getting some perspective

welcome to my Ted Talk

I gave a talk last week as part of the Creative Mornings series that I’d like to share.

Creative Mornings is a collective event, for lack of a better term, hosted in cities worldwide, once a month. Each host city organization invites a speaker, and each speaker works with the same theme as all the others. The theme for March was “perspective” and the invited speakers are asked to use it any way they like. In fact, when I was invited, I was told that I could speak about anything I wanted, actually. Bike rides, travel, or, sure, my work as an illustrator.¹

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There are two definitions of perspective:

PERSPECTIVE (noun)

1.the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point.

PERSPECTIVE (noun)

2.a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

I wanted to use both uses of the word in my talk, and I decided to utilize an illustration I made recently for the Philadelphia Inquirer as the nexus, to show how I don’t really use the first definition much in my work, and how I have been attempting to regain use of the second.²

Quick back-story:

Two years ago I was in a deep, dark place. For the first time as a working illustrator, I had no work at all. No books lined up, no new illustration jobs to do. The book I’d spent the last several years pouring everything into, that meant everything to me, had been published to a collective, disinterested yawn. And while the rest of the post-pandemic world was going back to work, back to collaborating and making, I was in the same studio where I had spent the last fourteen years, alone, feeling more and more isolated. Something had to change.

And it did change. Or, more accurately, I changed it. I began teaching, which was important for me to get out of my studio, talk to people, be part of something, and know I had something to offer. And I began the process of peeking outside of my children’s book sandbox into doing work for grown-ups again, which I had missed for more than a decade while books and series like Everything Goes, Tinyville Town, and Frank Einstein were the focus of my time.

This wasn’t easy, and it’s not finished.³ But this Creative Mornings talk was an opportunity to think about the last year or two and try to come to terms with it, and to talk about this work with an audience of creative and curious people. I really enjoyed the talk, and here is the video they just posted of the event. Please enjoy, thanks.

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Oh, about that picture book script.

Last week I promised a third part of the series on writing I’ve been focused on. But I’m putting that aside for a minute or two. The writing is going well, thanks for asking. And the comments from other writers and illustrators have been gloriously helpful. But I realized that going further down that hole and digging into existing manuscripts I’ve written and/or illustrated is a lot of work. I’m actually preferring to spend the time actually doing the writing right now. And, as I said, that’s going well. I have what I think is finally a good draft of the insect story that started this whole thing. I wrote it without tuning into page-turns or thinking about word count, and it’s just so much better.
With an actual script in my hands now, I am trying to decide at what point do I send this to my agent to get his take. I want the work to stand independently of sketches, just to know the story works. But at the same time, I am an illustrator, and I think that spending an extra week or two working through the first twelve or sixteen pages to get an idea of how I want it to work could be helpful, and important.

Furthermore, while I was on a roll last week, I wrote a rough first draft of a companion story, and I might hammer that into shape a bit as well. So, stay subscribed, and watch this space and we’ll talk more about writing. Right?

1. My good friend Keanan, with whom I ride bikes a lot, and whose kids are fans of my books, and who is on the CM/Philly board, did the inviting, and I very much appreciate this.

2. I wrote an entire issue about this illustration here.

3. This whole newsletter is part of this process, in fact.