{"id":450,"date":"2022-08-10T00:03:13","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T00:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/?p=450"},"modified":"2024-09-03T21:52:03","modified_gmt":"2024-09-03T21:52:03","slug":"the-trainbow-is-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/the-trainbow-is-here\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trainbow is here!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Rolling in to stores, libraries, places where books are sold starting August 16th, 2022, I am so excited to announce the arrival of The Trainbow!<\/a><\/strong> It’s a book… it’s a train… it’s a rainbow… it’s an accordion fold book that you can both read and play with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have always wanted to do an accordion fold book and I want to take you on a little journey so you can see how this super fun book came to life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s no accident that I decided to do a train book. Trains have been in my life, literally since I was two years old. We lived in Rego Park, Queens, in New York City and the Long Island Railroad ran through our backyard- just behind the garage. All day and all night, all sorts of trains went by: passenger trains, freight trains, trains that worked on the tracks- and they all shook our house. I had a fish tank in my bedroom and sometimes when the house shook, the water would slosh out of the fish tank and I’d find guppies on the floor when I woke up in the morning. The “X” on this map is where our house was- the first house on Alderton Street after 63rd Drive- LIRR is the railroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I even drew trains when I was little. I made this train, which almost IS a rainbow train when I was around six years old. It was done by coloring the paper first with many colored crayons, then covering it all with black crayon and ultimately drawing with a pointy tool like a toothpick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The book itself started years ago when I came up with the name, “The Trainbow,” and then wrote a little poem about it, with a song. Then I made a black and white dummy (yes, that is what we call a mock-up of a book) out of Bristol Board. I wanted the book to move sort of like a train, so that’s where the accordion fold came in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was what I sent to my editor at Chronicle Books<\/a>, and she liked it enough to bring it to acquisitions, and to my delight, the decision was made to offer me a contract to turn The Trainbow into a book. That was great news, but it didn’t happen smoothly, or quickly. For a while The Trainbow got derailed- by both the pandemic, and by some circumstances beyond my control. Finally a designer, Lydia Ortiz<\/a>, was brought on board and the book started moving again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was mutual agreement that the rainbow part of The Trainbow should stack on top of the book- and fold and unfold to form an actual rainbow. This took quite a few tries… and I had to make sure that the red arch was on top. I also wanted the book to read from right to left as it unfolded, and this had to work on both sides. So I created this little color dummy: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unfortunately the arches were too thin, and they would never hold up when the book was die-cut, so I went back to the drawing board. I had been pushing for the smoke from the train to create the arches. At first, my editor didn’t think she wanted that because she was concerned it was pollution… but I convinced her that it was steam. It’s a steam train- and it was rainbow steam… and it was fun. So I made another dummy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This time we were on the right track! (Sorry for all of the train puns, I can’t help it.) Then the real work began. The awesome design team at Chronicle Books worked with the amazing production team and they got me a template of the die-cut. I paint traditionally and I use Holbein Acryla gouache <\/a>on my board books. I had to paint the front and back sides of The Trainbow as one continuous painting- the front side was almost five feet long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I also wanted to paint the title so I could bring the rainbow into the letters as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As you can see, I paint my paper black to start. Then I paint over the black and leave little marks to give the art texture. I’ve been doing this style for my board books since I did “Peek-a Who?<\/a>” over twenty-two years ago. I call it my “fake woodcut” look. It gives the art energy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When all of the art was done I actually drove it from my home on Lummi Island <\/a>(near the Canadian Border) to Seattle where it was scanned. This was in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic, and I barely left my home at that point, but I bravely wore a mask and started the art on its journey to really becoming a book. Chronicle Books took over from there- and I stood by, at the station, and helped fine tune this little book to be the best it could be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope you will let The Trainbow<\/a> into your home and into your heart and imagination, whether you love trains, or rainbows, or unique books that bring a sense of joy and play into reading! <\/p>\n\n\n

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Rolling in to stores, libraries, places where books are sold starting August 16th, 2022, I am so excited to announce … Continue reading The Trainbow is here!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":463,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"The Trainbow is here! - NinaLaden.com","description":"Rolling in to stores, libraries, places where books are sold starting August 16th, 2022, I am so excited to announce the arrival of The Trainbow! It's a book..."},"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[15,19,14,6,17,16,18],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-board-book","tag-books","tag-childrens-book","tag-nina-laden","tag-rainbow","tag-train-book","tag-trains"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninaladen.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}