Bunny Carter (white tee shirt) waved us off--as we boarded a big red bus to go first to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the New Britain Museum to see their illustration collection. The Eric Carle Museum is a beautiful modern museum near Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. They had a great show, "Flights Into Fancy" that was also at the Brandywine River Museum. There was a great collection of works featuring a lovely Jessie Wilcox Smith of Alice in Wonderland, Edmund Dulac,a delicate Kay Nielsen (sort of a rosetta stone of techniques),works by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, an artist known for depicting fairies as children with wings. Her black and white work is exquisite and delicate. There were images from the Oz books. I learned about a new artist, William Heath Robinson's strong black and white work that may have influenced Virginia Lee Burton. I was looking at horizons and details, frames and foregrounds, something to store in the memory bank. They had a great store filled with children's books and graphic novels, art supplies and the entire collection of Eric Carle books, prints, teeshirts, and merchandise galore.