I love to draw. The first drawing that was saved that I drew was done when I was about two-and-a-half years old and, “It’s a cat,” I said. It looks like a spider or a ghost or something. I like to show it to kids just because they don’t think it looks like a cat for one, and it’s just an example of how much I must have loved to draw because my mom saved it and then I just kept drawing. There’s a series of early drawings like that.
As soon as I could read and write, I was making little tiny books and stapling them together. When I was about in third grade my best friend, Lisa, was in second grade. She said to me, “I know you want to be a children’s book illustrator when you grow up so I’m going to write a story for you and you can illustrate it because that’s how it’s done in the world.” She wrote this story called The Friendship Circle.
She said, “Okay. Now you do the pictures.” I did the pictures and we showed it to our teachers and they sent it to the California State Fair. We kind of forgot about it and then maybe a couple months later, we heard that this book won some sort of an award. Our school said, “Would you make another copy?” Because this was before you could just Xerox it. We had no other copy of this thing. She tried to remember what the words were. I tried to remember the pictures. We did the whole thing again — put it all together.
Then it was in our school library and I’d go in for library time and there it was on the shelf. I felt as if I had become a children’s book illustrator in third grade. I never really deviated. I always wanted to do this from that point on.