WORDS AND PICTURES
Like an alchemist working with an enchanted recipe to turn base metals into gold, it’s a magical process transforming words and pictures into books. So, how do I go about it? Do I start with the words or the pictures?
Oddly enough even though I was trained as an artist and started out as an illustrator, for me it’s the words that come first. Auntie Claus is a good example of that—so is my latest book Marigold Star.
Why? I enjoy playing around with words. There are certain ones that are so much fun to say: utterly, agog, litigious. Words that instantly conjure an image: bedazzled, powdered, burnished. I love the great lyricists of the twentieth century: Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Alan Jay Lerner’s Camelot, Cole Porter’s Night and Day, Sondheim’s Ladies Who Lunch, Irving Berlin—well, just about everything he wrote. The alliteration and rhymes, their irresistible expressions and phrases—they get me every time. It seems that even though I started out as a visual artist I am also in love with words.
I especially enjoy the mental game of connecting words together to form a name. The name implies a character and before I know it I’m pondering who they are, where they come from and what they do. In one of the first picture books that I wrote and illustrated called, The Three Dots, (about a duck, a frog, and a moose, all with dots who form a band) I needed a name for the agent who would propel them to stardom. That was back in the days when you still went to the Yellow Pages for information and in it I found the “Gold Star Agency”. I loved it—Goldstar—an ironic yet obvious choice for my talent agent’s last name. How I came up with the first name—Honey—I don’t remember but to this day the name Honey Goldstar still makes me smile.
Similarly when I started to work on something new a few years ago I began with a name. I was looking for a little girl character that I could do a series of books for along the lines of my Louise the Big Cheese books. I liked the word “gold” and “star”. I was trying to find first names that had either word in it. And then it came to me: “Marigold.”
Perfect.
Instead of Goldstar I thought of the name Marigold Star. Bingo! It made me shiver. What followed was the process of building a story around the name. I got to work and wrote a picture book about Marigold Star – a little girl with a big imagination who had a star above her head that no one could see but her.
I liked it and then I didn’t.
I put it away. A couple of years later after finishing the Rapscott books I returned to Marigold Star with a fresh eye. I kept the star above her head – but this time it was a real star – that everyone could see. I put her in an imaginary world and tried to think of where the likes of Marigold Star would come from. After a bit of wrestling some words about I wrangled them into the shape of Bramblycrumbly the very place that having a star above your head that everyone could see would be entirely logical. I was off and running.
Of course “off and running” never lasts when it comes to words. Sooner or later there you are reading the same paragraph over and over. Off and running has led to stuck and befuddled. It’s not working and it’s taken you three chapters to realize it.
Oh! If only words could be like pictures. It’s so clear with pictures. You know right away when facial features are lopsided, or the perspective in a room is off. But with words oftentimes you can’t see where they’re taking you, like being stuck in traffic behind a giant great truck that no amount of maneuvering will let you pass. And words are so slippery—like trying to pick up mercury off the floor from a broken thermometer. With words sometimes the only tip-off that something is wrong is an uncomfortable feeling like the one you get from hearing a sour note in an otherwise great performance.
As with everything else there are no absolutes and there are times when the pictures come before the words. For example, while I was writing The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls I found myself doing a kind of shorthand drawing (that only I would understood) when I couldn’t put to words a certain scene. There were two worlds in Gumm Street that were connected and sketching them helped me figure out where they were in relation to each other.
Lastly there is something about words and pictures that I learned only recently which is, I know I’m not the best illustrator out there—nor am I the best writer. But one thing I’m certain about: my words are better with my pictures and my pictures are better with my words. It’s the combination—or the alchemy—of my words with my pictures—that slippery, often frustrating transformative process that when you get it right is pure magic.
Oddly enough even though I was trained as an artist and started out as an illustrator, for me it’s the words that come first. Auntie Claus is a good example of that—so is my latest book Marigold Star.
Why? I enjoy playing around with words. There are certain ones that are so much fun to say: utterly, agog, litigious. Words that instantly conjure an image: bedazzled, powdered, burnished. I love the great lyricists of the twentieth century: Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Alan Jay Lerner’s Camelot, Cole Porter’s Night and Day, Sondheim’s Ladies Who Lunch, Irving Berlin—well, just about everything he wrote. The alliteration and rhymes, their irresistible expressions and phrases—they get me every time. It seems that even though I started out as a visual artist I am also in love with words.
I especially enjoy the mental game of connecting words together to form a name. The name implies a character and before I know it I’m pondering who they are, where they come from and what they do. In one of the first picture books that I wrote and illustrated called, The Three Dots, (about a duck, a frog, and a moose, all with dots who form a band) I needed a name for the agent who would propel them to stardom. That was back in the days when you still went to the Yellow Pages for information and in it I found the “Gold Star Agency”. I loved it—Goldstar—an ironic yet obvious choice for my talent agent’s last name. How I came up with the first name—Honey—I don’t remember but to this day the name Honey Goldstar still makes me smile.
Similarly when I started to work on something new a few years ago I began with a name. I was looking for a little girl character that I could do a series of books for along the lines of my Louise the Big Cheese books. I liked the word “gold” and “star”. I was trying to find first names that had either word in it. And then it came to me: “Marigold.”
Perfect.
Instead of Goldstar I thought of the name Marigold Star. Bingo! It made me shiver. What followed was the process of building a story around the name. I got to work and wrote a picture book about Marigold Star – a little girl with a big imagination who had a star above her head that no one could see but her.
I liked it and then I didn’t.
I put it away. A couple of years later after finishing the Rapscott books I returned to Marigold Star with a fresh eye. I kept the star above her head – but this time it was a real star – that everyone could see. I put her in an imaginary world and tried to think of where the likes of Marigold Star would come from. After a bit of wrestling some words about I wrangled them into the shape of Bramblycrumbly the very place that having a star above your head that everyone could see would be entirely logical. I was off and running.
Of course “off and running” never lasts when it comes to words. Sooner or later there you are reading the same paragraph over and over. Off and running has led to stuck and befuddled. It’s not working and it’s taken you three chapters to realize it.
Oh! If only words could be like pictures. It’s so clear with pictures. You know right away when facial features are lopsided, or the perspective in a room is off. But with words oftentimes you can’t see where they’re taking you, like being stuck in traffic behind a giant great truck that no amount of maneuvering will let you pass. And words are so slippery—like trying to pick up mercury off the floor from a broken thermometer. With words sometimes the only tip-off that something is wrong is an uncomfortable feeling like the one you get from hearing a sour note in an otherwise great performance.
As with everything else there are no absolutes and there are times when the pictures come before the words. For example, while I was writing The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls I found myself doing a kind of shorthand drawing (that only I would understood) when I couldn’t put to words a certain scene. There were two worlds in Gumm Street that were connected and sketching them helped me figure out where they were in relation to each other.
Lastly there is something about words and pictures that I learned only recently which is, I know I’m not the best illustrator out there—nor am I the best writer. But one thing I’m certain about: my words are better with my pictures and my pictures are better with my words. It’s the combination—or the alchemy—of my words with my pictures—that slippery, often frustrating transformative process that when you get it right is pure magic.
HOW I GOT STARTED
I don’t come from a family of artists.
I never visited an art museum until I was in college.
I was crazy about horses. Up until I was twenty-five I rode and competed year round.
There was no reason to believe that writing and illustrating children’s book was what I would have done with my life.
In the same vein of unlikeliness I had majored in fashion illustration at Moore College of Art because I loved figure drawing and—I know it sounds shallow—I loved clothes too. After graduation, I spent a year or so illustrating booklets for Seventeen Magazine. The zenith of my
fashion illustration career was when I landed an assignment from Henri Bendel for an ad in the New York Times. I think it was downhill from there. Fashion illustration was a dying profession and the jobs were few and far between. I knew it was over when I couldn’t even get a job drawing clothes for Butterick, the sewing pattern company. But here’s the thing: though I’d just spent four years at school thinking I was going to be a fashion illustrator now that I was actually doing the job I wasn’t loving it. The work had become boring. I knew I needed more. In the back of my mind I had the idea that I’d like to be a children’s book illustrator.
A couple of years before I graduated from art school there had been a pivotal moment where I happened to be in a bookstore and picked up a children’s book. I was mesmerized. It’s ironic since I never was much of a children’s book reader as a child—I was more of a comic book kid—but turning the pages of that children’s book I experienced a thunder clap of knowing that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Two years later it happened again when I was living in the Chadds Ford area of PA, and visited the Brandywine Museum. Standing before the N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Jessie Wilcox Smith paintings was that same knowing that I could do this. Granted, I had barely worked in color and didn’t know how to paint. I had absolutely no right to think I could do what they had done—just the same I knew I had to try.
I put together a portfolio for children’s books. There weren’t the amount of classes to help guide me the way there are now. There weren’t computers for me to find an agent. There actually weren’t even that many agents back then! I was virtually on my own with the New York
City Yellow Pages copying down phone numbers.
On the bright side those were also the days when you could leave your portfolio at a place like Harper & Row and if they liked your art you could get an appointment to talk to an art director or an editor. Armed with my phone numbers and addresses I schlepped around New
York City with my portfolio of mostly black and white and sepia ink drawings.
I spent hours looking at children’s books. I sought out established illustrators like, the Hildebrandt Brothers who created fantastic paintings from the Lord of the Rings and the great picture book author-illustrator Roger Duvoisin – miraculously both lived near me in Gladstone, NJ where I had moved. I was on fire to do children’s books. I don’t ever remember feeling discouraged or frustrated. If anything my strongest emotion was the fear that I wouldn’t be allowed to do this thing that I just had to do. I went everywhere. I called everyone. It worked because lo and behold I did get a book cover to do. I’ve included it in the drawings below for you to see just how little I knew about color—or even about making a book cover for that matter. Not long after I got a book to do from the famed publisher of children’s books, Margaret McElderry, who must have seen something in my work. The book was for an Irish folk tale called, The Mermaid’s Cape and in black and white which was common for publishers to do back then because of the cost of full color printing – but lucky for me!
I definitely got through that first book by the seat of my seats but enough for Margaret to give me a shot at another book called The Snug Little House – again in black and white. From that point on I was off and running.
Take away from my story? It doesn’t matter if you think the odds are against you—if you think you don’t have enough education, or talent, or money, or time. The only thing that matters is if you have the passion to keep going and the deep knowledge that this is something you can do—something you have to do. If you get the calling—which is what I really do think it was and still is for me—then you will eventually succeed—no matter how unlikely.
I never visited an art museum until I was in college.
I was crazy about horses. Up until I was twenty-five I rode and competed year round.
There was no reason to believe that writing and illustrating children’s book was what I would have done with my life.
In the same vein of unlikeliness I had majored in fashion illustration at Moore College of Art because I loved figure drawing and—I know it sounds shallow—I loved clothes too. After graduation, I spent a year or so illustrating booklets for Seventeen Magazine. The zenith of my
fashion illustration career was when I landed an assignment from Henri Bendel for an ad in the New York Times. I think it was downhill from there. Fashion illustration was a dying profession and the jobs were few and far between. I knew it was over when I couldn’t even get a job drawing clothes for Butterick, the sewing pattern company. But here’s the thing: though I’d just spent four years at school thinking I was going to be a fashion illustrator now that I was actually doing the job I wasn’t loving it. The work had become boring. I knew I needed more. In the back of my mind I had the idea that I’d like to be a children’s book illustrator.
A couple of years before I graduated from art school there had been a pivotal moment where I happened to be in a bookstore and picked up a children’s book. I was mesmerized. It’s ironic since I never was much of a children’s book reader as a child—I was more of a comic book kid—but turning the pages of that children’s book I experienced a thunder clap of knowing that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Two years later it happened again when I was living in the Chadds Ford area of PA, and visited the Brandywine Museum. Standing before the N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Jessie Wilcox Smith paintings was that same knowing that I could do this. Granted, I had barely worked in color and didn’t know how to paint. I had absolutely no right to think I could do what they had done—just the same I knew I had to try.
I put together a portfolio for children’s books. There weren’t the amount of classes to help guide me the way there are now. There weren’t computers for me to find an agent. There actually weren’t even that many agents back then! I was virtually on my own with the New York
City Yellow Pages copying down phone numbers.
On the bright side those were also the days when you could leave your portfolio at a place like Harper & Row and if they liked your art you could get an appointment to talk to an art director or an editor. Armed with my phone numbers and addresses I schlepped around New
York City with my portfolio of mostly black and white and sepia ink drawings.
I spent hours looking at children’s books. I sought out established illustrators like, the Hildebrandt Brothers who created fantastic paintings from the Lord of the Rings and the great picture book author-illustrator Roger Duvoisin – miraculously both lived near me in Gladstone, NJ where I had moved. I was on fire to do children’s books. I don’t ever remember feeling discouraged or frustrated. If anything my strongest emotion was the fear that I wouldn’t be allowed to do this thing that I just had to do. I went everywhere. I called everyone. It worked because lo and behold I did get a book cover to do. I’ve included it in the drawings below for you to see just how little I knew about color—or even about making a book cover for that matter. Not long after I got a book to do from the famed publisher of children’s books, Margaret McElderry, who must have seen something in my work. The book was for an Irish folk tale called, The Mermaid’s Cape and in black and white which was common for publishers to do back then because of the cost of full color printing – but lucky for me!
I definitely got through that first book by the seat of my seats but enough for Margaret to give me a shot at another book called The Snug Little House – again in black and white. From that point on I was off and running.
Take away from my story? It doesn’t matter if you think the odds are against you—if you think you don’t have enough education, or talent, or money, or time. The only thing that matters is if you have the passion to keep going and the deep knowledge that this is something you can do—something you have to do. If you get the calling—which is what I really do think it was and still is for me—then you will eventually succeed—no matter how unlikely.
LIFE DRAWING
Life drawing is the foundation for all of my book illustration. I’ve always loved drawing from the figure and can say that some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent in life drawing class. At a very young age I copied from comic books, and later in high school the figures from an art book I found on Michelangelo’s work from the Sistine Chapel. I spent four years at Moore College of Art drawing from the figure to my heart’s content. I did thousands of gesture drawings which are quick timed drawings from a live model - you can see one that I did below. I also drew my relatives. The two shown here are of my Grandmother. After college I studied for several years at the Art Students League with my life drawing teacher from Moore, Jack Henderson. He always encouraged me to do self-portraits and below are a few of those. After the League I went to The National Academy School of Fine Arts and studied with Dan Gheno where I learned the pastel technique that I used for Auntie Claus and all my books from about the mid 90’s on. I took to the pastels right away. I’ve included a few of the first that I did in Dan’s class. I did try working in oils, but I never really warmed up to the medium. I have painted in acrylics as well but to my mind not very successfully. I guess I just love to draw, and the pastels afford me the same feel as working in charcoal or pencil. My best work has been with the pastels which I continue to use to this day for creating my book covers.