A Garden of Colour in Tomatoes for Neela
Tomatoes for Neela, written by Padma Lakshmi and illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal is a story about the love of food, and passing down generational traditions through recipes. Martinez-Neal’s illustrations are lush and complex, and she utilizes acrylic paint and colored pencil to create an array of colors representative of dream and memory.
A page where these colors are on full display is one in which Neela is nose-deep in a patch of heirloom tomatoes. Her paati stands recto, a memory Neela is conjuring and interacting with. The illustration is rendered atop a wash of soft yellow that gives the image a bright, dreamlike quality. Much of Neela’s life is rendered in bright, saturated colors with high light points, which creates a warm and loving world for her to inhabit. Doonan states in regards to this “A high-key colour scheme using light colours is able to suggest feelings of well-being” (Doonan 31). Neela’s tomatoes are rendered in various hues of red-orange, and a similar colour is splattered into the illustration at places like stray blotches of juice.
The one piece of this illustration not filled with colour is Paati, who is drawn in grayscale pencil. While a fully desaturated figure would typically feel dull, sinister, or lifeless among all the bright colors, this intentional choice by the illustrator puts Paati’s memory in context with the black and white photo Neela’s mother has in their kitchen. Neela’s imagining and interaction with her paati brings the photo into her world, and the yellow of the background showing through Paati’s grey rendering allows Neela to be a part of Paati, too.
Martinez-Neal’s uses color to tie Neela’s real world to that of family memory and her own imagining. The warmth of her world, the desaturated memory of her paati, and the sunny yellow that ties them together work together to great affect.
Works Cited
Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Thimble Press 1993.
Martinez-Neal, Juana. Tomatoes for Neela. Written by Padma Lakshmi. Viking 2021
Stats: CIP Fall 2022, Laramie Hearn. Installment #1: Artistry. 308 words.