MerBaby's Lullaby, illustrated by ME!

I haven't really given you the full walk-through of my latest picturebook, MERBABY'S LULLABY, written by Jane Yolen - so today's featured title is my own! (Published by Little Simon, and imprint of Simon & Schuster) Thank you for indulging me as I invite myself to be my own guest this week! The project began in an unorthodox way... During my MFA in Illustration at the University of Edinburgh, I created a 'Style Bible' per Julia Patton's inspiration (read about that here). I took it with me when my husband and I went to visit Jane Yolen in St Andrews. (Read more about that here.) She flipped through my Style Bible saying, "There's a story here, and here, and here..." Stan and I went to walk around St Andrews and by the time we returned to Jane's home, she had written them all! (As she does!) My favorite was a story about a little mermaid. So I decided to take it on as one of my MFA projects and began working on it.


It looked great at my graduation show, but it was just a mock-up at that point.Jane sent it to her agent and between her agent and my agent, they sold it to Simon and Schuster shortly after graduation. Woohoo!
     In that time, it went from being a picture book to a board book. Color proofs came in while I was teaching at Hollins last summer.
And the finished product came out this summer - woohoo!
     So, now I'll answer a few of the questions I ask my visiting authors and illustrators...

1) My media was pencil, digital, and watercolor. I drew very small, then scanned my sketches at a very high resolution to create the compositions in Photoshop. I like the chunkiness and texture that happens to a line when it gets blown up - although scanning it at a high resolution is key, because I don't want the line to degrade, just show its texture.

2) My favorite part of being an illustrator is having the chance to stretch myself, experiment, and play with new approaches. Not everything needs to end up as a book.

3) Heart Art to me is any image that makes your breath catch, your heart flutter, your eyes stare in wonder as you try to enter the magic the image creates. If I can't stop looking at it, it's probably heart art to me!

4) These days, I don't advertise myself. Jane keeps me busy! And with my teaching jobs, I have as much as I can handle. So, I'm pretty pleased with my picture book work load right now.

5) The most challenging part of being a creator is keeping up with my (and Jane's) ideas. There's so much work I need to create! I need at least five more lifetimes or clones of myself!

6) I didn't hide any easter eggs in MerBaby, although I do sometimes do that. And I do have extra art for MerBaby that didn't make it into the book. What I like about it, though, is that the baby could be a boy or a girl - it's up to the reader.

7) I'm actually in-between books at the moment. Oh, except for the novel I'm writing for my PhD. But another book with Cornell seems to be looming, and I'm hoping MerBaby will turn into a series, and there's a grant project that, if accepted, could lead to four non-fiction picture books. I also have several works-in-progress and books with my agent. So... yeah.

8) A dream project to me would be any work I create that measures up to the standards of the books that made me want to become a picture book creator in the first place. Although, I'm not sure I will ever have the objectivity to see if I've reached that point!

    Thank you for joining me on this creative journey!