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Imagnary House launched a delightful new title where illustrator Megan Lötter joins forces with Kirsty Paxton in a cheeky and fun African children’s story, which is their first children’s book together.
What sort of landscape would you like to live in? Imagine if you had the chance to tell the artist how you wanted to look? Well, the animals of Africa – starting with the giraffe – have a say in creating their own personal landscape when our artistic child draws a giraffe in chalk. When the drawings magically come to life, the characters become rather demanding art critics, and some things have to change!

 

We all know how fabulous it is to draw with chalk and create characters that we love and then rub them clean when we want to change them, only to recreate the original picture. In The Chalk Giraffe, author Kirsty Paxton gives us all these elements along with rhyming text and a creative child with wildly messy hair and a vivid imagination.  When her creation comes alive and asks for more colourful surroundings, she happily draws that for him.

 

“‘I’m alone’ he cried out, ‘there’s just grey all around’. So I drew him a tree growing up from the ground.”

 

But as he asks for more and more, our little artist gets frustrated and things start to unravel! What follows is a quirky and humorous tale of creativity and perspective, with the beautiful African landscape as a backdrop to this unlikely friendship.

 

The collaboration between Kirsty Paxton and Megan Lötter has resulted in a beautifully balanced book, where illustration and text allow children to pursue their own creativity.
Kirsty Paxton is a play education specialist from Cape Town, South Africa, and now living in Canada. She has previously written and published Why is there a Hole in the Wall? through Book Dash, and throughout her life has worked in jobs that encourage learning for children through play and imagination, including time in her own business Artee Parteez and working with Axium Education. Her latest kids’ book, The Chalk Giraffe is a dive into creativity and curiousity for children, exploring what art means and what role we partake in it. It is an exciting and brilliant understanding of imagination for children, and is sure to lead to many more publications in this vein.

 

Megan Lötter is a freelance illustrator living in Cape Town, South Africa, having studied graphic design at CPUT. She is in love with creating characters and animals for children’s books, nostalgic of her own childhood. Having been surrounded by paint and an endless supply of pencils and crayons, her love for drawing started at a very young age and highly influenced her love for colour. Her new illustrated book, The Chalk Giraffe, captures this pursuit of colour, perspective, and out-of-the-box art for children.

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