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I love your background I agree with a previous comment that the book Journey does sound extremely interesting especially being that it is wordless. I would defiantly be checking it after reading your summary. The book cover pictures are all beautifully illustrated and for sure make me interested in checking them out, as well as other books by Mr. Aaron Becker.

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Aaron Becker discusses A Stone for Sascha

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Aaron Becker discusses A Stone for Sascha

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Aaron Becker discusses A Stone for Sascha

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Journey
This is a wordless picture book about a lonely girl who uses magic chalk to "attract" herself to another world. And the girl travel by car. It is well executed and shows the creativity of your imagination. It includes a magical bird, secret doors, castles in a fantasy adventure world, which can only be described as flying machines and evil enemies.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Quest
This is the second book in a series about crayons in a fantasy world. The adventurous little girl is back, this time with her friends. It's raining, and the red chalk girl and the purple chalk boy are hiding under the bridge. The king gives them a map with the locations of six pieces of colored chalk. When the child kingdom gate found that it had been invaded, so they have to follow the king's map to see all the colors of chalk, and so they start a new and incredible journey.

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Aaron Becker was born in 1974 and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Pomona College in 1996, and currently lives and works in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He is best known for his wordless children's book Journey, which received positive reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and a Caldecott Honor in 2014.has worked as an artist in the film and animation industry, where he helped define the look and feel of characters, stories, and the movies they become a part of. And he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, daughter, and cat. Journey is his first book, he has created characters and worlds of his very own, using traditional materials and techniques.

In an interview with him, he talked about how illustration is a long road. He needed time to develop his illustration and storytelling skills, so he was glad he didn't publish his work at a very early period. As for the source of inspiration for his work, he said that he loves architecture and prefers to study it and draw all the details of buildings.
And in creating the composition, he had to learn watercolor because he says he wanted the books to look and feel like classic children's literature. The only watercolor gives me more detail in the lines and fantastic colors and rendering effects.

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Return
This is the last of the Wordless picture book trilogy. At the end of this book, I thought it was very interesting. The father suddenly realizes that his child is missing and is involved in a dangerous adventure. The girl once again finds her family - her father - and invites him to spend time together, but is ignored. As she retreats once again to the magical world she helped save, this time her father follows behind. When the father finds his daughter, she ignores her father. But when the kingdom is again in crisis, the girl joins her father to save the kingdom.

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Journey Trilogy

Book 1: Journey (August 2013)

Book 2: Quest (August 2014)
Book 3: Return (August 2016)

A Stone for Sascha (May 2018)

You Are Light (March 26, 2019)

My Favorite Color: I can Only Pick One? (September 08, 2020)

Nominations

Goodreads Choice Awards Best Picture Books
Caldecott Medal

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A Store for Sascha
The book begins with a ten-year-old girl who loses her beloved pet dog and leaves flowers on its grave. The little girl finds a stone on the beach connected to continents, civilizations, and matter. It is like opening the universe with a stone. Perhaps there will be some comfort in the heart of the little girl after she has witnessed the prosperity and change of civilizations in history.

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You Are Light
This is a short book about light, tells a small story about light; there are two round holes in the book, there are different colors of plastic as part of the story, can be lined up in a circle. You can hold the book up to this light source; it will produce a special effect. This book is readable and engaging and, most importantly, can understand the color or light.

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Welcome you to leave your precious comments for me~~

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portfolio website for illustration and film design

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I read these Aaron Becker books, and my favorite is Journey Trilogy. Although they are picture books without words, each one is full of endless imagination and creativity. Just like a child's brain imagines, there is no sense of falsity, and maybe that's the beauty of this book. The magic can resonate with both children, parents, and teachers when they read it. When a story without words, it tests the level of the illustrated story even more. I have to say that Aaron Becker's illustration skills and story structure are top-notch. Both the lines and colors blend with the story presented. Each storybook with a different theme has the same color contrast, the size of the color control range, and the placement of key elements. Overall, I like Aaron Becker's style of work, where reading is not only about words, but pictures are better for children to swim in the world of imagination.

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Author/illustrator Aaron Becker ( The Journey Trilogy) joins us to reveal the cover of his brand new wordless picture book, A Stone For Sascha, with a gorgeous video that he animated himself! He said he was very proud of his project, but that he could've done it faster, he said he got very distracted playing videogames with elo boost services. Watch below, then keep reading to learn more about the inspiration behind the book.

Aaron: I like to think of A Stone for Sascha as a majestic yet tender way to introduce a child to the very real feeling of loss and the power of larger ideas to heal. It sounds ambitious for a picture book, and I think it is, but Sascha is ultimately a personal and small story about private experiences that happen to have resonance on a much larger scale. I realize I've probably confused you all with this introduction! Have faith! Approach the book with an open mind and you will probably find a better explanation for yourself. It's what makes these wordless books so fascinating to me: the ability for them to mean such different things to each reader.

Aaron: The idea for the book came about while I was working on Return and living with my family in Granada, Spain. Each day on my walk to my studio, I would pass a church. Like most of the city, it was ornate and clearly full of history, so one day I stopped to read the sign out front. It turns out that hundreds of years ago, this church had been a mosque, and before that, a different church, and even before that, an ancient Roman structure. It was hard to stand there in front of the stone church and not think about its history, the grand scale of time that these rocks had witnessed. I thought that perhaps there was a book somewhere in there.

Aaron: I've actually taken a different approach with the artwork for A Stone for Sascha. Instead of the watercolors and detailed pen and ink drawings from the Journey Trilogy, I decided this story needed something more ethereal and soft. My film background was in digital art and I've been able to emulate the feel of oil pastels on a digital tablet. The pen that I use interacts with the glass screen and knows how hard I'm pressing or at what angle I'm holding the stylus. It was a liberating experience, and one that was surprisingly magical when I first saw the proofs of the book. The paintings were suddenly larger on the printed page with room to breathe, and most of all, wonderfully tangible. We yearn for touch, which is why books remain so important, even in this digital age.

Aaron: Without words, my books need a symbol to help guide the reader through the story, and color is one of the most clear and powerful visual symbols we have. For Sascha, I needed a color that was believable as a rock but would also pop off the page. But on a whole different level, there's a chance that this rock might actually be made of gold. There's a new theory that the gold found closer to the earth's surface came from a meteor shower some 200 million years after the formation of the planet. It's no coincidence that Sascha's dog tag hidden underneath the book's dust jacket is made of-you guessed it-gold.

Aaron: It's hard for me to pick one, because each is so essential for the story to work and each was so carefully researched and considered during my sketch process. But if you were to twist my arm, I'd have to say it's the moment that the girl is skipping stones underneath the darkening sky. It captures so much of the feeling I was after for the book. The tender moments that often precede awakening.

Aaron: Wordless picture books demand that we slow down. I think there's nothing quite as important to practice these days. My hope is that A Stone for Sascha provides something soft and quiet and real in an increasingly fragmented world.

A Stone for Sascha will be on sale from Candlewick Press beginning May 8, 2018.

For more content about Aaron Becker and his books, including a podcast interview, a craft project, and more, click here!

Aaron Becker's Journey was named a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association in 2014. Becker has worked as an artist in the film and animation industry, where he helped define the look and feel of characters and stories and the movies they become a part of. With the Journey Trilogy ( Journey, Quest, and Return), he created characters and worlds of his very own using traditional materials and techniques. In A Stone for Sascha, Aaron draws inspiration from his time living in Granada, Spain, where he learned that the stones from many of the city's churches had at one point been part of mosques, and before that, Roman ruins. Aaron Becker lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Author/illustrator Aaron Becker ( The Journey Trilogy) joins us to reveal the cover of his brand new wordless picture book, A Stone For Sascha, with a gorgeous video that he animated himself! He said he was very proud of his project, but that he could've done it faster, he said he got very distracted playing videogames with elo boost services.

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A one-stop place for all your kid lit information needs.

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]The first time I encountered a wordless picture book for children was Journey at my mother's house nearly a year ago. Long before we had ventured to the library she was already cycling through books for EV every time she visited.

I gave it a cursory page through and didn't quite get it. EV didn't seem to love it, either. I took away that EV wasn't excited about wordless picture books.

Over the summer, E bought EV a wordless book called . I was skeptical of it at first, recalling EV's disinterest in Journey. Then, I watched something magic begin to happen. E kept making up the story of Pool, and EV began to interact with the story. Sometimes she interjected to add something from a prior telling, others she inserted her own details.

I took a turn reading it to her, and I noticed different facets of it than E, so my telling was a shade different. If I asked nicely enough and didn't make a big deal about it, EV would even "read" Pool to me.

Pool was one of our most-read books during the summer. When E was listing off books from her want-list for our request list for the library and mentioned Journey, my ears pricked up.

I wondered - how would EV like the book now that she was older and more engaged in the shared creation of a story? Would Journey include both enough narrative and enough ambiguity to make for as interesting a read as Pool?

What a difference a few months made!

The Journey Trilogy: Journey, Quest, and Return by Aaron Becker
CK Says: - Try them!
Gender Diversity: Female protagonist; most other characters are male, although background characters are sometimes agender.

Ethnic Diversity: None, unfortunately

Challenging Language: None!

Themes to Discuss: imagination, fantasy, canals, cooperation

Reading Time: Depends on the reader! Between 4-15 minutes each, for us.

The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker is a beautiful, brilliant, fantastical trio of wordless adventure books by with a capable little girl hero, each with plenty of room for interpretation and expansion in the retelling. Becker proves himself an ingenious storyteller with an eye for detail and a knack for tantalizing ambiguity.

is the story of a young girl who uses a piece of red chalk to travel to a fantastic world by drawing a door on her bedroom walk. In that world, she learns that the chalk can draw anything out of thin air.

After sailing through a town built on a series of canals, she encounters a group of soldiers flying in zeppelins are trying to catch a vivid purple bird. The girl tries to save the bird, but she's captured herself, and the two work together so she can get free. The bird leads her to a door just like her own, except it's the same color as the bird! On the other side, she is back in the real world down the street from her house, where she meets a boy with purple chalk.

I could add so many more details to that plot summary, but none of them are verifiably true and that's the best part of Journey. The story told by the series of gorgeous illustrations is never proscriptive, but it includes many hints to act as hooks for your imagination. The colorful chalk creations pop off the watercolor backgrounds.

The easiest example is the red chalk itself. The girl finds it on the floor of her room. Is it the first time she has encountered it? The natural urge is to say yes, as that fits with how stories like this one are usually told. However, she already owns a matching red scooter and red ball which she has been carrying around the house with her. Is it a coincidence that red is her favorite color, or had she created with the chalk before?

These points of interpretation abound in Journey, and they're part of what makes it so fun in the retelling. Does the girl mean to steer her little red boat to the top of the highest canal? Is it she or the the bird who engineers the magic carpet that will fit through the bars of her cage? Where do she and the boy find the body of a bike that they draw wheels for at the end of the book?

That's what makes Journey perfect for a small reader who can interact with you while you read. The details that EV noticed and questions she asked shaped out version of the story. Sometimes it's a very plain, descriptive version that simply explains the action on each page. Others it unfurls in the telling like a florid fairy tale, full of little asides and descriptions of the girl's inner monologue.

Journey would already be a surefire recommendation if it stood alone, but Aaron Becker extended the story into two additional books - Quest and Return - that are somehow even more captivating than Journey itself!

Quest finds the girl and boy accosted in a real world park by a king dressed in yellow, who presses an empty bandolier and a rainbow map before being pulled back through a door to the fantasy world by the guards from the first book. The map depicts four other colors of chalk and the places they can be found. The girl and boy re-enter the world and give the guards a merry chase through the land as they collect the full rainbow of chalk and free the king.

begins similarly to Journey - the girl decides to travel to her secret world when her father doesn't play with her. This time, her father follows her to her room and discovers the open door and the fantastical world on the other side. He finds the girl, boy, and king meeting together, but they're interrupted with the guards and a machine that can vacuum up their colorful creations - and their chalk! A chase ensues, in which the girl's father sees all the ingenious ways she's learned how to use the chalk. However, they have to work together to figure out how to protect the girl's red chalk from capture and free the king and the boy from the grips of the guards.

There is so much to love in both books, but I'll simply highlight my favorite element of each.

I love that Quest features an equally capable girl and boy on a wild, fantastical adventure. The added bonus is that the absence of dialog means you can read the pair's cooperation in whatever manner suits your own little one. The book gives no indications to their relationship aside from their cooperation.

My main telling has the boy as much more tentative and unsure than the girl to emphasize how strong encouragement makes her a good leader and friend. However, there are other times I put them on more equal footing, or have them bicker amusingly. Sometimes the girl is cautious, while others she is headstrong and needs to be reeled back in by the boy.

Each person I've watched read it with EV gives the pair their own balance. The only thing you cannot really exclude is that the girl is clearly the protagonist of the series.

Return is The Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, because the introduction of the father to the story includes several potentially mind-blowing revelations that fundamentally change the story depending on how much you fixate on the details of the book.

I don't want to "spoil" your read by giving you all of our house theories, but here are a few things to notice (which should also give you a good idea of how you can engage your little one in the illustations of all three books).

The father appears to be drawing at his work desk - what is his job or hobby?

A door similar to the girl's can be spotted in the father's office early in the book. Does it already (or did it ever) lead to the fantasy world?

The father and the girl both have looks of shock on their faces when they meet in the fantasy world. What is it that surprises each of them? What is it that causes the girl's subsequent cross-armed reticence?

The girl and her father encounter a series of seemingly prophetic sketches in a cave. How did they get there?

Did the father always have the ability to draw in the world with his gray work pencil, or did something happen to cause it to be useful? And, do you think the gray looks similar to the gray of the guard's armor?

If you read between the lines in those questions, you can see that there is an intriguing meta-narrative about the father that might change the meaning of the prior books depending on your interpretation. This is just one example of how the books open themselves up to growing in the retelling.

When I evaluate if a purchase was worthwhile, I do so on a matrix of dollars invested vs. time enjoyed vs. intensity of enjoyment. If I apply that matrix to the Journey books they are a relatively flat shape of nearly infinity length and width - meaning, they weren't that expensive but there is no end to the time and amount of enjoyment EV gets from them. She walks around the house with them clutched tightly to her little chest, and will sit for an hour retelling the stories to her stuffed animals and toys.

My sole critique of Journey is that Becker missed an easy opportunity to diversify his cast in making the little boy anything other than white. We don't meet any of his relatives (OR DO WE?), so his whiteness doesn't create consistency with any other element of the book. Having him be a kid of color who makes fast friends with the girl and joins in her adventure would only add to the wordless power of these books in displaying friendship, loyalty, and cooperation.

The Journey Trilogy is breathtaking modern classic of fantasy from Aaron Becker that can captivate kids from age 2 to 102. All it takes to enjoy them is an imagination and a willingness to get lost in the beautiful details of his fantasy world. If your toddler isn't quite enough for it yet, she'll get there.

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Children's Book Review: The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker - Crushing Krisis

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Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]The first time I encountered a wordless picture book for children was Journey at my mother's house nearly a year ago. Long before we had ventured to the library she was already cycling through books for EV every time she visited. I gave it a cursory page through and didn't quite get it.