Digging pigs, digging roads.
a true story about a totally made-up one
Once upon a time…
This forthcoming Tuesday, September 10, is the publication date and book birthday of Pigs Dig a Road, a new picture book that Carrie Finison wrote, I illustrated, and Putnam (an imprint of Penguin Kids) is publishing. I love this goofy book, but for one very weird little reason, it was one of the more difficult books I’ve illustrated. Sit down, criss-cross applesauce, and let me tell you about it.
Thank god, a new manuscript.
I first heard of this project in late May 2022 when the script landed in my email inbox. As soon as I read it I knew I was going to say yes yes yes I’ll do this. First, there was the not insignificant fact that I was in the middle of a several-month spell where for the first time in my working life, I had nothing to do.1 Second, I’d never drawn a picture book with animals as the main characters. In fact, for years I’d avoided it, but something changed there somewhere, and after drawing the first Parrott book, and then writing the first bits of what has become my Stinkbug story, I liked the idea of using animals to say things about people that might be harder to say actually using people to say them.2
But mostly it was just the idea of drawing a bunch of pigs and construction vehicles. I mean, come on!
Typically, when I get a new script I am in the middle of illustrating some other book and the meat of the work on this new one has to wait several months. This gives me time to sort of soak it in, ferment it, and play with sketches during down-times. Pigs was different, since, as I said, I had no other work. Pardon the pun, but I dug right in and started drawing pigs wearing little construction outfits. I drew a lot of pigs in construction outfits.
I played with line, and color, and media. Some on the iPad, some in pen and ink, some in pencil. So many pigs.
The story calls for a crew of four pigs with one named Rosie being the crew-leader and the other three named Pinky, Curly, and Stinky. I hadn’t drawn many pigs, so I went through the process of figuring out what makes a pig my pig? And furthermore, what can I use to differentiate one of my pigs from another? How does Rosie look different from Pinky, and Curly, and Stinky? I appreciated the fact that Carrie had solved the problem to some extent with their names. Pinky and Curly were a good place to start. Stinky, well I don’t know how “stinky” looks, but I have him a big moustache. And Rosie, I decided would just be less pink than Pinky, and she’d carry a clipboard. You know, she’s the boss.
One of the things about these character-design-phase sketches is that I have to get to where I can see the pigs doing various things, and then draw them shoveling, hammering, running, driving front-loaders… It’s easy to draw a cute pig just kinda standing there. But, okay, what if she has to take a nap? Or work at a desk? Or drive a truck? How does an animal with a hoof hold a clipboard?
Once I nailed down the look of these pigs, I drew them as a little group, with their names. Later, when we were looking for an image to use on the title page, I was delighted when Marikka, my a.d. suggested this drawing of the crew.
And then the hard part
I ran into a roadblock (ha ha get it?) when I started working on the pagination and dummy. Here’s the thing, see if you can follow: This whole book is about the building of a road. It starts out with planning, then construction vehicles dig, then pave, and finally we drive on the road to a county fair.
When you read a book, especially a picture book, you read from left to right3. Therefore, the first thing you’ll read on a double-page spread is on the far left. But the writer begins a text with the first action. So what that means is that on a spread where, say, three things take place, the first thing will be pictured on the far right, but probably read on the far left. I can handle this for one spread, here and there. But this book is a totally linear-action story. Everything ran into this problem.
So, in a scene with this text:
The grader flattens out the road.
The dump truck hauls a gravel load.
Curly drives the big compactor,
but—oh, gee—a bee distracts her!
The grader has to be on the far right. The action as pictured goes from right to left!
Of course, two years later now, the solution seems simple and obvious. We broke up the left-to-rigt action with some top-to-bottom, including the text. In hindsight, it doesn’t even feel like a problem. But I lost three months trying to solve this. Thank god for patient editors and clever art directors.4
As much as I want to, I won’t show you the whole book here. But I do want to post three more images. The first two are from a spread near the end, where the road is built and the pigs are off to the county fair. And the other is the endpapers. Man I love these endpapers.
the best for last
The book was completed last December, and then it’s the long wait until a box full of actual books shows up on my porch. I’ve illustrated a ton of books, but this part never gets old. It is always exciting to see the work as an actual book.
But wait, there’s more. Last week I got notice that Pigs Dig a Road was accepted into this year’s Society of Illustrators Original Art show!
But wait there’s more more! Take a look at this quote from a review in Booklist:
Enjoyably abuzz with slapstick chaos, Biggs’ illustrations do the text’s many action words justice.
Pigs Dig a Road officially comes out on Tuesday, Sept 10. But you should pre-order a copy today. If you find me, I’ll sign it for you. And maybe draw you a pig in a construction outfit.
Thanks for reading!
I designed a bike vest for Papertrail Bikes. The pre-order link isn’t available just yet, but if this is your jam, check out the website tomorrow morning. (There is a merino t-shirt version of this up there currently, too.)
On the desk: Working on a new collage. It’s larger than most of the others. All of the others in fact.
And obligatory cat pics. Basil does Basil things, while his mom, Maple, guards the backyard against marauding mice and mysterious things in the bushes.
I’d been very fortunate to have a steady stream of work since breaking into this business in 2003. Even during the pandemic, when publishing halted, I had two books contracted. So while they got delayed, I had them. This period of no work at all… man that was weird and disconcerting. It led to a lot of shifts in my perspective, in fact, that directly led to this newsletter, among other big changes. One day I’ll write all about it.
A touchy subject at times, and one day I’ll tell you all about it. And then I’ll retire.
I know, not everywhere. But here you do.
I’m looking at you, Stephanie Pitts, and you, Marikka Tamura.