Hello Class –

If you don’t already know Chris Van Allsberg’s work – take a look at it and get familiar!  This Caldecott winning illustrator is one of the greats!  We will be discussing his work at length later in the course, but for now I thought I’d share this image with you from his book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.   These illustrations were done with chalk pastel in gray tones. These pastels come in stick or pencil form and can be sharpened to a very fine point.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick are fourteen black-and-white drawings, each accompanied only by a title and a caption, enticing readers to make up his or her own story for the illustrations.

It is a really amazing example both of Use of Value and of Object Staging, … and just as we need to do in our next assignment, storytelling based on objects or without a character doing the main storytelling in the image!

Click on the links to learn more about the project and the author illustrator!

Post one image from the Mysteries of Harris Burdick that particularly appeals to you to DISCUSSION and explain why you chose it. 

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is a 1984 picture book by the American author, Chris Van Allsburg consisting of a series of images, which were from Harris Burdick, a man who mysteriously disappeared. Each image is accompanied by a title and a single line of text, which compel readers to create their own stories. Many famous writers have tried to put their own twists on the pictures.^[1]

In 2011 a book titled The Chronicles of Harris Burdick was published, featuring stories by high profile writers including Stephen King and Louis Sachar, inspired by the illustrations in the original The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.