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Comment By Christine Rappleye, Deseret News MailTribune.com By Christine Rappleye, Deseret News Posted May. 25, 2015 at 12:01 AM Updated May 25, 2015 at 6:16 PM By Christine Rappleye, Deseret News Posted May. 25, 2015 at 12:01 AM Updated May 25, 2015 at 6:16 PM » Social News Illustrator Carson Ellis lives in a home that’s “a really great place.” “I live on a farm and I have a lot of animals and I have a huge garden,” the Oregon illustrator said in an interview. Carson has been illustrating books for 10 years. Among the books she's illustrated are those in the Wildwood Chronicles series by her husband, Colin Meloy, who is a musician with the Decemberists, as well as “The Composer is Dead” by Lemony Snicket. She is now also the author and illustrator of the picture book “Home” (Candlewick Press, $16.99, ages 4-8) , which depicts about two dozen types of homes ranging from the realistic to the fantastic. “They are all places that mean a lot to me or my family or have piqued my interest,” said Ellis, whose two sons are ages 9 and 2. Ellis had wanted to write a book but couldn’t come up with an idea that she liked, so she changed her approach and decided to start with things that she liked to draw. “I thought if I started with subject matter I really love, then I could pour all that love into the illustrations and build a story around it and hopefully that would be engaging for kids,” she said. That redirection worked. “I realized looking around my studio that I loved to draw buildings and architecture and especially homes,” Ellis said. “That’s been a lifelong creative interest to me.” She wrote the manuscript for the simple text in about 20 minutes and quickly sketched thumbnails for the images. “Home” gives a glimpse of all kinds of homes, whether they be apartments, palaces or wigwams, located in the country, on boats or on buses, and within varying countries and cultures or even belonging to animals. “I chose places that mean a lot to me and that I’m constantly revisiting in real life or in my imagination,” Ellis said. “I also chose a lot of places that mean a lot to my family or to my kids.” She included homes for several mythical and fictional characters: the old woman who lived in a shoe, underwater Atlanteans, a Norse god and moon dwellers. “A lot of (the imaginative places) is stuff my older son, who’s 9, is thinking about and reading about a lot,” she said. “He loves Norse myths. He loves Atlantis. He loves sci-fi and terraforming planets.” One of the homes is a mansion under a bubble that has pipes connecting it to a front yard — her version of terraforming, or making an uninhabitable planet habitable for humans — with the text: “Who in the world lives here? And why?” “It’s funny because when kids look at that illustration and I ask, ‘Who do you think lives here, and why?’ they always say ‘Santa,’” Ellis said. “That’s not what I was thinking, but that’s great. I love to imagine Santa living there.” One of her favorite illustrations is of a girl in an apartment building with multiple levels, windows and water towers and that also has a greenhouse on the roof. “It felt like a painterly treatment of those buildings,” she said. “It also had those little windows to put things in.” She said painting the graffiti was a “funny experiment.” Ellis grew up in a New York suburb, and her parents worked in New York City when she was young. “I was fascinated with all of the stuff that was on the rooftops in New York — all of those water towers, smokestacks and greenhouse-type things,” Ellis said. “I was always wondering what all that stuff was for — and I still am wondering what all that stuff was for. It was fun to make a landscape on top of the cityscape.” Each spread and its paintings took Ellis about three to four hours to sketch and about 12 hours to complete. The original artwork is about the same size as it is in the book and was created with gouache — paint like opaque watercolors — and ink. “I feel that I did what I wanted to do,” Ellis said of the book. “I’m really happy with it.” “Home” was released in February and has appeared on the New York Times’ Children’s Picture Books Best Sellers List. Ellis said it was challenging to find a publisher that would work with the simple concept, and further challenges came as she was working on the illustrations: her family moved and she had a baby. “We had a chaotic couple of years while I was working on the book,” she said. But, she added, “it was a very easy book to work on” compared to other projects. Now living in the country and after publishing “Home,” Ellis has further ideas for what would constitute her dream home. “My dream home is much smaller, much less sprawling, much easier to take care of,” Ellis said. “It’s probably in the woods, like a cottage in the woods, but enough natural light that I can have a really great garden. That’s my dream home: very small, not too much to clean, not too much space to acquire lots of junk, and someplace a little wild and forested.” Ellis is currently working on another picture book that is scheduled to be published next year. By Christine Rappleye, Deseret News MailTribune.com By Christine Rappleye, Deseret News Posted May. 25, 2015 at 12:01 AM Updated May 25, 2015 at 6:16 PM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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