 Hello, hello, everyone. It's great to be with you today. My name is Christy. I'm with the San Francisco Public Library. I'm one of the youth librarians. And I'm so glad that you are in coming to this event with us. It would be great if you want to put in the chat where you're tuning in from. We love knowing where our audiences are tuning in from. Before I introduce our wonderful guest, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatish Ohlone who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula and continue to live, work, and play here today. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance to their traditions, the Ramatish Ohlone have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As well as for all people to reside in their traditional territory. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatish community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Today you're in for a treat. This is our VIP Summer Stride program with artist Kailani Juanita and her mentor and former teacher Lisa Brown. This is also part of our BIPOC kid lit series celebrating and engaging around the wonderful books by today's creators, authors, and illustrators. This entire series as of all of our Summer Stride programs is sponsored in part by the friends of the San Francisco Public Library who are with us here today. Hi friends. So I want to tell you a little bit about our Summer Stride program. This is our largest and longstanding program presented to inspire reading and learning and adventuring and exploring all summer long. We are so fortunate to have our local publishing house Chronicle Books here right here in San Francisco and seven years of partnership with them to commission original art inspired by a picture book. This year is Tadah by Kathy Ellen Davis illustrated by Kailani Juanita and we invite them this year Kailani to create original art inspired by being in San Francisco the love of San Francisco and we're so grateful that Kailani accepted our invitation. We felt so so lucky because just a couple weeks later she won the 2021 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for another picture book so we felt really fortunate that she said yes to our invitation and found time to create original graphics for our community. In fact I'm going to show you a few of those. If you live in San Francisco you have seen Kailani Juanita's art on transit shelters. In fact you've seen her portrait on transit shelters. You've seen posters with trilingual messages to get involved with your library this summer inside our libraries and all around the community. If you're taking the bus you've probably seen a bus card inviting you to travel to new places with your library and if you visited your library which I'm sure you have you've seen it on the outside of our library so I hope that you are paying attention and looking closely at the art because each time you will see something new and if you're a lucky SFUSD student you receive the tracker and summer book list made by your teacher librarians and your public librarians. You've got that in your mailbox so you've probably been tracking your reading and learning and listening time all summer long. If not you can visit any of your public libraries or download a copy today and start tracking. You can do it online as well. Welcome to everyone. If you're joining us from afar you're welcome to download the tracker and play along with us and you can also download a free resource. It's called the Everybody Read Summer Guide and it's available today in English, Spanish and Chinese. This guide features the art of Kailani Juanita and original literacy activities created by Dr. Cheryl Davis who is the director of the Human Rights Commission and this is a passion project of hers so we thank her for her work and her contributions to this year's campaign. This is freely available for you and it features every single author or illustrator who is joining us for the BIPOC kid lit series running all summer long with a special literacy activity inspired by their books so please check it out and last but not least the summer prize is a tote bag that is features Kailani's art that book as a life raft. She really gets library so you can't buy this tote but you can certainly earn it by participating in San Francisco Public Library Summer Stride program. So I want to tell you briefly about Kailani Juanita. She's a Bay Area artist lives in Fairfield. Again she she won the Karate Scott King Illustrator Honor Award a really big deal for her amazing work and she's been busy busy busy finishing up her master's degree from UC Davis and she strategically and specifically makes inclusive picture books to represent under underrepresented and marginalized communities so and with that I will also want to introduce Lisa Brown. She is the New York Times award-winning artist and cartoonist. She's also a big supporter of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and has helped found the Brown Handler Fellowship where emerging voices have a writing stipend and a space to create more more work for our community so we thank you Lisa for your contributions to the Friends of the Library and with that I'm going to invite you to grab a pencil and a piece of paper or your favorite writing utensil and get ready to draw along with Kailani and Lisa first. Kailani is going to take the mic and share a little bit about her her journey as an artist and her work and then Lisa is going to be in conversation with Kailani. We welcome your questions too so put them in the chat and we'll pull for those. We always prioritize questions from kids so we want to hear from you kids and with that I'm turning the mic over to Kailani and Lisa. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for the introduction. Yeah I'm so excited to be here with you Kailani and I'm so excited to see your slides so why don't you pop them up. All right sounds good so hello everybody my name is Kailani Juanita and I'm here to talk a little bit about myself in celebration for Summer Story 2021 and on the right is a screen on the right is a picture from the book Tada that I illustrated for Kathy Ellen Davis's story and then on the left is a picture of me from whenever I was little probably about nine or ten years old um so yeah a little bit about me so as you guys know I'm an illustrator so I work from home and I draw art mainly for picture books um I do a lot of different types of art for like magazines or posters like you guys saw for the summer stride stuff but one of my favorite things to do is draw art um for kids to enjoy in books some of the books that I've been working on um on the left Tada and then on the right Magnificent Homespun Brown when Aiden became a brother the little things and a house for a rebirth so as you can see I really really like drawing people especially kids having fun and playing and celebrating themselves and their identities and community um and just family in general family and friends but I didn't always draw picture books I used to be a little kid just like you guys and even when I was little I used to draw I I've been drawing what feels like my whole life ever since I could pick up a pencil um my mom told me this story about whenever I was little and I drew on this wall this really big picture of a cow with like crayons and markers and at first she was pretty upset that I drew all over the wall um which I would not recommend that any of you guys do but uh she was always really supportive and she was mesmerized by um my cow drawing capabilities so on the right is a picture of me and my little sisters from a long time ago I was around seven years old it looks like it was really really long ago I know like sepia so it looks super aged and um we always laugh and laugh at old yeah we look like uh little old grandmas it's really cute and then yeah so I really like thinking about real life whenever I draw picture books um specifically this in the picture in the middle it's me giving my little sister like a piggyback ride and we're playing pretend and I feel like you could see a lot of that in tada and a lot of the books I draw um because whenever we were really little my mom she was working a lot of the time so we used to spend all our time like making up games and stories with each other and one of her favorite games to play together was called hot lava and how that works is the whole ground like all the carpet and everything we pretend like it's lava and then we would throw pillows around and jump from pillow to pillow or couch cushion to couch cushion um avoiding letting our feet touch the ground because that's how you lose the game and here's a picture from when I was um a picture on the left which I drew when I was six years old and that seems like a kind of long time ago actually now because right now I'm 27 years old I turned 28 in November but that so that was like 27 years ago that's a long time ago um it was in the year 1999 which seems crazy because it's now 2021 um but this is the oldest picture I have that I've drawn and it's of my mom on the left she has the striped shirt with a tree on it um me in the middle getting my ears pierced those are the little dangly bits right here these little circles and then on the right is the lady who pierced my ears um and then a stuffed animal in the chair because I got my ears pierced at the mall when I was like six years old so on the far right is a picture of me my mom and my two little sisters and just some like background information um so my mom she's uh like first generation American and her family is Filipino and um they immigrated from Manila Philippines to San Francisco uh whenever my mom was really really really little but they lived in uh around like north beach area uh so like in Chinatown and then my father's family um they were from Arkansas so that's the south and they migrated from all the way from Arkansas to east Oakland area and then that's where they started their own business of um funeral homes and they were one of like the few black-owned funeral homes and that's how my mom and my dad met and then that's how I was made so well me and my other two sisters too but yeah that's just a little background information about me and um my some of my roots in the Bay Area and then here's kind of like a short timeline of how uh my drawing has changed a little bit over the past like over the past two decades so on the very very left is a drawing I drew of myself at age six years old and then another drawing I did of a girl at age 13 and then 18 and then 24 years old and then all the way on the right is kind of how I draw now uh in the year 2021 at age 27 years old so as you can see it's changed a lot and I wish I had more drawings to show you guys um but yeah I feel like consistently I've always really really um felt like it was important to draw uh people who look like me and have representations of different types of people because I never really saw that in picture books when I was little so some advice that I would give you guys is and also my younger art self on the right is a picture of me and my sisters again and our dog Jack from whenever we were really little um but some advice I would give you guys is to keep samples of your old artwork to track progress read and study lots and lots of picture books and any other books books with illustrations and also um be kind to yourself so as much as it's important to practice it's also really really important to take care of yourself while like you're practicing and even on your off days and everything so when you draw take breaks to stretch and rest and do like hand movements um because you have a lot of fingers in your joints so you want to make sure to stretch your hands and like um take a break from sitting at the desk and also eat snacks and drink water um have play time and also take the time to admire your work and celebrate all the cool stuff you've made so with that I'd like to uh end this with a Q&A with Lisa Brown and Lisa was my teacher who taught me everything about picture books and was also my picture book mentor just so you guys know well I'm excited to ask you some questions and then I'm excited to hear the questions that the audience wants to ask um everything you know about picture books did not come from me it probably came from you reading picture books and I wanted to ask you what your favorite picture book when you were a kid is or what some of them were so my most favorite one um was Good Night Moon and that I feel like is a classic um so my mom would always read it to us and then like as we say good night to every little part of the room because that's what the rabbit does in the story um for the nighttime routine uh after we read the book we would say good night to random stuff um so I felt really interactive and I liked I think it was because it was so beautifully illustrated it it felt kind of it felt like strangely magical nighttime I don't know like exactly how to say like explain it but that book like it perfectly encompasses right before bedtime so that one was a classic and then also um I think it's called I'll Love You Forever and like I can't remember the title but the phrase I'll love you forever and like you forever always as long as I'm living my your my baby you'll be um that was also one of my favorites because whenever my mom would read that to us like I understood we would get older one day um and I was always kind of scared of like oh no one day I'm going to be older because I always wanted to be close to my mom um but in that book it's so beautiful because um the child grows up into an adult and then takes care of the parent so it always made me feel like okay no matter what me and my mom are going to be close um regardless if one day I'm taller than her what I love about both those books it's they seem to be books that made you feel safe and cozy um are you working on any books that make you feel safe and cozy yes okay so um well what two that I've finished that make me feel very safe and cozy that are recent aside from to dawg because it's like really fun and playful it's also really cozy but you don't get to see um like any guardians in that book um but for magnificent homespun brown there's a lot of like really cozy moments and everything is um painted in kind of like a warmer palette so it feels like you're being hugged and then um for when 80 me came a brother I feel like there's a lot of really like sensitive and intimate moments with parents holding like kids and stuff so I really enjoyed drawing that kind of stuff I love the safe cozy moments um you talked about palette and the word palette means what colors you choose and I wanted to talk I because I'm a teacher of art I love talking about art supplies and also when we saw your art through the years it seems like your art supplies and your choices change so what are some art supplies that you love to use and and what have you used in the past okay so um it always changes depending on what other people show me too because then I notice other people do things that I'm like wow that looks so cool I want to try that as well um but some of my so aside from digital because I do a lot of tweaking and editing and digital um and I like depending on the project I'll go back and forth but some of my like favorite analog art supplies I really really like like I'm gonna use these pencils in the demo later but all of these pencils with different hardnesses most of the time I use um 6b and hb and those are like the darker ones and they make really chunky lines which is what I use for tada to make all the hair scribbles and everything and then aside from that I just really like using um they're called Dr. Martin's watercolors but you could really there's so many other different watercolors too I just really like these ones just because they're really really pigmented um and yeah it means like dark colors like bright dark colors yeah so like saturated I like um for my color pilots I usually try to choose stuff that's more light and airy but whenever I do stuff by hand I really like like deep dark colors and like saturated colors um the pigment is uh just so you guys know um it's the the color and then they add like fillers and stuff so the pigment depends on um like all the other stuff that's added to it but I like when the pigment is really really high I remember um the book that you drew for me in class that used a lot of black ink and it was really dark and then they were really bright and you did it all I mean pretty much all by hand which people think that everything's done on the computer but that's not true a lot of artists still work by hand and it has like a different feeling too because there's some stuff like with digital they make like a lot of brushes and stuff that like mimic and copy watercolor but some things um watercolor is super unpredictable sometimes like even um it it can change and you add certain stuff to it like more water or like salt or something else um and I like the notion of that like I like with working with inks and stuff I like the fact that you can't control it so sometimes it'll bleed off and go do something else um and I feel like there's some type of there's a little bit of freedom in that because then you don't get so fixated on trying to correct and fix it all the time you kind of learn how to work with it so I would suggest any of you guys to um even though digital art is really cool too and I like using it I I love working by hand and I suggest all of you guys to experiment working by hand like there's a splatter brush on um like did like on my digital art that I use but in real life what's really cool and less um adds like a little bit more spice to it because it's inconsistent is you get a toothbrush that you don't use or like an old one that you cleaned and used um and then you wet it and then when you do that which is what I did for all the stars in the little galaxy book I did in Lisa's class so when you do that and all the water is on it and you aim it towards the paper it flickers and it does like these little speckles that can be read as stars or anything else stars freckles any types of like little dots um I forget what I was gonna say um I what so you have I was thinking of hand drawing and the happy accidents that happen and it made me think about inspiration and what inspires you like happy accidents might inspire you like making stars because you're using the toothbrush and I was thinking about what inspires you and um what makes you want to draw picture books in particular okay so those are two big questions yeah I'm like trying to recommend which one should I talk about first so first I would say what inspires me is um it's I feel like it's a lot of human interaction and seeing other people and meeting people and listening to them like sometimes well just an art in general I feel like a lot of art is just related to storytelling and even if people don't think it is I feel like there's some type of fun like some type of narrative underneath like you could peel anything back and see like a narrative or a story um so I feel like like a lot of my inspiration comes from um listening to other people talk about themselves or watching other people that do things like people watching kind of in public because um we're all kind of in this like big bubble together so you see a lot when you just sit down and start to like notice things um like I used to sit on Bart and I would just sit there even if I was that didn't have anywhere really to go I would sit there and just let the train go like back and forth and I would transfer to different trains and I would bring a sketchbook and just draw people um not trying to like creep them out or anything but I draw them casually from a distance and make sure they didn't feel me just like staring at them um and yeah I had like a bunch of different like life drawing sketches of people just living their lives and wondering like oh where are they going to go what are they about to do next um and then other than that just music and feelings and enjoying stuff like looking back on past experiences like for the SF for the San Francisco public library art I was thinking a lot about whenever we were little and my mom she'd get off of work we already lived in Fairfield by then so she'd get off of work and then we'd go to San Francisco we'd go to Chinatown and we because the bakeries used to be open really really late so we'd go to like a Chinese bakery and get like custard pies or like Gaimei bao or something and then we would just eat the bread and walk around and it felt so like magical and mystical because it was like oh we were inside all day like playing hot lava and now we're at night and we're eating bread and walking around the street and all the like adults are walking around and it felt it felt like a whole different world um and so then aside from that my what made me want to work on picture books is um it was honestly it was going to CCA and getting to meet you because before I I really wanted to do a conceptual art like video games and stuff and then I kind of realized after like hearing more about your class like wow there are so many ways to tell stories aside from like working working with video games like I could write my own stories instead of working on someone else's which felt super empowering to me because I never considered like the type of stuff that I would want to tell people I always kind of wanted to join other people's projects and help them tell stories um but then I realized my stories are important too so thank you for that thank you um yeah I mean we talked a lot in the class about telling your telling one's own story and seeing oneself in picture books and I think that um I know that's your goal and I think you do it really well and it's really exciting to see you in your books even when you're telling the stories of other people that are have written them you know you're putting yourself in the book so it becomes a collaboration and it's really fun to see you in everything you do and I know that we have some questions coming from the audience which is very exciting so I'm going to ask you some of them um how do you draw hands hands are really hard to draw how do you do that okay so hands I have a like a love hate relationship with hands and same with like feet and toes because mostly the fingers okay I just saw it's it really is the fingers um okay so I have I think this might be easier to explain if I had these bigger okay so I have like the demo page shut up but I don't want to like mess it up so like usually what I do is I'll like look at a picture of a hand um or my own and I'll kind of like reference it it reference it and you can see like there's it's made up of different parts so you have this bigger like more like square rectangular piece that's like the back of your hand or your palm and then aside from that you have the fingers and the joints and everything and you kind of see how they stack up pinky and then ring and middle and then pointer and then the thumb is all the way down here on the corner of the box so like sometimes when I draw hands I think about like that so I'll use like a darker pencil so first I'll draw like the box and then I'll draw like the fingers kind of like keeping point of where the joints are going and then from there I'll just draw it in like slightly darker so then I'll just fill them in making sure like the fingers kind of stack the right way put a little lump because like there's kind of a joint right there and then add like another little lump and then you just kind of keep tweaking it and keep erasing it but you like that's how I draw them and I feel like I draw hands like pretty simplistic too so it's a little bit easier um and I I kind of draw them fast like a squiggle usually when I'm drawing naturally but yeah if I know that something like at the school I went to they had like a head and hands class where all you did was draw heads and hands so it's not just you who has a problem drawing hands hands are like I feel like a lot of people's worst enemy but they're fun to draw once you get used to drawing them yeah um they are so hard sometimes I draw them over and over and over and I still don't get them right um on the summer stride tracker there's an a picture of an ugly carrot what's your favorite cookies to eat and draw do you like drawing food I love drawing food yes okay so I love drawing food and I have this I really love like produce that's misshapen it's not even like it's misshapen it's more like we're very used to produce being like very like specific meat and looking organized but I love whenever carrots have like an extra leg or you see like a very strangely shape and strawberry that kind of it's like is that a strawberry why is it shaped so lumpy it looks kind of like a rhino face so I um aside from like produce I really like drawing pastries um and I feel like that's like a cultural thing too because each like different cultures have different types of pastries so I feel like that tells its own separate story as well like the type of food you draw on books so yeah those are my favorite um a bunch of people want to know if you've ever done like graphic novels or comics and are you interested in doing that ever so I I bug Lisa about this a lot because Lisa is so good at comics you guys oh my gosh you guys have to look at Lisa's comics um but I'm definitely interested and I'm trying right now I'm trying to come up with some ideas for one and that I've been mulling over constantly but whenever I was little I used to read a lot of comics like that's kind of what also got me into like drawing as well because um I don't know if you guys have ever been there but it's in the Bay Area it's called 99 Ranch or Pacific East Mall and whenever I was little they used to usually like really be more like a mall like there wasn't as many like um vacant stores they had a really cool comic book shop there and I used to always always get like my comics and my how to draw books there so yeah comics I really hope I can jump in them it's really fun learning from reading other people's work I mean I feel like I learned so much just by looking at what other people are doing either like old fashioned or now um are there any artists who you've been looking at lately? Okay so off the top of my head um this isn't really like a picture book artist but um there's this artist that I follow on Instagram and she draws a lot her name is Lilypore and she does tattoos but she does a lot of like flash um you wouldn't know this but a lot of people who do tattoos also do like watercolors and illustrations with pen and ink um as practice for the tattoos and I just think it's so cool how um what I really like what her art is it's like a mixture of all different types of things going on like um tattoo art also like um like nineties like Chicano Chicano art mixed in with that and then um like revisitation like re-imaginings of um like vintage cartoons like Betty Boop and everything so that's kind of who I'm looking into right now um I have like a whole list of like picture book artists that I like because I look at them all day it's really it's really really fun and it's fun to realize that art is everywhere like art is on people's bodies and tattoos they're on walls they're on posters they're in books they're in museums um they're in stores on packages so it's really funny um fun to look at all the art in the world um one of the questions we have is you mentioned the importance of snacks we already we talked about pastries we talked about ugly carrots and now we're talking about snacks what do you like to eat when you're making art oh man what don't I like to eat I feel like that'd be an easier question um what of my right now I'm really into smoothies um because like speaking of like ugly fruit I always I feel like I don't finish them enough so um sometimes when I take a break from art I'll just plug in the blender and make smoothies and stuff because it's faster to it's like less time away from the computer in the my desk which is not the best habit uh but smoothies and then aside from smoothies I've been really into eating like fried egg on a tortilla so kind of just like fried egg tortilla and then maybe like some fruits I'm um I'm very much into fried eggs on tortillas actually I'm alone right now um without my family trying to work and that is my dinner of choice is a fried egg and a tortilla um that's the champion meal I think that we should do an art project do you think we should do an art project yes okay so I know you're all set up and I'm set up because I have my notebook and I have my pencil and I think you're going to teach us how to draw a book is that true yes okay so since we're all here to talk about picture books um and your guys's stories are just as important as the stories we're telling I wanted to teach you guys how to draw a book um that way you can start planning for all the books you're going to draw in the future to share with all of us so let me start the video on here oh I'm not sure how to pin yes thank you very much this is always the hardest part okay so I just have this tape to kind of see where the boundaries are because the paper in real life is like hard for me to tell where it is so let me just move that up a little bit okay so first what we're going to do for our book project is you want to have handy pencils and erasers just because you can use a pen if you want but I feel like it's a little bit safer to use a pencil in case you make mistakes or anything um so our first step is we're going to be drawing a rectangle but the rectangle is going to be slightly diagonal so we're going to draw a slightly diagonal line going down I'm going to try to make this big see how it's kind of at an angle yep and then from there we're just gonna the line at the top should be straight we're going to draw another straight line parallel to the top one at the bottom sometimes it's hard to draw straight lines I know you see how mine has a little bit of attitude right here I just you don't want to listen that's okay that's personality okay and my I feel like a lot of the books I like have scratches on them anyways now for me taking them places and holding them so much okay then we're going to complete the rectangle by drawing another one on that side so now we have um the first part of our book which is kind of like the cover okay so the next part what we're going to do is at the bottom right here we're going to add kind of like a c shape so you can kind of draw it lightly so you can like feel it out okay so we're going to draw like a little c shape and then you're going to keep to add to that line right here at the bottom you're just going to draw a line that's matching this one at the top so draw that like that and then from there what you're going to do is you're going to add another line up here because the book is kind of like at an angle so the line is going to go straight kind of like down like that so draw it like that at a slight angle and then you're going to connect this line to this one down here if it's not long enough you might need to extend it a little bit but start at the top just so you know it kind of like matches up so you're going to go down like that and then just connect it like that okay and then from there what you're going to do is you're going to draw kind of like the hole in the spine so when you look at a book um if you could still see me on my screen or even under here I'll just show it to you so if you look at a book you can kind of see like there's this little lump right here so this is like what we're going to draw like the little spine part okay okay so going back to this you're going to add this little like kind of like line right here that's where the book is bound all the pages and everything and then for what that's called it has a funny name and I bet you don't remember it what's the name of it it's called a crash that's kind of cute it's how the pages are like all glued to the spine so you're going to draw the crash which is here um and then also you're going to draw a little line right here to show it's like kind of like the corner of your book pages because it's kind of it's like at an angle okay so then from there the final kind of step to set of the book is you want to draw the line for the spine is from the front and make it lead into where the little crash is showing right there and then from here you just add extra lines for the pages okay so there's a book and the final step to making the book is adding yourself on the cover um or whatever you want your book to be about but I think you guys should draw yourselves because you should celebrate yourself all the time um so I'm going to go ahead and draw me so right now I really look like right now sometimes I forget okay I have a hat on I should probably draw my head first because I have a pretty big head and I'm going to leave room at the bottom for the title the title cool on the top or bottom or it doesn't have a title at all because there are so many books out there without titles at least not on the cover so here are my shoulders I'm wearing a little sweater I have a slightly kind of egg shaped head and then I'm going to draw my little eyes in and I hope you guys are drawing yourselves along with me my nose my smile my kind of tiny eyebrows the braids so I'm just going to draw in my braids I cannot wait at the end of this I I really want to see what everybody's portraits look like because I love looking at portraits it's really fun to see how people see themselves okay we did an exercise in our class but I've done an exercise it's called like the um 30 second portrait and to see how fast you can draw yourself it's really fun so we're all going to get a chance to show on our zoom screens our little art that we're doing and I feel like I always have little flyaways just going everywhere that can never be tamed okay perfect and then I'm going to put the title at the bottom because that's where I have room for it so I'm just going to put my name in bubble letters nice you do the best hand lettering Lisa oh thank you it's really fun I love an alphabet hmm I don't know if I'll have room for my full name I'm just going to put k and then my initial and I'll put some of your braids I love the way you drew your braids oh my gosh thank you I can't wait to see how you do your hair because your hair is so perfect every time I love how you um your curls they always land perfectly okay not in real life so once you're done drawing your book the fun part is coloring it all in so I'll just add some quick colors with some watercolors let me test this out on the side where you can't see I don't have watercolors but I have a highlighter pen so I'm going to use a highlighter pen oh that would be so good too for um like what is that called again when it's like a two-tone color palette when it's just oh um it's not a monotone it's I don't remember I don't remember either see this is what happens in the summer it's because I have a limited palette there you go man that's so literal I don't know how I forgot that well I think there's probably another name for two colors in your palette but a limited palette is a good thing to remember another good thing to remember is the term artistic license which means it doesn't matter what it looks like to anyone else it just matters what it looks like to you that's how I like to explain artistic license oh I love that okay and then we're gonna dual tone says Christy of the SF public library because librarians know everything I'm gonna start saying dual tone I feel like it sounds I like the word dual because it it could mean two or it could mean dual that is the one of the good things about being a picture book artist it's if you love pictures and words you're always using them together and I love words and I feel like they mean the meaning changes so much once it's accompanied with pictures too I think that's one of like the coolest parts of picture books is that they would not be the same without if they had one or the other if it was just words or just pictures but you can have a picture book with just pictures but you can't have a picture book with just words you know what I actually have like a picture book without any words and it's I think it's called the journey and it's like a series of three but there are no words at all and I remember the first it's it it's weird because it's like you have to look for all these context clues in the background in the illustrations so and I had never had that experience before like I've I think aside from that series I have yet to pick up like another picture book that's only pictures but it's it's crazy what you can communicate with just pictures there's a great picture book with just pictures by and it's by a writer and an illustrator so it's hard to imagine someone writing a book without pictures but it's called sidewalk flowers and it's by Joe Arno oh dear librarian help us and illustrations by Sidney Smith and it's wonderful so while you're finishing painting I'm going to talk about um a couple other books that I love Joe Arno Lawson yes and he is a poet he's a really good poet and he's uh from Canada um other things that I've been reading lately that I love besides Kalani's work um Raul the third has anyone read any Raul the third um he has a new a couple of new books one I love is called Vamos let's go to market um and Katya Chen has a really beautiful book about a bear and a moon um Makayla Goad um has a book about um living the planet about water um and I can't oh I should have written all this down um because I don't remember the author she's the illustrator and it's a beautiful beautiful book um about saving the earth and yeah they're just so many books to read and I'm sure they're all on um the library's list we're getting a bunch of fun links in the chat we're almost ready to show everyone else's creations I love your little cheeks oh my I think we had a whole conversation about cheeks and knees and stuff yes we had a bit it was a big year for knees in our class okay I'm just going to go for her face one more time to make her browner all right and then we can add a background for the book cover and then we will be good to freaking go so I think I'm gonna put green in the back even though they're stars oh that was really I said I love saturated and then look what I did okay so I'm just gonna add a little water to spread it out actually you know what I think I have a bigger brush than that here's a question do you ever um put your brush in something you're drinking instead of your paint water yeah and I've also drank paint water before so uh man because it goes back kind of fast sometimes yep especially when you're looking super close to your paper because you don't have zoom on on paper so you have to look really close sometimes and if I'm not um if I'm not paying attention because I'm looking so close to the paper sometimes I'll just immediately dip it in their own cup or I'll just grab their own cup I'm gonna just fill these up anyways yep it's a problem we are water protectors that's the one I was thinking of by Carol Lindstrom Michaela Gode is the illustrator the librarians are finding all the things I'm forgetting which is what librarians do there's Vamos let's go eat Vamos let's go to market there's so many Vamoses Vamos I tried to read it out loud there's a lot of Spanish in it and I'm very bad at Spanish and I mispronounced everything um but at least I tried I've been seeing a lot of um books lately so this is done you guys but I've been seeing a lot of translation um in on the page too and I think that is so cool to like teach language at the same time have it like fanatically spelled um in its original context in like language and then have it in English so over for people who speak English can understand it I think that's so cool to have the combination of all three um so here you go this is how you draw a book and I'm really excited to see what everybody's books look like okay so everyone hold up their books go on your screen hold up your books let's see what we're doing can we get more people bigger let's see maybe if I change my view to gallery if you change your view to gallery you can see everyone's I can see Kathy's the life of Andy oh look that's really really intricate my goodness Jason has a good one Aaron that looks great Aaron and family oh wow there's so many beautiful ones Kathy I love the smile and the sunglasses oh my gosh the stars are so good Vanessa Vanessa has some nice pink shirt and hair oh my goodness oh yes there's a second page of this awesome oh I like that book it's so colorful oh Andy has his hands and his hands are great Andy's having a bowl oh my goodness I wish there was a lot of colors is it do you know does anybody know if there's a way if we could I wish there was a way we could have all of these pictures collected because I want to get to spend time to look at each of them individually too yeah why don't we all hold them up at once and maybe someone can take a screenshot of the screen oh yeah yeah so hold up your art as close as you can to the camera everyone let's try to screenshot it on three one oh you'll move it a little farther back two three okay I tried my hardest to get some of that well thank you everyone we're almost at the end does anyone have a last question that they're dying to ask Kailani before we go well then I will ask a question what are you most excited about what you're doing next Kailani oh I have so many things to be excited about okay so excitement art related wise I'm getting to lecture my first illustration course during the summer so that's exciting and then book wise um now that I've graduated school and everything I'm working on another book with chronicles so that's really exciting um I can't speak too much about here because it's still working progress but um I'll have a little bit more time to work on my own stories so uh for the first time I'm getting to work on a story that I've written and illustrated so I'm extremely excited to work on that so I get to draw all the stuff that I really really like I'd see a hand up we have a couple more minutes um Andy had his hand up for a while Andy do you want to unmute yourself and say something someone could unmute Andy okay this is my beef story oh wow your trees are so perfectly drawn and you drove such a big vast sky oh I love the sun the sun is perfect and it has an even more oh it's a whole book oh that was so cool that you put the words inside of the the leaves of the tree oh that beehive that is so clever oh look at the bees what are they singing to each other Andy what are the bees singing to each other uh they're they're uh they're a utility story and stuff and they're excited because there's yummy juicy flowers where are they I see the juicy flowers is that any question uh this looks like a great book I wish I could oh wow look at that color um what yeah Andy was uh this is actually inspired by the also talks they are school introduced so yeah I really love the uh library have this kind of program it's uh it's a good day education for the kids thank you thank you for sharing amazing um we have a question that is um really interesting to me um and it's talking about the evolution of your style I think it was so great I've never seen um someone put all those styles through the years up on one screen I loved seeing that Kalani can you talk about how do you come around come across a style and what makes it change oh yeah so I remember when I was a younger I really tried to just like for a second I was like I'm just gonna develop it and I don't think that's possible to just decide that one day um so I think I realized wow the fastest way to like kind of to like shape your own style because it's always shaping you can't control it it just happens um is to look at other people's art you really really like and sometimes it inspires you or gives you ideas on how to draw stuff in a way that is your own um so that way you're not just copying other people's work but expressing yourself in a way expressing yourself in a way that's uniquely you it's really great um what is our timing like librarians we we're rolling with it this is such a beautiful conversation and we're loving hearing about the creativity I see another hand um if you'd like to take one more question yeah okay let me unmute um it's yeah the question is that how you pronounce your name I'm not sure you have glasses on is it pronounced jai thank you for taking your glasses off now I can see your eyes what's your question look at that that green is so beautiful I like the bird that's really lovely oh that is a very strong bird in the corner I love that I like the feet on the bird they're so perfect that's really beautiful that's like when you were saying things are saturated Kalani means there's lots and lots of bright color in there yeah and the contrast I think you did a great job with the contrast between the background in the the green house is that your house is that a drawing of your house um it's not my house my house is yellow now the green oh so what's the building in the drawing um that's my exercise school I draw inside my exercise school wow there must be really cool birds there are there birds there is it from your imagination um the bird in here and did you draw the rainbow behind you as well wow I see more pictures of juicy flowers I see flowers I see another tree and stars it's hard to see is it a clover I like the rainbow on the clover that's how you know it's extra lucky sharing your art with us yeah and thank you Kalani and Lisa I hope that you have been feeling the love from the chat feed um Lisa specifically we have some shoutouts for the airport book and also how to be and really see your skills as an instructor for illustration out of the California College of the Arts really in action here so thank you so much for bringing this gorgeous conversation with Kalani and Kalani thank you for doing so much for our community and sharing your art your whimsy every time I look at your piece I see something new and I have so much appreciation for you um there was a comment in the chat that said even at six years old six years your characters have so much personality um and thank you for sharing your amazing family history and there's a lot of love for your bay area connections so we really appreciate you sharing so much of your life with us today um we are all excited to see your good night book I hope that's in the hopper if not we we want something we know you can make it safe and so cozy for us all so thank you and for everyone tuning in on youtube and on zoom we really appreciate you showing up today and being with us please join us next week next uh July 22nd we have Jean Luen Wang dragon hoops he's going to be in conversation um 1 p.m. pacific time so that's all take care um and follow Kalani's advice remember to eat good snacks stretch and rest be creative and take care of yourselves during the process we'll see you soon at our public library thanks everyone