She says the final product would take an entire year.
"And then it's backwards and forwards between us until I get to the point where we all agree that what I've roughly got in mind is right," says Craig. Craig would do rough thumbnail sketches to take back to Holabird. Once the story was created, Holabird would turn it over to Craig for storyboarding. Since they were both living in London at the time, they would occasionally go on field trips together to research scenes - like for a story where Angelina is getting to a dance festival on a barge. Holabird says she would first spend several weeks writing the story. Unlike some author and illustrator pairs, Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig worked closely over the years. "They're very hard things to draw," says Craig. "And Helen said to me, 'Please don't ever write a story about bicycles again.'" The last full-page spread was the whole village coming out and riding bicycles with Angelina. In one story, Holabird decided that Angelina should get a bike for her birthday. "I used to go in with the roughs and say, 'Look, does this work? Is this pulley working?'"īut one thing Craig never wants to illustrate again? Bicycles. "I like the drawings to make sense."įor one book in the series, Angelina On Stage, Craig says she spent a lot of time consulting her father, who was a stage designer. "I have great respect for the children who are looking at these books," says Craig. "It just seemed to me this was a wonderful story about little girls and how empowering dance and music can be," says Holabird.Īt the time, she was working for her husband's publishing company - writing copy and doing interviews - when he introduced her to illustrator Helen Craig. Later, when she was a freelance writer living in London, she had two young daughters who also loved to dance.
She grew up in Chicago with three sisters, and they spent hours dressing up and dancing around the house in ballet costumes, made by her set-designer father.
Holabird - like a lot of children - loved to dance as a kid. "She's feisty and she has a lot of emotion. "She's this marvelous character," says Holabird of the little white mouse in a pink tutu.
"She danced all the time and she danced everywhere, and often she was so busy dancing that she forgot about the other things she was supposed to be doing." "More than anything else in the world, Angelina loved to dance," writes Katharine Holabird on the first page of her classic 1983 picture book, Angelina Ballerina.
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