Story & Illustration Workshop
June 27, 2017
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A few weeks ago, I held my first Story and Illustration Workshop for 4th and 5th graders at our public library. We started out with pencils, paper, and feelings—Which color means happiness? What shapes mean anger?—and then did a series of exercises on creating feelings by using the co
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On My Desk Now: Grass Gametes & Crossing Genes
June 20, 2017
While I can appreciate the need to self-replicate, I wish the local grass plants would stop trying to do it on my face! I often have seasonal allergies, but my family and I are now living in an area in Oregon with one of the highest grass pollen counts in the world, so for the last fe
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Spiked Lunch: Behind the Scenes with HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT
June 13, 2017
If you are what you eat, elephants are basically one big walking pile of acacia leaves. They eat other plants too, of course—some populations of elephants have hundreds of different greens to choose from—but the elephants that I met in Kenya loved acacia plants, enormous spikes and al
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Mistakes Were Made: The Evolution of Ideas
June 07, 2017
There are all of these little moments in my sketches that never make it into a final book, raw ideas that are loose and messy that capture the feelings or information I want to work into in a scene. Some are diagrams, some are page spreads, some belong in a future, unwritten project.
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On My Desk Now: Otis & Will
May 23, 2017
When I imagine a book that I didn’t write or illustrate, I usually think of the book’s front cover. But when I imagine one of my books, what usually comes to mind instead are my piles of notes and sketches, or a particular moment during my field research, or perhaps even one of the ch
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Time-lapse Video: HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT Book Cover
May 16, 2017
People love the word “talent,” but most of what artists do is just time and work. Join me in my studio to watch behind the scenes as I paint the cover for HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT at super high speed!
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How to Design an Elephant Book Cover
May 09, 2017
A baby elephant is basically the opposite thing of a great white shark. Unsteady and shuffling, small and pink, she begs for milk and whiffles her tiny trunk from beneath the safety of her mother’s towering legs. The cover for HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT was challenging to create, bec
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Behind the Scenes with HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT
May 02, 2017
Holding your book for the first time is a little like meeting your newborn baby. After investing weeks or months (or even years) of work and worry, your heart is skipping about with joy. Look at you, amazing little thing that I made! You’re finally here! I wish my ears were big
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