that there’s nothing better than a real friend, except maybe a family.

The pen, ink and watercolor illustrations are charming and each one features our new rainbow-hued feathered friend. Margaret Peot stopped by Frog on a Blog to share with us the origin story of her lovely early reader picture book Crow Made a Friend along with a few other beautiful birds.

—————————————————————————

The Origin Story of the Early Reader Picture Book CROW MADE A FRIEND

by Margaret Peot

Crows have fascinated me since I was a kid, and appear everywhere in my artwork. I have made drawings of them, paintings, woodcuts, stencils, even crow rubber stamps, so they can fly through whatever painted landscapes I make!

I love stories about crows and their antics—how smart they are, the trouble they get into, the problems they can solve. There are Aesop’s fables of various Crow adventures, Native American stories of trickster Crows, beautiful Mughal miniatures where a Crow appears speaking at a Conference of the Birds. Crows make appearances in my woodcuts often:

The ability of crows to sort out the solutions to various problems got me thinking about illustrating a picture book of a Crow making a friend—really MAKING a friend out of whatever materials were around. This was my first try, a woodcut crow making friends with shapes:

Then I decided that I wanted Crow to make friends out of real things from his world, sticks, leaves, a crab apple, and snow. And that idea turned into the watercolor and ink paintings in Crow Made a Friend, an I Like to Read picture book from the wonderful publisher Holiday House.