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Jan Thornhill
About the Author: Jan Thornhill was born in 1955 in Sudbury, ON. After she finished high school she attended the Ontario College of Art, majoring in Experimental Film & Video. After graduating, she worked as a freelance artist in Toronto for ten years. In the mid-eighties she began to write and illustrate children's books. She has done many solo and group exhibitions at a variety of places, including Toronto and Mexico. She has also won and been shortlisted for a variety of awards. Her Wildlife 123 was awarded the UNICEF Ezra Jack Keats Award. Crow and Fox was chosen a White Raven Book by UNESCO International Children's Library in Munich. Her books have also been shortlisted for the Mr. Christie's Children's Book Award and the Governor General's Award. Thornhill currently lives in the woods in central Ontario (near Havelock) with her husband, Fred Gottschalk, and dog, Betty Boots. More information can be found on the CANSCAIP website: www.canscaip.org/bios/thornhillj.html Bibliography: The Rumor, A Tree in the Forest, The Wildlife ABC: A Nature Alphabet, The Wildlife 123: A Nature Counting Book, Drought and Other Stories (a collection of stories for adults), In the Great Meadow (also known as: Over in the Meadow; illustrations only, written by Skid Crease), Before & After: A Book of Natural Timescapes, Crow & Fox: And Other Animal Legends, Wild in the City. Artistic Styles: Thornhill's illustrations are full of rich colors and strong, intriguing drawings, but the styles she uses vary from book to book. Her animals are always appealing, but not always overly anthropomorphized (ie. life-like, photograph-like, textbook illustration-like). The bright colors and little shading make the illustrations of most of her books quite flat, yet still very pleasant. The ducks in Over in the Meadow appear to be constructed from inanimate objects like pompoms, pipecleaners and sand shovels. The raccoons in Wild in the City are cartoony with hints of their mischievous nature drawn right into them. The animals in The Rumor are more life-like than those in some of Thornhill's other books, but they retain a cartoony simplicity that makes them friendlier and more fantastic. The inanimate backgrounds and settings are no less detailed or colorful. Thornhill manages to capture Canadian neighborhoods in the pictures of houses she puts in books like Wild in the City, and the many different nature settings of The Rumor give the reader the impression of really being there. The illustrations are realistic, yet simple and flat, so that the reader sees all the beauty without becoming overwelmed. Thornhill often uses borders around her illustrations to contain them and set them apart from the text, as she did for The Wildlife ABC & 123 and The Rumor.
The Rumor
A Jataka Tale from India 
About the Book:
The Rumor was published in Fall 2002 by Maple Tree Press Inc. in
Toronto, ON. "The Rumor is a retelling
of an ancient Jataka take from India. Jataka tales have been used for
more than 2500 years to teach about sharing, compassion, and the
difference between good and bad." In many Jataka tales, as
in this one, the Buddha appears as an animal. In this story, he is the
wise lion who realizes that despite the rumor, the world is not really
breaking up.The story begins with a young hare who worries about everything. One day when she was napping, a mango fell from a tree and crashed down with such a loud sound that the hare thought the the world was breaking up. Without looking back, the hare ran away through the palm grove. As the hare passed other hares, she told them that the world was breaking up, and they began to run too. As the hares passed the boars in the thicket, the deer in the marshland, the tigers in the forest, and the rhinoceroses in the brushland, the rumor that the world was breaking up spread to all the animals. When the running animals reached the open plain, the lion roared to stop them, and demanded to know who had started the rumor. The lion took the little worrywart hare back to where she was having her nap to show her that it was only a mango, not the world breaking apart, then they returned to tell the other animals and everyone could go home. Since she was tired from all the excitement, the hare decided to have a nap, and she went right to sleep without worrying about anything at all. All the animals featured in the book are either endangered or threatened, mostly because of loss of habitat. The final page of the book contains information about the species. This book is mentioned in A Guide to Canadian Children's Books by Deidre Baker and Ken Stetterington. They list it as appropriate for children aged 3 to 6, something I would tend to disagree with. I'm not sure that a 3 year old would understand or appreciate this book, and at the same time, I was delighted by it and I'm a few years older than 6. "... there were a thousand rhinoceroses, a thousand tigers, a thousand deer, a thousand boars and a thousand hares all thundering across the brushland." 
About the Illustration: I chose
to talk about this illustration because it contains almost all of the
animals mentioned in the story (missing only the lion). It is one of the
full-page illustrations; the relevant text (sample above) was on the
facing page. The amount of visual information presented on this page
would be overwelming if it was not balanced by the predominantly white
facing page.The page is so full it is bursting at the seams, but the border keeps it under control. All the illustrations have the same border containing the fallen mango (which caused all of the uproar in the story), flowers, and foliage coordinating with the various terrain that the animals cross. An additional border strip appears on the far side of the text (either below the text, like below, or beside the text when the illustration was on the facing page). The foliage changes as the animals move, and the coloring changes, but the fruit and flowers are always present. The significance of the mangos is clear, if there were no mangos, there would be no story, but the significance of the flowers is not as clear. The flowers grow in the palm grove where the hares live, but they are not part of the story. Including them in the border provides color contrast with the mangos and, along with the three thin solid borders, provides continuity and familiarity. The center of a framed area becomes the focus of attention, and in this page, the image in the center is the wide eye of a frightened rhinoceros, giving the reader a sense of the animals' emotions. The center does not monopolize the reader's view however, because the overlapping and moving animals make the reader's eyes move around the page to take everything in. The layers upon layers of animals makes it seem like there could really be thousands of animals rushing past. The overlapping of the animals makes the scene look crowded and dangerous and frightening, which is exactly the way it must feel for the animals. At the same time, the overlapping joins the animals together, making them into one large, powerful force. There is no visible sky in the picture, only animals and foliage. This adds to the mood of the illustration - it's a tense situation. There is a full rainbow of colors on this page, with each animal having its own distinct shade. The hares are yellow, the boars are dark purple, the deer are red-brown, the tigers are orange, and the rhinoceroses are blue-grey (this scan doesn't really do the colors justice, see the scan of the cover for a better idea). The grass below the animals and the leaves around them add touches of green so that the entire spectrum is represented on a single page. The animals are all very important. As Thornhill explains on the last page of the book, "although large numbers of these animals are shown in The Rumor, it would be impossible to see so many today. All these species - Bristly Hare, Pygmy Boar, Swamp Deer, Bengal Tiger, Indian Rhinoceros... - are either endangered or threatened, mostly because of loss of habitat." By illustrating these animals, Thornhill has both preserved them for future generations and encouraged present generations to take care of these and all species. This illustration could be a useful tool for teaching children about taking care of the environment and preventing habitat loss and extinction. The protagonist of the story, the little worrywart hare, is distinguished from all the other hares by her green eyes (the others all have red-brown eyes), so part of the appeal of the story is to spot her on every page. On this page, in relation to the border, she is about three sets of mangos up and two sets from the right. The hare is small, a visual element which makes her seem weak, especially compared to other animals like the lion. Weak animals are easier to frighten, so it makes sense that the small hare would be terrified by the sound of a mango falling onto dried palm leaves. The entire book was done primarily on the computer, a first for Thornhill. There is some evidence of the use of the computer in the repetition of both animals and elements in the border. The Rest of the Book: The first page of the book had both a framed illustration and text on it. For the rest of the story, some two-page spreads had the text on the left page and the illustration on the right page (like above), and some had the illustration across the top of both pages and the text across the bottom (like below). The final page of the book had small illustrations of the animals beside short descriptions of their species. The wide variety of page types made for a nice mix and helped the scenery changes. 
In case you were wondering, our little worrywart
hare is at the bottom in the center (four sets of mangos from the left).
Works Cited and Referred To:
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