What I did for Ellington Was Not a Street, as far as creating that world, was from working on Amistad. I also worked on a movie called Spirit doing visual development. When you do visual development for a film, you’re pretty much creating characters, mood lighting, environments, and all those skills come into play when you’re doing artwork for a children’s book. When it came to working on Ellington Was Not a Street, since there was not much text, I had to try to think of a narrative.
I worked together with my editor, Kevin Lewis. We went back and forth, and he thought it was pretty well finished in terms of the sketches that I did, but there were a few spots where it wasn’t making sense. We had to tie it all together. So at the end of the book, he said maybe this is some kind of gathering where all these really influential people are meeting for some reason, political or not, who knows.
I didn’t want it to be a political book — it’s a children’s book. So what I thought would work would be to make it like a big family portrait. My grandmother has a great photograph with her seven kids. And they were all there — some of them were married, and my grandmother is sitting in the middle, and it was a great photograph. I always loved that photograph. I thought, I’ll use that idea and just make it a big family. And it worked — I think it did anyway.
