A Huddle at Cafe Breton



Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 2. My Trip Around the Art World

Essay 25. A HUDDLE IN CAFE BRETON

By Arnaldo Mirasol

It was at posh Cafe Breton-Greenbelt where the cover art for the book "Long Ago and Far Away" was selected. Long Ago and Far Away is a compilation of ten Brothers Grimm fairy tales retold by Fran Ng and published by Tahanan Books for Young Readers.

Publisher Reni Roxas met me and her assistant at Cafe Breton to discuss and select,  over plates of delectable crepes, which illustration would be the cover art. She first asked us our choices. Her assistant  (whose name escapes me now, but who could be Ginny Mata) chose, if I remember correctly, "Rumpelstiltskin". I chose "Snow White and Rose Red".

Reni jokingly scoffed at our choices. She sharply tapped the table in mock dismay and declared that the cover art should obviously be "The Goose Girl". According to her the Goose Girl is, hands down, the most beautiful among the illustrations I did for the book. She's right, because the book does indeed look splendid with the Goose Girl as cover art.

Reni not only selected the Goose Girl as cover art for the book, she also added it to her growing collection of my works. Another Illustration for this book which Reni bought was "Rapunzel".

By the way, book illustration is different from book design. The illustrations I did for the book are but one aspect of the whole book design. Reni hired only the best, and the one she chose to design not only this book, but also my two previous books---"The Brothers Wu and the Good-luck Eel" and "Once Upon a Time"---was Auri Asuncion Yambao. Definitely, she's one of if not the best picture book designer in the Philippines.

Auri did the layout, not only of the front and back cover, but also of the interior pages of the book. She also selected the typography, the letter fonts to use for the book title and the inside text, and what the color scheme of the cover would be. In short, Auri was responsible for the book's overall look.

I don't know if Auri's back cover design was novel, but it was the first time I saw printed on the back cover of a picture book thumbnail-size images of all the inside Illustrations.

Incidentally, Rishma Cuerdo, the model for the goose girl character, was a high school classmate of my younger son Kai. Rishma was also my model for three other Illustrations: "Snow White and Rose Red", "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 2", and "Waling-waling", one of the illustrations I did for Jun Matias' story "Alamat ng Agila".

The Goose Girl scene shows Rishma as the true princess hugging her horse Falada who was about to be decapitated. She of course wasn't hugging a horse in the photo I took. She was hugging my son Kai, who gamely posed as the horse.


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