Lauren Stringer

Illustrator

         Author

1. •...Rylant lyrically imagines the scarecrow as a grateful “witness to life,” while the acrylic paintings evoke a warm, even nostalgic sense of plenty.
   

                                                  --Publisher’s Weekly

1. •...an appreciation of silence, of patience, and of the beauty and changeable quality of the natural world. Stringer’s acrylic paintings are magnificent... a lovely and gentle book.
   

                                                   --School Library Journal

1. •...The lilting text, coupled with large acrylic paintings, captures the serenity of the countryside and the peacefulness of a scarecrow’s life...
   

                                                   --Booklist 

1. •...Rylant is in fine form with her lyrical, understated prose, and Stringer’s big, bold acrylic illustrations do a lovely job
   

of amplifying the text.

                                                   --Kirkus                                    

A Little Bit About...

How I Came to Illustrate Scarecrow:

The first time I read the story Scarecrow, I didn’t actually read it: I listened to it! My editor called me from a Starbucks coffee shop in San Diego, California, and read the entire story onto my phone machine. I loved it on first listening, but I kept playing the message over and over again, each time making little sketches on pieces of paper. These first sketches transformed many times before becoming the final painted illustrations. It took me almost two years to complete the paintings for this book and during this time I felt I had learned to see the world through a scarecrow’s button-borrowed eyes.

A Day in My Studio While Working on Scarecrow...

As I painted the illustrations for Scarecrow, I felt I had learned a new way to breathe while painting. Especially when working on the landscapes, a calm took over as I brushed the colors over and over one another creating light and times of day: dawn, evening, and night. I breathed in the changing seasons. I breathed and waited patiently for it all to appear. I became the scarecrow watching the world appear before me, letting the brush breathe life into the paintings.