Artist Alert:: Maggie Rudy

Maggie Rudy's work makes me crazy with love. Her mice characters are filled with emotion and her way with the attitudes of their heads and the subtle gesture of their bodies makes them come fully alive.

As a major fan of hers, I have taken the liberty of sending her a wee parcel each early Spring filled with miscellany of tiny prints in fabric and paper, art materials, what have you, that I think she may enjoy working with in her ongoing makings. I keep a small box on my sewing table and add new things to it as they come across my path during the year, sealing and shipping it off to her around February.

The first year, she sent back the above image of one of her Mouseland characters showing off the shiny new Halfland button he'd received in the box! She also kindly wanted to do something more in exchange, so I of course suggested a small undersea scene puppet. She beat me to the punch of animating first in Halfland and sent the clip below last year of a hermit she'd made for her extraordinary book, I wish I had a pet (seen in action upper right below) published in 2014, by Beach Lane Books.

For this year's thank you, she generously sent me a signed copy of the book which is a treasure in every way. Everything she uses in her dimensional storybook illustrations is handmade and divinely detailed. Above are just a small sampling of what awaits in this story. All of her books are worth reading to delighted children of all ages.

Halfland's first underwater sequence! As shot by artist Maggie Rudy, my art sister by another mister.