Hi, my name is Chris Raschka. I’m very glad to be here.
I didn’t imagine and illustrating children’s books when I was a child. I was always a drawer, painter, but I loved animals, I love biology and that’s what I studied in college. But I always kept painting and kept drawing then it finally caught up with me and I turned toward art as an adult.
When I turned to art initially I did magazine work and newspaper work and also panted just paintings and sold those. And then I came to New York and I did a little book about the Russian and the English alphabets, which was my very first book call R and Y and it’s a book that starts from the same point on either side and you read it into the middle and one side is in Russian and one side is in English.
I moved to New York and still wasn’t sure where I would fit into the world of art but started to make picture book dummies. Then when Richard Jackson a great editor, and my editor still said he quite liked Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop that was the beginning of me taking it as maybe this is something I could really devote myself to which is now what I do.
It’s — I’m still very fascinated by making pictures that go with words and what they look like when they’re in a book. My mother is a librarian, my father is a historian, so books seem to make sense because they’re around, but I like pictures and I like pictures with words. So to make picture books has felt right for a long time.