Thursday Things: Young Artist Edition
3 February 2022. Vol 4 No 5 By Dan McGirt. #130
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the heading or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also post a comment by clicking the dialog bubble next to the heart.
Illustration from Old French Fairy Tales Artist: Virginia Frances Sterrett Source: Project Gutenberg
This true story is almost a fairy tale in itself. Teenage Artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s Hauntingly Beautiful Century-Old Dreamscapes for French Fairy Tales
Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931) had barely learned to walk when she began drawing. She never stopped, and her talent never ceased winning over its legion of silent champions.
At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State Fair. To her surprise, she won first prize in three different categories.
Within a year, she won a stipend to the Art Institute of Chicago — one of the country’s oldest, most esteemed and egalitarian art schools
But then her mother fell ill and young Virginia dropped out of art school to get work as an illustrator for Chicago advertising agencies. Later, she was was diagnosed with tuberculosis and bedridden in a convalescent facility at 19.
However, a friend had shown some of her art at the Chicago Book Fair, where it eventually came to the attention of a publisher who commissioned Virginia to illustrate an American edition of Old French Fairy Tales (public library | public domain) by the nineteenth-century Russian-French writer Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur.
That’s some straight fairy godmother stuff right there. Read the full article at Maria Popova’s amazing site The Marginalian for the rest of the story, and several more examples of Virginia Frances Sterrett’s hauntingly ethereal work. You can also view or download Old French Fairy Tales (with the illustrations) at the links in paragraph just before this one. In case you missed that.
Illustration from Old French Fairy Tales Artist: Virginia Frances Sterrett Source: Project Gutenberg
This kid is the author, illustrator, publisher, and book distributor all in one! An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.
Dillon Helbig, a second-grader who lives in Idaho, wrote about a Christmas adventure on the pages of a red-cover notebook and illustrated it with colored pencils.
When he finished it in mid-December, he decided he wanted to share it with other people. So much, in fact, that he hatched a plan and waited for just the right moment to pull it off.
Days later, during a visit to the Ada Community Library’s Lake Hazel Branch in Boise with his grandmother, he held the 81-page book to his chest and passed by the librarians. Then, unbeknown to his grandmother, Dillon slipped the book onto a children’s picture-book shelf. Nobody saw him do it.
The book, titled “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis,” is signed “by Dillon His Self.”
You gotta love the moxy!
Actually, though, that’s a crass way of putting it. I don’t think it was so much moxy as sincerity. Young Dillon sincerely wanted to share his story with readers and, being a lifelong library patron, naturally thought the best way to do that was to put his book on the library shelf. And I get that. I used to pass my handwritten stories around to my friends at school. Wish I’d thought of the library approach!
Anyway, one thing led to another and the local library officially added Dillion’s book to their collection. Soon, a local TV station covered the story.
'I always be sneaky': Boise eight-year-old hides self-made book on library shelf
BOISE, Idaho — Eight-year-old Dillon Helbig has always had big aspirations.
"I've been wanting to put a book in the library since I was five," Dillon said.
Three years is a long time to wait when you are only eight years old.
So when his grandmother gave him an empty journal, he decided to go all in.
After what Dillion said was two or three days of writing and drawing in December, he finished his very first book: 'The Adventures of Dillon Helbig's Crismis' by Dillon Helbig 'His Self'.
The book is about Dillion, who, one night, is decorating a tree when the star on top explodes.
"I think someone overnight put a bomb in there and it just exploded," Dillon said.
After that, he gets sucked into a portal and goes back in time to the very first Thanksgiving.
"Everything about it was a bit crazy," he said.
First, wow, this kid writes fast. Second, just from the preview, I want to read this book. Unfortunately, there is now a lengthy waitlist to check it out. And I don’t live in Idaho. But there is apparently an ebook edition in the works.
Dillon — like any true writer! — is already working on the sequel. And I think he’ll go far in the writing biz. Let’s give the author the last word:
With the book finished, Dillon knew he had to get it on the shelf at his local library, but he was not sure how.
So, Dillon decided to go the undercover route.
"I always be (sic) sneaky, like how I get chocolate," he told us.
Same. That book is not going to put itself on the shelves, that’s for sure. Best wishes to Dillon in his writing endeavors!
“The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis” Source: Ada Community Library
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