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Emile and the Field is the story of a little boy who spends every season playing in a field by his house, whispering to the trees or playing in the leaves.

Kevin Young, the author of the book, originally wrote Emile and the Field years ago as a bedtime poem for his son. Young’s son is a teenager now — and too old for bedtime stories — but this poem about Emile lives on, now as a children’s book illustrated by Chioma Ebinama, a fine artist living in Greece.

Ebinama wanted to reflect Emile’s love for nature, so she used a sort of romantic palette (调色板) of pinks, blues and sunny yellows. She hand-painted the illustrations in watercolor.

For inspiration, Ebinama says she drew from a variety of influences. One scene, where Emile and his father hold hands and walk through the snow-covered field, reminds us of Snowy Day, Keats’ 1962 children’s book about Peter, an African American boy who explores his neighborhood after the season’s first snowfall.

And — as in Snowy Day — Ebinama drew the little boy in Emile and the Field as a black child. Even though the author and the illustrator never discussed it clearly, Young says the fact of Emile’s blackness was very important to him. The winter scenes were actually the most challenging. Obviously it’s winter so it’s mostly white.

Emile and the Field is a family story for both the author and the illustrator. Ebinama, for example, drew her dog, Luna, into the story as the little dog that follows Emile around. Even though there is no dog in Young’s original poem, Luna came in very handy.

There was a kind of family quality to the book for Young. He named the main character of his poem after his great-grandfather, Emile, a farmer who lived to be 103 years old. He says the story reminds him of running around his family’s fields as a kid in Louisiana.

“There’s nothing better than being read to or reading to someone,” Young says. “It really connects you to this long story-telling tradition.”