Gabi Swiatkowska is giving a tour of her studio, a dark basement in a narrow wood-frame house in Greenpoint, an old working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Her large worktable sits in a corner, facing exposed pipes and gray cinder-block walls. Apart from a painting propped against a wall and a hanging poster, there's little to suggest an artist at work, let alone the remarkable new talent behind two recent picture books: "My Name Is Yoon" (2003) by Helen Recorvits, for which Swiatkowska won the 2004 Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award, and "Summertime Waltz" (2005, both Farrar) by Nina Payne. Swiatkowska brings to Payne's poem about childhood summers a virtuoso drawing and painting technique, coupled with a gleefully unorthodox use of space and a gift for creating funny, surreal imagery. All in all, it's a strikingly innovative work. She wants a visitor to know that normally, when everything isn't crated, the seemingly drab basement has a lot of character and is, for her, a perfect place to work. She likes to surround herself with the stacks of cut-out pictures, art books, and graphic design magazines as an inspiration for her work. She usually becomes so immersed in her projects that her surroundings seem to disappear.