Here Comes the Sun
where we see that light at the end of that tunnel
It’s early on a Friday morning, and normally, early on a Friday morning, I’d be making last minute edits, creating a thumbnail image, and preparing to upload a new video to my Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies channel on YouTube. But not today. Instead, as soon as I finish writing this, I’ll get on the iPad and complete the brunt of the work on the interior art for this book that I feel like I’ve been illustrating forever, called The Night the Buildings Switched Places. That’s not to say the book will be done. Not quite. But we’re getting so close.
I’m sure I’ve written here before that I think this book has been the most difficult book I’ve illustrated. The artwork itself hasn’t been so bad. In fact, if anything, other than feeling terrible that I’ve missed two deadlines and at times feeling like I've rushed things1, it’s been one of the more satisfying books I’ve drawn. My favorite book to work on was, and will probably always be, My Hero, which I drew back in 2021, totally analog, with pencils and inks and paint on paper. Since then, I’ve drawn five books, all totally digital, and all on the iPad2. I like working on the iPad, but it’s different. While I love the process of drawing with pencils and inks on paper, the iPad (and Procreate) is about the results. I have a way I want the art to look, and I have a deadline, and the two get along pretty well. Drawing a book with analog tools is more unpredictable. Often, the materials have a mind of their own and there is no undo.3 So it was with this Buildings book, where the pencil drawings took about two months longer than I expected, and two months longer than I’d told my editor and art director that they’d take.
While drawing these drawings has been a long process, it’s not the part that delayed the book or made it difficult. That came much earlier, last year even, as I planned the illustrations and pagination of this book. I wrote about A Whale’s Tale a few weeks ago, and in that post I mentioned how the pages and illustrations kind of fell into place rather easily in that book.
That book was an unusual and complicated book, being able to be read front-to-back but also back-to-front. This structure sort of forced certain decisions to be made in order for that trick to work. There was no messing around. This book, which by the way is about a city of buildings that get bored one night and decide to pick up and rearrange themselves, was 180º from that book. When I read the script for Whale & Otter, I immediately saw the problem to solve, and that defined everything about the illustrations. This Buildings script read as funny and a bit strange, but the structural issues with what exactly will be on a page, and how to illustrate the action, only came once I was deep into the sketching process. The buildings had to have legs in order to run. And faces in order to show delight and surprise. And the office building had to read as The Office Building here, where it sits at the beginning of the story, and also there, where it moves to later on. When you look at a city block, there’s no inherent organization to it. A market sits next to a coffee shop and a bookstore, right? So what if the bookstore picks up and literally runs across town and parks itself next to the hair salon one night? Chaos, of course, but only because we, the people who live in the town, no longer know where the bookstore is. Setting up the “order” at the beginning that would become “chaos” as the story is told was a difficult trick. I’m not 100% sure I successfully achieved it, in fact. I think I did, and my team at Little Brown thinks I did, but we’ll have to wait a year until the book comes out and see what everyone else thinks.
Sometime later today, with my iPad and Procreate, I’ll put the final touches of color on the last of the sixteen spreads for this book, which is a perfectly fine reason to celebrate4. But the book won’t be done. At that point I’ll export all sixteen spreads from the iPad to Photoshop, where some of the backgrounds will be finished and the comic book style hand-lettering will be standardized. Probably over the weekend. Maybe Monday. Then, I still have to draw the cover (in pencil) and color it (on the iPad). I have the title page to complete (in Photoshop), and, if time allows, some fancy endpapers to make5.
I think I’ll be done next week. Friday, probably. Maybe the week after. May 27, latest. I swear.
At least, that’s what I’m telling my editor and art director.
But what about those videos?
When I draw the cover next week, I plan to put the camera up and record that work. Both the pencil part and the iPad part. I feel like it’s a little ambitious to hope I can find the time to edit and narrate this footage to make a proper episode of Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies, so there might not be a video next week, either. The heavy lift of these videos is real. Certainly, once this book is done I look forward to some sitting around and talking about my pens, and some collage materials, and pushing the boundaries past what I’ve done so far with it6. But right now I can only think about getting back on my iPad and wrapping up this book.
Storywalk
I got into this business of making children’s books a little more than two decades ago. Back then I’d often take my kids to one of the local branches of the public library system where we’d all three sit in the kids’ section and read picture books. They’d make a stack of five or six books that they wanted to check out and take home. I’d read with a different intent. I’d look at some books and think “this is what I want to do” and with other books I’d think “for chrissake, I could do this.” Afterward, we’d walk the sidewalk from the library to Moe’s Burritos and get dinner. I loved these nights.
A few weeks ago I was asked to come down to the library and read a few of the Tinyville Town books for the opening of the new Storywalk that the library had put in place. They’d told me that they used Tinyville Town Gets to Work for the first iteration of this Storywalk, but it hadn’t really occurred to me what this meant, or how this would look. When I arrived, and saw that they had seventeen small signs with all of the artwork, the entire book in fact, along the same sidewalk where we’d walk to the burrito joint, I nearly died. It’s just such a nice connection and there’s no way that I could have foreseen something like this 22 years ago. If you’re in Philadelphia, head over to the Andorra Branch and take a look.
Cat content
As always, thanks for reading.
-Brian
A picture book, like most artwork, always has this problem where by the time the work is finished, one has had to make concessions and compromises, and the award-winning, best-selling, beloved-by-children-and-adults-around-the-world-potential has been inevitably watered down just a teensy bit by the realities of getting it done.
Yes, I have an eraser. Not the same thing. At all.
It’s Fri-yay after all, and should be prime gin & tonic weather around 5:30pm. You do you!
Worst case scenario is we fill the endpages with starry skies, which will look great so I’m not worried. But a pattern of buildings covering the endpapers would be really excellent. It’ll just take a few more days...
What a wonderful tribute to the book, and your family's history with that street is real special!
Wow! An amazing story of appreciation. That is a wonderfully honor from and for the community. Keep on Bookin’! 🚶🏿🚶🏽♀️🚶♂️🏃♀️