Continued from The Way Home (part 1)

After we moved, Judy and I kept in touch and would see each other when I visited Woods Hole every summer. Back in central Massachusetts, with my son in daycare part-time, I continued to sew pictures, developing my fabric relief technique. I tried out different ways of making people, animals and houses with flat cardboard backs that could be sewn onto a pieced and embellished fabric background. The raised figures and props seemed to work best at a shallow depth of 1/4″ to 3/4″. “Picking Peas” (1986) and “Raking Leaves” (1987) are examples of the change in my way of working.

“Picking Peas” fabric relief 1986

This was a very productive time for me. Even though I was busy taking care of a child, our life was simpler and less social because we hardly knew anyone in our new town.

“Raking Leaves” fabric relief 1987

Peter with our scarecrow in Lunenburg 1986

The area was beautiful, and my artwork was influenced by the agricultural landscape of our neighborhood. I started working in my studio in the evenings, a habit I’ve kept ever since.

In an effort to test the illustration market for my type of work, I made a solo trip to New York City, meeting with an agent and a few children’s book editors. The agent wasn’t interested in my type of art, but I recall that one editor was intrigued. She laughed good heartily when I laid out the fabric background for “Noah’s Ark” on her desk and arranged the loose animals in front of her. I realize now that this presentation must have appeared quite unprofessional compared to the ubiquitous black portfolio with plastic sleeves that most illustrators carry. After looking at my various pieces, she told me she liked my work but found it hard to match with a story. She suggested I find a story that I thought would work together with my style and technique.

I went home feeling that I wasn’t practiced enough to take the leap from depicting one moment in a story to filling a 32-page book with enough action and visual variety to make a story come alive. I needed more time to develop my work to a point where I could confidently take on a large illustration project.

Ian’s birth announcement

‘Noah’s Ark” fabric relief 1986

After our second son Ian was born, I kept working on fabric relief pictures. I remember finishing up the “Noah’s Ark” piece on my worktable, with him rocking next to me in a wind-up swing. You can see an earlier post with several pictures of “Noah’s Ark” here. I continued to make and sell fabric relief pictures, trying new ways of constructing 3-dimentional parts that could be sewn in place.

‘Family Portrait” fabric relief 1986

sketch for sample illustration

After four years away, we decided to move back to Woods Hole in the fall of 1987. Judy and I soon revived our interest in The Way Home and decided to start over and change our approach to the project. I felt more prepared to illustrate the story and with Judy’s encouragement, started to think how I would make a new sample to show. We wanted to impress the editors with our serious preparation, not wanting them to see us as two inexperienced housewives from Cape Cod. I made another illustration, this time picking a more active part of the story, where the mother elephant is enjoying herself on the beach, while Savi splashes in the water. I found some plastic banana beads that were the right size and cut banana tree leaves from cloth artificial leaves. Planning ahead for the border, I bought some diagonal striped upholstery fabric, in every color available.

 The text reads,

“Her mother cooled off in the shade of a banana tree and ate bananas. She rolled her big body from side to side in the sand. Savi stayed in the water.”

2nd sample illustration 1988

We knew that my new and untested method of working in 3-dimensions would be questioned as a viable illustration technique. We gathered everything that we could think of to counteract any skepticism. Since my originals would have to be photographed, we had a professional 4×5 transparency taken of my sample art. We also made a storyboard showing a simple layout in the standard 32-page format. It pictured the progression of the story with the different characters at the beach, in the water, walking through the trees’ shadows, following the banana trail and looking up at the moon at the end.

When we felt ready to present our project, we called and set up appointments with a handful of children’s book publishing houses in New York City. Judy was excited to be able to meet editors in person, because our visit would include showing my portfolio. Generally, writers are asked to submit their stories by mail only. My portfolio (brown leather, not black) held the original sample illustration for The Way Home, a color print and 4×5 transparency of the sample, the storyboard, plus a collection of 8×10 color prints of my fabric relief work from the past 4 years.

Judy and I drove to western Connecticut, where we stayed overnight with friends. The next morning we took the train to New York. We spent the entire day visiting children’s book editors, the most memorable being with Phyllis Larkin, an older, respected editor at MacMillan. When we were introduced and I saw her face, I knew that we had met before. I forget names, but faces make their imprint. I remembered that she was the one to whom I had shown the Noah’s Ark parts a few years earlier. Phyllis behaved as a true editor, asking to read the manuscript first before looking at my portfolio. She carefully read the story and then called in her art editor, Cecilia Yung. We laid out our visual materials and held the 4×5 transparency up to the light. They liked the pairing of Judy’s story with my artwork but had financial concerns about the extra expense of photography. They were also upfront about their inability to offer me an advance large enough to pay for the time it would take to sew the illustrations. We left them a photograph of the sample art and a copy of the manuscript and went home. We were encouraged because they liked our idea, but didn’t know if they would take the leap to offer us a contract. Months went by and we didn’t hear from any of the editors we’d met with. Judy and I put the project in the back of our minds and were fully distracted by summer activities.

To be continued in The Way Home (part 3).

Summer in Woods Hole, 1988

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This is the story of the making The Way Home, my first picture book for children. In the 5-part series, I explain how the writer, Judy Richardson and I persisted over a period of 8 years, from our first glimmer of an idea in 1983, to having Judy’s story and my illustrations paired together in a book published by MacMillan in 1991.  This is not meant to be a guide for those who want to have their own work published. Our unique project and the time and circumstances in which we were working shaped the trajectory of events I will be sharing. There’s a lot to show and tell about this story and I hope that you will follow through until the end of part 5.

I majored in illustration in art school, but I never thought I’d make illustrations in a way that could be reproduced effectively. At the Rhode Island School of Design during the 1970’s, there wasn’t an obvious major for someone like me, who was interested in many different materials and methods.  I didn’t want to limit myself to a particular discipline and was attracted to the illustration department, with its focus on communication, rather than certain processes and mediums. Just as other schools are divided by subject, our student body was separated by technique, and I regret not mingling with people in other majors. Other possible matches, like the sculpture or textile dept. were too specialized for me.

The sculpture dept. seemed to me like an all-boys club, with its swarm of black clad, chain-smoking, wiry young men who produced large, austere metal sculptures, the kind that are now rusting in public places. Even the more female dominated textile dept., with its concentration on fabric design and weaving, was too specific for me. All I knew was that total abstraction left me hungry for more and I wanted my artwork to be a kind of narrative that viewers could connect to. In the illustration dept., I could use any materials I wanted, as long as my artwork solved the assignment. I used this time in school to teach myself different ways of working and showed a particular interest in fabric and sewing. For my senior thesis, I made a series of 3-dimentional illustrations of the story “Hansel and Gretel”.

Following graduation in 1978, I spent a few years making soft sculpture. My first freelance illustration job was constructing insect characters and their neighborhood for a story in an educational reader. I found that making all of the parts was easy compared to setting up the scenes for the photo shoot. It was almost like making a movie in miniature, complete with an “Ivory Snow” winter scene. The project was challenging, and I came away thinking that I would have more control of the outcome if I figured out a way to present my sculpture in a different format.

I started making what I called “fabric relief” sculptures, which were figures and props sewn to cloth backgrounds. I guessed that if my work was hung on the wall, it would be more readily accepted as “art”. I also thought that bas-relief work would be easier to photograph than sculpture in the round. “Mother and Child” was an early fabric relief sculpture that I made with fabric-covered and stuffed cardboard shapes on a pieced and embroidered fabric background.

Molly Bang, an illustrator who lives in Woods Hole, showed me Judith Benet Richardson’s 2-page manuscript for a picture book titled The Way Home. Molly had recently illustrated Judy’s novel for young readers, David’s Landing, which takes place in a village very much like Woods Hole, named Maushope’s Landing. Molly’s cover illustration shows a drawing of the Woods Hole School (built in 1870), where I attended elementary school in the 1960’s.

Her 1981 wordless picture book, The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, had won recognition as a Caldecott Honor Book and she was nice enough to show an interest in Judy’s writing and my artwork. I liked The Way Home immediately and could envision the baby elephant and her mother at the beach. Today, 27 years later, I marvel at how very fortunate I was to have this story presented to me. As an illustrator who is not a children’s writer, I have learned to appreciate how difficult it is to craft a good story that children will want read to them over and over. Like poetry, everything about it has to work, the characters, the place and the rhythm, without any unnecessary words. Judy’s story had believable and charming characters, a strong sense of place, tension and a problem resolved in the end.

We decided to work together, and I made a sample illustration of Savi, the baby elephant, alone on the beach, with the banana trees casting long shadows. I knew that an editor would want to see just a sample of my work, not the complete set of illustrations. Picking a book size and designing the page layout comes later, after a contract is signed.

This part of the story reads:

“The sun went down a little farther. Savi came out of the water and lay on her towel. She began to feel cold and hungry.”

Judy and I sent out the story and photographs of my sample illustration to a handful of editors, none of whom were interested. Looking at it now, I can see that showing this part of the story was not a good choice for a sample. The artwork and the moment it illustrates were too static and not the obvious scene to pair up with the story. It was the most lonesome point, just after a tense moment when Savi’s mother leaves her because she refuses to get out of the water.  I can see why I was drawn to this emotional part, but visually it was too motionless. To sell our idea, we needed to show a more active scene, one that more accurately represented the story as a whole.

That summer our book project was sidetracked by the birth of my first son, Peter. You can see more pictures of my Self Portrait in an earlier post here. Soon after, I moved away with my family to Central Massachusetts. My sample illustration for The Way Home sat in a box, while I adjusted to motherhood and living in a new town.

This story is continued in The Way Home (part 2).

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