Sneak peek of Magnolias, a forthcoming picture book from Tulika. Available in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali.

1. It has been a year full of trees for us at Tulika.
The bright blue Let’s Plant Trees.
The resplendent red The Coral Tree.
And as the year draws to a close, two more tree books are on
their way…
Artist Malati Shah, author of Magnolias, one of forthcoming
picture books, shares the how and when of this dreamy book,
while illustrator Amrita Kanther talks about the challenges of
rendering the soft white ‘flower like the moon.’

2. A Very Long Sunset
Malati Shah

3. I sat in the deep verandah of our Shimla home, drinking
in the long summer sunset before my eyes. I
snapped out of my reverie when the gardener suddenly
appeared at the bottom of the steps with a magnificent
magnolia bloom floating like a moon in his arms.

4. "For you, didi!" he smiled up at me in the gathering
gloom. And seeing my delight, he added, "I was bringing
you many more, but everyone whom I met on my way
home, took one from me!“

5. Far away from India, I would walk again the familiar
streets of Shimla in my mind, recalling the gentle
people, one by one…

6. Shimla was home to the Tibetans who came as
refugees from China, was home to Kashmiris
looking for work, was home to us all summer long,
escaping the heat of Delhi and enjoying the pleasures of
a pony ride or a ride on the narrow gauge train which
whooshed through tunnels and puffed merrily along
beneath the pine trees and the deodars.

7. It was a place where there still was a sense of the past,
when one would come across a graveyard full of angels and
crosses or see a Tudor style building with a trellis of yellow
roses blooming in the sunshine.
And so, as I painted, the story took shape, till it got written
in a day.
A very long sunset with magnolias it was!

8. Malati Shah studied Art in the USA and has had several one person
and group shows. She grew up in a joint family in Delhi, and spent a
lot of time looking for quiet places to hide and read. She lives in the
USA and in India, with her husband and black Labrador named
Kaza. Her two children are almost all grown up now.
Malati did a series of evocative paintings inspired by the Magnolia
incident that took place in her Shimla home. Read an interview here.

9. Flower like the Moon
Amrita Kanther

11. Amrita has adapted the Pahari miniature
style, as suggested by Malati Shah, in
Magnolias. She has grown up seeing
Rajasthani miniature, and also done her
graduation project on Udaipur
miniatures.

12. “I looked at a few plates of Pahari miniature paintings
and tried to understand differences in style, proportion
and compositions,” she says.
Miniature paintings are done on cloth using natural
dyes. Amrita worked with poster colour, which she
feels closely resembles the opaqueness of gouache. She
chose watercolour paper as the base to wash and
reapply the paint if she needed to give the pictures a
layered feel.

15. Her biggest challenge was the magnolia itself. It took
her two to three iterations, she says, before she was able
to render its moon-like quality on paper.

16. When asked if and how illustrating for children is
different, Amrita says that she tries to understand what a
child would look for on a page. “Most of the time, I am
the child who goes through each page and looks for the
story in the picture drawn.”

17. Amrita Kanther has a Master’s in Design (Visual Communication)
from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. She is interested in
designing for children, bi-cultural design, publication design and
visual interaction design for digital media. Her earlier book with
Tulika was The Lion and the Fox.

18. We’re taking
pre-orders!
An exclusive offer
for our Facebook
fans:“Like” this
post and get a
special discount +
free shipping!!*
PRICE Rs.135 Rs.100
*Offer valid until December 17th. Please send your shipping details to
tulikabooks@gmail.com with the subject: MAGNOLIAS.