Antoinette Portis: Hello, my name is Antoinette Portis and I'm the author and illustrator of the book, A New Green Day. This is the only book I've ever written that was based on a prompt from a writing class. So this was the first picture book writing class I ever took, and the teacher gave us a prompt to write a story where the character gets a message, and that's what starts the whole thing.

I had this image of a little girl holding a maple leaf and feeling like nature had given this leaf to her, that she had this personal relationship with nature, which in fact I did as a kid. I used to talk to the trees in my neighborhood, and there was this beautiful Chinese maple in our neighbor's front yard that was right by my bedroom window. When I was a little kid, being in my room, my room felt enormous. I'm in this room by myself and the tree was my protector, and I would ask the tree to watch over me while I slept, and the tree would say, "Of course, I'm going to do that for you."

So I always felt like nature was my friend, and I would roam around in my suburban neighborhood, picking up seed pods and leaves and sticks and things that seemed beautiful and interesting to me, and I wanted to share that love and that feeling of being connected to nature, even in small ways, with children now who seem more like their lives are obviously more scheduled. They spend more time on screens. They have a soccer practice, piano lessons, millions of things that just occupy their day, and they're driven around by their parents, and they don't have the same experience of rambling around in their neighborhood that I had as a kid, which actually, has prompted some of my favorite memories of my childhood.

At first I wrote this book as just a series of little poems where nature spoke directly to the kid. And then, I went, "Oh, it would be more interesting if it was a riddle." So instead of nature just saying, "I'm sunlight, come out and play," I thought, oh, let's have nature speak, and then you have to guess which element is speaking to you. So, I did it that way and that's how the riddle page turn thing came out.

So, once I got into just playing around with sumi ink and painting much more loosely, which I did with the book now, I finally went, "Oh, I know how I can illustrate this book the way I'm picturing." I knew that I wanted to capture the look of light shining through leaves, like that bright green and the overlap of different greens as the light shines through all the leaves overlapping each other. That was the key thing to this book. It had to have that leafy light in it, and I finally went, "Oh, I know how to do that." So, I was really excited.

I found that oak leaves printed just so beautifully. So, I would cover them with ink and then smoosh them onto paper, and then scan them into Photoshop, and make them into three or four layers, and overlap them and play around with them. Anyway, I got the look that I wanted.

Another tricky thing about this book was, mostly a book is a spread, the left hand page, the right hand page, they belong together. But my book, it's like the right hand page belongs with the left hand page, so you can't do a spread, and I didn't want it to be confusing that if you saw the picture on the left and the writing on the right, that the two things belong together because actually the writing on the right belongs to the next page. So, I put the text in the square that was butted up against the trim of the right side, so you would get... The design led you to see that you needed to turn the page.