I fell in love with the story the first time I read it-- it was originally titled One Night, so when I look though my sketchbook, all of my notes refer to One Night. My initial drawings were of a little girl all dressed up as a princess and a cat that followed her wherever her imagination took her. My first dummy book shows the real and the imagined worlds side by side, but my editor’s comments were “Simplify, simplify!”, so my second dummy book shows just the little girl and her cat and lets the words tell of the imagined world, but this wasn’t satisfying. I really wanted to paint a princess and her panther! Then I remembered how my sister and I used to play dress up when we were little. She was always the princess and I was always a cat! I made a quick sketch of two sisters and knew that my third dummy book for The Princess and Her Panther was going to work!

Here on my studio wall are many of the painted spreads for The Princess and Her Panther, but if you look closely, you will see that they are different from the illustrations in the book-- I paint in acrylics and the paintings evolve and change until I am satisfied that they work together from page to page. Some of my paintings have as many as ten layers of paint on them.

A Day in My Studio While Working on The Princess and Her Panther...

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Reviews

1. • Imagination is at the heart of this book as two sisters set out to camp in their backyard. Their red tent becomes a royal shelter, the wading pool a lake, and the sandbox is the desert they toil across. The princess is stalwart, but her little sister, the panther, is unnerved when night falls. Orr’s steady refrain is, “The princess was brave, and the panther tried to be,” and the timidity of the panther is purposefully revealed in the rich acrylic illustrations... a clever twist on the usual camping story and the fears that accompany it.
   

                                                --School Library Journal

1. • A little girl and her younger sister have a great adventure in the backyard. After dark, though, it gets harder to be brave. Alert children will know that it’s not leaf snakes but leaves, not an owl-witch but an owl, not a great dog-wolf but the puppy next door that try their bravery.  The pictures are in broad, rich swaths of acrylic colors that deepen into night and then lighten into morning. A warm and cozy tale of sisterly joy and sweet imagination. 
   

                                                --Kirkus Reviews

Awards

1. •The Best Children’s Books of the Year,
   

   Children’s Book Committee,

   The Bank Street College of Education.

1. • Nominated for the Amelia Bloomer Project, Recommended
   

  Feminist Literature from Birth to Age 18.