Orback, Craig

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Orback, Craig

Personal

Born in Los Osos, CA. Education: Cuesta Community College, A.A.; Cornish College of the Arts, B.F.A., 1998. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, hiking, movies, reading.

Addresses

Home—Seattle, WA. Agent—Liz Sanders Agency; lizlizsanders.com. E-mail—craig.orback@gmail.com; craig@craigorback.com.

Career

Illustrator, 1998—. Also teaches children's book illustration and oil painting.

Awards, Honors

Best Children's Books selection, Bank Street College of Education, 2007, for The Flyer Flew!; Best Children's Books selection, Bank Street College of Education, and Editor's Choice for Picture Books, Library Media Connection, both 2008, both for Nature's Paintbox; Amelia Bloomer Project selection, American Library Association, 2008, for Susan B. Anthony: Fighter for Freedom and Equality.

Illustrator

Ginger Wadsworth, Benjamin Banneker: Pioneering Scientist, Carolrhoda Books (Minneapolis, MN), 2003.

Tami Lehman-Wilzig, Keeping the Promise: A Torah's Journey, Kar-Ben Publishing (Minneapolis, MN), 2004.

Laura Hamilton Waxman, An Uncommon Revolutionary: A Story about Thomas Paine, Carolrhoda Books (Minneapolis, MN), 2004.

Marlene Targ Brill, Bronco Charlie and the Pony Express, Carolrhoda Books (Minneapolis, MN), 2004.

Deborah Hopkinson, John Adams Speaks for Freedom, Aladdin (New York, NY), 2005.

Lee Sullivan Hill, The Flyer Flew!: The Invention of the Airplane, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Marty Rhodes Figley, Washington Is Burning, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Suzanne Slade, Susan B. Anthony: Fighter for Freedom and Equality, Picture Window Books (Minneapolis, MN), 2007.

Patricia Thomas, Nature's Paintbox: A Seasonal Gallery of Art and Verse, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2007.

Stephen Krensky, Paul Bunyan, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2007.

Marty Rhodes Figley, Prisoner for Liberty, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2008.

Ginger Wadsworth, Survival in the Snow, Millbrook Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2009.

Also contributor of illustrations to magazines and text books.

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Sidelights

A children's book illustrator based in the Pacific Northwest, Craig Orback has provided the artwork for such award-winning titles as The Flyer Flew!: The Invention of the Airplane by Lee Sullivan Hill and Nature's Paintbox: A Seasonal Gallery of Art and Verse by Patricia Thomas. Orback, who works primarily in oils, also paints portraits and landscapes and teaches art at colleges near his home in Seattle, Washington.

One of Orback's early efforts, the art in Keeping the Promise: A Torah's Journey by Tami Lehman-Wilzig, focuses on a story of survival. The work concerns a small Torah scroll that was given as a gift to a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; the scroll was later carried into space by an Israeli astronaut aboard the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia. "Orback's full-page oil paintings tell a story in themselves," Sandra Kitain noted in School Library Journal.

Thomas offers an ode to the four seasons in Nature's Paintbox. In his illustrations for this book, Orback depicts each season using a different medium: pen and ink for winter, pastel chalk for spring, water color for summer, and oils for fall. "It's a successful conceit," observed Susan Moorhead in School Library Journal, and Booklist contributor Carolyn Phelan credited the success of the work to "Orback's artistic ability and to the quality of the free verse." Nature's Paintbox exhibits "a strikingly rare synergy between the poetry and the illustrations," in the view of a Kirkus Reviews writer.

Orback has also served as the illustrator for a number of juvenile biographies. The accomplishments of Wilbur and Orville Wright are the focus of his collaboration with Hill for The Flyer Flew! According to School Library Journal reviewer Heather Ver Voort, the book's characters "are painted with clear expressions and details that add to the quality of the book." Suzanne Slade offers a portrait of a famed abolitionist and suffragist in Susan B. Anthony: Fighter for Freedom and Equality.

Ilene Cooper, writing in Booklist, complimented Orback's work for Slade's biography, in particular a "dramatic spread showing slaves and soldiers marching under a golden sky." Prisoner for Liberty tells the story of James Forten, an African-American teenager who enlisted as a sailor during the Revolutionary War. In Booklist, Hazel Rochman remarked that here Orback's "vivid paintings" added to the "inspiring" tale by Marty Rhodes Figley.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2006, Gillian Engberg, review of The Flyer Flew!: The Invention of the Airplane, p. 101; June 1, 2007, Ilene Cooper, review of Susan B. Anthony: Fighter for Freedom and Equality, p. 94; October 15, 2007, Carolyn Phelan, review of Nature's Paintbox: A Seasonal Gallery of Art and Verse, p. 50; January 1, 2008, Hazel Rochman, review of Prisoner for Liberty, p. 66.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2007, review of Nature's Paintbox.

School Library Journal, December, 2002, Suzanne Crowder, review of Nathan Hale: Patriot Spy, p. 131; May, 2004, Rita Soltan, review of Uncommon Revolutionary: A Story about Thomas Paine, p. 138; August, 2004, Anne Knickerbocker, review of Bronco Charlie and the Pony Express, p. 106, and Sandra Kitain, review of Keeping the Promise: A Torah's Journey, p. 111; August, 2006, Heather Ver Voort, review of The Flyer Flew!, p. 105; November, 2007, Susan Moorhead, review of Nature's Paintbox, p. 113.