Celebrate Children's Day with a Book Sale!

Celebrate El día de los niños / El día de los libros (Children's Day / Book Day) with a special 50% discount off books purchased from Arte Público Press! This special offer is good on orders until April 30, 2012 for events celebrating El día de los niños / El día de los libros.

This sale is a great chance to pick up Adelita and the Veggie Cousins on the cheap! (Go ahead and collect other great titles from their catalog while you're at it!)

"On the first day of her new school, Adelita learns that vegetables can have similarities and differences, as can new friends. . . . The dual message of nutrition and diversity will probably find its place in today's curriculum and can certainly augment units on food, language and culture."

-Kirkus Reviews

"The last two pages have a recipe in both English and Spanish for the '1-2-3 Super Calabacita Soup.' The bold, colorful illustrations capture the action well."

-School Library Journal

To take advantage of this offer, call 1-800-633-ARTE or e-mail your order to bkorders@uh.edu. To see a sample of the book, click here.

Buy a Book or the Puppy Gets It!**

My dog implores you to shop at Arte Publico's pretty amazing holiday sale:

Save 25%

Enjoy 25% off + free shipping when you buy books from www.artepublicopress.com now until December 20, 2011. Just enter coupon code HOLIDAY11 at the end of the check-out process and enjoy!

You can now pick up the newest bilingual children's book I illustrated, Adelita and the Veggie Cousins, for a better deal than at Amazon! So for my dog's sake, buy a book…..please!

**Of course I'm kidding, folks! This was all the dog's idea, I swear.

Illustration Friday: Fuel

Food is fuel, and if you fill your tank with junk, your engine won’t run very well! In this week’s submission for Illustration Friday, Adelita’s teacher shares the delicious bounty of nature with her class as she teaches them about healthy eating. This illustration was created for Adelita and the Veggie Cousins, a forthcoming bilingual picture book that I illustrated for Arte Público Press. Watch for the book’s official debut on October 31^st!

Have a great weekend, everybody! 

Activity Page: Farm Fresh Veggies!

Who doesn’t love the farmer’s market and fresh produce? I’m very excited about the impending release of Adelita and the Veggie Cousins, a bilingual children’s book I illustrated that celebrates fruits and vegetables, and wanted to share a coloring page this week. 

I loved working on this project: as a foodie, I learned a lot about South American root vegetables that I didn’t even know existed before, and as a Latina, I appreciate my publisher’s dedication to the health and well-being of Latino children. As part of Arte Publico Press’ ¡Salud Familia! initiative, their mission is to expand access to important health and nutrition information through lively and engaging bilingual children’s books like this one, available for free online and in health clinics in over a dozen states.

The hardcover version of this book will be available for purchase this fall. Until then, download the activity page and have fun!

Forgotten Files: Yarn Chalk Drawing

Frequent moves as a child and a natural aversion to hoarding led me to regularly cull my collection of artwork over the years. I tend to only keep the stuff that I really like or that holds the fondest memories. As this New York Times article attests, kids produce a ton of artwork in school these days and if not kept in check, it’ll soon be more than any parent (or grown-up artist) can handle.

This special mixed media piece of mine has fortunately survived the last two decades. It was created sometime in 1988 or 1989 and was featured in an art exhibit in Colorado. This was art that triggered, for the first time, that immense feeling of satisfaction when everything is going the way I want, when hours can fly by but I’m so happily occupied that I don’t even notice. It’s a feeling I strive for whenever I’m creating something.

I scanned this artwork for my digital archive so that a facsimile exists even if something happens to the original. Additionally, as I was illustrating the forthcoming Adelita and the Veggie Cousins, I found a great opportunity to let this piece live on in printed form:

You can see the artwork in the hallway, just behind Adelita’s head in the upper left corner of the illustration.

I can sympathize with parents today who have more children’s artwork than they can store, but it’s important to maintain some kind of archive for the young artist. These days it’s easy enough to scan everything but only physically store the most treasured pieces. You never know what will become of it!