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Author: Judy Butler

  • Molly Bang’s Big Picture

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    Judy Butler
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    Picture This: How Pictures Work  by Molly Bang begins by illustrating Little Red Riding Hood with a few basic shapes and four colors. She represents Little Red as a red triangle. This triangle makes Bang feel “stability, balance, a prickliness or alertness, plus warmth, strength, vitality, boldness, and perhaps some sense of danger.” (p. 3)…

  • Mitsumasa Anno

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    Judy Butler
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    Mitsumasa Anno has amazing imagination and artistic skill. I found Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno at a library sale (text translation copyright 1983, original Japanese copyright 1982). The cover art is  beautiful. It shows a blue and white, two-handled, covered jar in the middle of a plain white background. On the…

  • Henry and Mudge: Remember When . . .

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    Judy Butler
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    Reading Cynthia Rylant’s Henry and Mudge series feels like flipping through a photo album. Nearly all the memories are happy scenes, the highlights of a young boy thriving in a safe environment. Henry has a very big dog named Mudge. Mudge is a loyal companion. Henry has a father who takes them to the beach,…

  • Good Rosie! A Masterpiece by Bliss and DiCamillo

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    Judy Butler
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    Rosie’ s gaze on the cover of this book caught my attention. Her journey from loneliness to friendship warmed my heart. Maybe it reflects the personal stories of Harry Bliss and Kate DiCamillo. That could explain why Good Rosie! is so meaningful. “Rosie lives with George. Rosie is a good dog.” George perceives that Rosie…

  • Conte Crayon, Stippling, and Cats

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    Judy Butler
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    When I list Katje the Windmill Cat as the fifth book about cats in my  Teachers Pay Teachers store, I pause to ponder the different ways in which cats come to life in these stories. Nicola Bayley’s paintings and Clare Turlay Newberry’s drawings are my favorites. I was lucky to discover their art at a…

  • Plagiarism

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    Judy Butler
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    My interest in plagiarism and copyright infringement began a couple of years ago when I learned that artists were losing their jobs to artificial intelligence. Then, a book review in the March 30, 2026, The New Yorker magazine intensified my interest. In “Copy That”, Anthony Lane wrote, “One of the knottiest problems in this vexing…

  • Wondering About Wolves

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    Judy Butler
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     Wolves live in children’s literature. What children learn about wolves from The Three Little Pigs depends on which version of the story they read. The mother in James Marshall’s 1989 The Three Little Pigs doesn’t warn her three children to watch out for the wolf. When the wolf shows up at the houses of straw…

  • Be Careful What You Wish For

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    Judy Butler
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    This is on the copyright page of Bill Thomson’s books: “Bill Thomson embraced traditional painting techniques and meticulously painted each illustration by hand, using acrylic paint and colored pencils. His illustrations are not photographs or computer generated images.” This statement gives you an idea of Thomson’s hyperrealistic illustrations. I own The Typewriter (2016). The cover…

  • P.S. At the Window

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    Judy Butler
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    At the Window (2025) by Hope Lim arrived via interlibrary loan after my “Windows” post of January 26. I love this book, so here it is. Quin Leng animates this story with a friendly touch, often with multiple scenes per page. For example, when the main character walks their dog along a sidewalk, we see…

  • Windows

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    Judy Butler
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    There are almost always exceptional picture books at library sales. For just a few dollars, I bring home a variety of artwork that’s hidden inside them. Gary Blythe paints the seashore of a grandmother’s childhood. (1) Ted Rand shows a flock of sea birds as seen from the boat of a Vietnamese fisherman and his…