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.’

A Very Long Sunset Malati Shah

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. 

"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!“

Far away from India, I would walk again the

familiar streets of Shimla in my

mind, recalling the gentle people, one by

one…

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. 

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!

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.

Flower like the Moon Amrita Kanther

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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.

We’re taking pre-orders!

An exclusive offer for our Facebook fans:“Like” this post and get a special discount + free shipping!!*

*Offer valid until December 17th. Please send your shipping details to tulikabooks@gmail.com with the subject: MAGNOLIAS.

PRICE Rs.135 Rs.100