It took a while for me to come up with what Clementine looked like. I mean, in the manuscript, she’s of course described as having unruly red hair. I kind of knew from the manuscript that — I’m trying to think back to what I knew at that time — that she didn’t play it by the rules. And that she had an artist mother and a father, who is the manager of an apartment building. Her parents didn’t go to traditional jobs, and I figured because of that she’s kind of got a quirky home life. There are kind of clues that way as to what she would look like.
I also looked very carefully at Lewis Darling’s illustrations in the Beverly Cleary books because I wanted the book to hearken back to that era, and I wanted the design of the book and the font and all the elements of page layout to look as if that book had come from that time. They’re sort of this combination of wanting it to look fresh as paint as well as something that had been around long enough to be a classic. That was a line I was trying to follow. I was trying to be in that area.
I did kind of aim for that with most of my work I think. Now that I say that I think that’s probably true. I did a whole lot of drawings of her. Some of which were too cartooned and then others were too realistic. Finally arrived at what she looks like — just trial and era. Just took a long time. I think it’s a process of drawing until I recognize her. I feel like she’s there. I just know that’s not her yet. No, that’s not her yet. There’s a lot of erasing.
With her, I had this one image and I thought, “Okay. That looks sort of like her,” and then I started using that character and put her into a narrative sequence, and actually she was sitting outside of Principal Rice’s office in the chair in her various positions in this chair, and it was in drawing her doing all that that I kind of got to know her. It was, “Okay. I get you. Now I know who you are.”
