A Guest Post by Julia Denos

Happy Wednesday! I am honored to turn over my blog for the day to the super-talented Julia Denos. Thank you, Julia, for sharing the book trailer for Swatch: The Girl Who Loved Color! 

Click here to read about the making of the book trailer. 

What a thrill to be here at Watch. Connect. Read. Swatch is SO excited to meet everyone, and I hope your readers have fun meeting her too! This is a book about creativity, love, and freedom, and how those things work together to make beauty in our lives. 

This is also a book honoring color, so it wouldn't be right if I didn't credit my co-author, the color Yellow. Here's how we wrote the book together:

One afternoon, a girl showed up in my imagination and told me her name was Swatch and that she was a COLORTAMER. 

"A color...what?" I asked her.

I pestered Swatch with that question for the next three years, while I worked on other books. As an artist, I lived in deep relationship with color. From my own experience, I knew that colors (and girls) were wild forces of Nature. Neither one of us were very tameable at all. This would be tricky.

Who was Swatch? What did she want to say? Why couldn't I capture her wild story? After a hundred or so drafts, the colortamer still wouldn't budge. So I put it all away: my sketches, my notebooks, my papers, and pens. And THEN! On an ordinary evening in the studio, it happened. I walked by a tiny sketch still pinned to the wall, which I'd forgotten to clear away: A little girl holding tight to a blob of Yellow crayon. 

"Hold on," said a voice I hadn't met yet, as I walked out of the studio.

It wasn't Swatch's voice. It was...Yellow's!

In all these years, I had never considered asking a color to tell me the story! So I ran right back into my studio and the entire book unraveled backward from that single line. Yellow told me the story of Swatch in its own wild way.

In my attempt to write a story about a colortamer, I had forgotten how to be a storytamer, which is about letting a story (another wild thing) be free to speak for itself. Yellow reminded both Swatch and me, that if you want to make a masterpiece, if you want to tame anything at all, you have to get out of the way and let it tame you."

Look for Swatch: The Girl Who Loved Color on March 15.