Win Me: James Jean's Kindling

Kinder Sur­prise

Win James Jean's Kind­ling.

Kind­ling, by James Jean. Pub­lished by Chron­icle Books.

Judging by the fan­boy (and fangirl) scenes of last year's Semi-Permanent, James Jean is a pretty big cheese in the world of illustration.

Leaf­ing through Kind­ling, which arrived on my desk just in time to be ignored in the pre-Christmas chaos, the respect Jean has garnered is pretty well jus­ti­fied. Kind­ling is not an ordin­ary book; it's an over­size col­lec­tion of 12 remov­able prints, includ­ing one 23-inch gate­fold mon­ster. Each print fea­tures pre­lim­in­ary sketches of the fin­ished art on the flip side, so you can get a bit of a handle on how each com­pos­i­tion comes together.

The sub­ject mat­ter might not be to everyone's tastes — there's not much main­stream about these ren­der­ings of chil­dren (kinder, kind­ling, et cet­era, ged­dit?). It's fant­ast­ical and a bit freaky. It's truly a Kinder Sur­prise, and the sur­prise is that it's up for grabs – all $74.99 (rrp) of it. All you have to do is leave a com­ment at the bot­tom of this post about James Jean. Any­thing will do. If you're stuck for inspir­a­tion, I sug­gest bor­row­ing a fact about him from Wiki­pe­dia. The win­ner will be drawn this Fri­day, 29 Janu­ary at 12 noon. The only catch is that you have to have a New Zea­l­and post­ing address, apo­lo­gies to all the internationals.

Image from Kind­ling, by James Jean.

Image from James Jean's Kindling.

- Michael Barrett

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