Folks often ask about my illustrations and how I draw them.  When I wrote
my first book Swimming in Chocolate,
I actually didn’t plan on illustrating it myself.  I searched for an artist, but had a hard time finding someone who could draw what I saw in my own mind!
I realized that I was the only one who could do the drawings the way I ’saw’ them… even if it took a little longer.

When people see my illustrations, they sometimes think that they were drawn rather quickly, but that’s not the case.
I plan my drawings carefully and do many sketches and often many drawings before I get them just the way I want them.   It’s not unusual for me to draw something over and over again before I’m happy with it. This illustration of a little girl and a tall flower is from ‘Sunflower’ (Swimming in Chocolate, p.7).  It’s one of the first drawings I ever did.

I start with a fine point black ink pen and plain white paper.
Here’s a rough sketch of ‘Woolly Mammoth’ (Over the Top, p. 90).  Pretty messy, huh? 

As you can see, just like my poetry, even my drawings start out rough.  For Woolly, I was trying to decide how I wanted her trunk to be… straight, like she’s reaching or curved up like she’s kind of thinking about picking up something (a dress that’s not in the sketch).  If you look carefully at different places on the sketch, you can see where I was considering drawing one way, then crossed the lines out.

I like this process of drawing the illustration over and over because it gives me time to think about each of the lines and time to change things a bit here and there.

Here’s ‘Mime’ (Over the Top, p. 137)… I’m trying to decide what to do with his legs.

The illustrations on this website are in color, but my illustrating style is called black and white ‘Line Drawings’, which is how you will find them in most of my poetry books.

Once the drawing is done, it does have to be digitized so that it can be used on a computer to set up the book.  Very little, if any work is done on the computer to change my original drawing… maybe a little tad of clean up here and there, but for the most part, what you see is what I drew.

Frog Jumpin’ (Over the Top, p. 141)

Sometimes I’ll write notes to myself about things I’m not sure about or things I want to change.

Every once in a while something weird happens…

While drawing this boy at his desk (no chair yet!), I put it in a stack with a bunch of other illustrations.  Part of the pile slid off the table and onto the floor…

When picking up the papers, I noticed this one upside down… check it out… do you see anything in this upside down boy?

No, I did not draw it that way on purpose!
Some things just work out funny!

I hope you enjoyed my explanation of how I draw my illustrations!  I hope you enjoy drawing too!  Don’t get frustrated if it takes a while to get it right – it’s worth it!