Next To Me is a children's book with a simple but joyful premise: a child and a mom walk home from school and notice things.
It's written and illustrated by Daniel Salmieri — who illustrated the mega-bestselling Dragons Love Tacos, as well as many other kids' books — and Sophia Haas, an artist, former early education teacher and now, debut author.
"We've known each other for a really long time," says Haas. They both grew up in New York City. "Daniel and I went to the same parties in high school but we started dating in college."
"I tried in high school once, but she wasn't interested," Salmieri adds. They still live in New York City, and they're married, with a young son who helped inspire his parents' book. "Being parents now, we noticed that we tend to notice and name all the things around us when we're with our kid," Haas says about how she came up with the concept of "next to."
As the child and mom walk home from school, they notice a big tree next to a red car. They notice a twisty slide next to swinging swings. Next to big kids playing basketball.
When they get home, they notice what's for dinner and who is making it. They notice bubbles in the bath.
"The way that we did it," says Salmieri of their process, "was a lot of working separately and coming together." They wrote separately, then shared their ideas, then sketched separately, then compared them. Salmieri did most of the paper-making and watercolor painting and Haas did most of the cutting and collaging. They glued everything down together.
"It's a bright and happy-looking book," says Salmieri. There's also a lot of texture — Salmieri painted some of the paper to look like concrete for the city scenes, and Haas pulled from her work with marbling and natural dyes.
"I grow my own dye plants and process them into pigment," she explains. "So throughout the book there are little details like that. There's a page where the child notices a cloud next to an airplane and that sky is painted with indigo that we grew at our community garden down the block."
Their friends and family might have been a little nervous about them working together, but it was great, the pair says. In fact, they might fight more cleaning the apartment than they did making a book together. "I've always been a big fan of Sophia's art," says Salmieri. "I think that this was a really nice way to be able to combine our aesthetics."
After dinner and a bath, it's time to get ready for bed. Things wind down and get cozy. Instead of noticing and seeing, the child starts feeling — the blankets and stuffed animals. Soft, next to soft, next to soft. "That's something in the end that we really wanted to convey," says Sophia Haas. "This feeling of safety and kind of slowing down."
And there's a reason for that. "As a parent now, I realize how great it is when a picture book ends like that," says Daniel Salmieri. "Everything's quiet and it's bedtime. That's what we're here to do. We're here to go to sleep."
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