Sunflower Seeds tells the story of a Kindergarten class planting sunflower seeds and watching them grow. It’s told from the perspective of a boy who notices things, and the reader follows the growth cycle with him.
Because so much of the magic in this story comes from paying attention—from looking closely and noticing changes, I wanted the illustrations to offer those discoveries to readers who are also looking closely.
For the paintings in this book, I chose to use oil on brown paper in order to zoom in, as the students do with their magnifying glasses, and notice something new inside the exact same painting—just because of a change in scale. With oil paint, you’re able to see how a bumblebee from a distance can be made from a swirling slush of abstract goopy brushstrokes, how those brushstrokes have all different colors mixed in, and how highlights and shadows fall on different thicknesses and directions of real paint.
The warmth of the brown paper allows the paint to represent both the darkest darks and lightest lights, while also being a significant storytelling color that gives substance to negative space.
While making Sunflower Seeds, I looked to artists from the past who had also painted with oil on paper and also painted sunflowers, I watched our own sunflowers grow, and I read non-fiction books about sunflowers. In this research phase, there were three things in particular that I wanted to keep in mind: 1: a careful accounting of the way numbers and math can be hidden in the structures of plants and paintings and books 2: the way that paint strokes themselves—their direction and thickness and movement—can add meaning to a composition and 3: the cooperative roles of good and bad luck in the unfolding of a story or positive and negative space the arrangement of a picture.
Here’s a process video if you’d like to see more examples of these ideas in action in the book.
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Were you and your reading partner wondering how many sunflower seeds are actually on the spread covered in sunflower seeds? Here is a kid-friendly counting video to help answer that question.
