I went to Penn State as an undergrad and I started out as an architecture major and I was planning to go into urban planning. I changed my major after three days, I got terrified by my freshman architecture professor and I ran to the art department thinking I’ll just do this until I think of something else that I really want to do.
And then I had some really wonderful professors there and so I stayed on and on and on. I was a printmaking and drawing major and my work was always, always representational and friendly so, I mean I think it was friendly. So it always seemed to me that illustration was something that I might ultimately do but I was in a college art program where the fine arts and the commercial arts did not have a really friendly relationship.
So I was not encouraged in that direction since I was in the fine art part. So I had no idea how to get there so I just kept doing fine arts for some time. Let’s see, in grad school, which I also did in printmaking and which I did mostly because I didn’t know what else to do next.
You know I started thinking then again about illustrating and after I finished grad school I actually took a class at another school in illustration and really liked it but I just took the one class and I didn’t really know where to go so I worked for a while as a graphic designer. Then I had this chance occurrence, I was visiting my hometown and I was talking with somebody who grew up across the street from me.
Who when we were growing up I didn’t know her very well because she was about six years older than me, her brother was a friend of mine, he was my age. And we got to talking and she was a software writer, a children’s educational software writer. And she was working on a program called color and read in English and Spanish. It was a bilingual computer coloring book. he needed somebody to do the drawings.
So I said okay, I’ll do that and artistically the main requirement for these drawings was that all the lines formed complete closed units so that if the child clicked on this spot it wouldn’t color in the whole picture, they had to be these separate little units. But I was living in Michigan at the time and she was in Pittsburgh and we didn’t this all via the U.S. mail.
And I just really enjoyed so much getting to know her through this process, she was great to work with, that I wanted to extend our friendship. So I sent her some color copies, photocopies of some drawings I had done just to say this is who I am, this is what I like to do. And she signed me up for a conference in Pittsburgh that was a children’s book writing and illustrating conference.
And it included a portfolio review with the art director of Greenwillow Books. So she told me what you need to do is take a well-known story or fairytale, make six drawings about it so that they can see that you can take one character through many situations, have the character be recognizable, have the six drawings be different enough to be interesting but coherent enough to be a group.
And I met with Eva Weiss, who was the art director of Greenwillow Books and she looked at my portfolio, she was very encouraging, and she said your work is imminently publishable and then she said do you also write? And I found out later that this is a question she asks everybody whose portfolio she looks at but at the time I thought she had spotted some hidden talent in me that no one else ever had and I said well I have some ideas.
And she said send us your ideas and she gave me her business card and so I went home, and I had been thinking about this little story for three months and so it was somehow really easy to write down and type up, in three days I wrote it down and typed it up and I sent it off. And they wanted to buy it and they wanted me to illustrate it. So I thought well maybe this is something I can do.
I was 35 years old when that happened so I’m a late bloomer poster child.
