So in doing the illustrations for Seed by Seed, there were a couple of different kinds of research, I did a lot of research on that book actually. I read a biography of Johnny Appleseed that was really interesting. One thing that was really interesting is that we don’t really know what he looked like.
In this book that I read, they have, nobody had drew pictures of him. Nobody painted pictures of him, people wrote letters about him but the information in the letters is sometimes contradictory. You know one person will say his eyes were grey, one will say his eyes were brown and you know just really different descriptions. But there were some common threads.
He was strong, he was sinewy and a lot of the ideas that we have, you know that have become clichés, he didn’t actually go around with a coffee sack and a pot on his head all the time. But he did wear everybody’s cast off clothing. And there were some actually quite specific descriptions of things people saw him wearing. So that was one part of it.
And then Esme was, had her ideas about five things she wanted kids to remember, five things that seemed to her to be essential to his life. One was use what you have, share what you have, respect nature, you can reach your destination by taking small steps and I’ve left one out, which one did I leave out?
Anyway, so I was thinking I think kids would have an easier time remembering these ideas if they had something concrete to attach them to and when I said concrete I was thinking an actual, physical object. So I wanted the object to both embody the idea that it was trying to communicate and also to be something that would have existed in Johnny Appleseed’s time.
And to be something that would naturally have words on it that I could write those words on. So for example, there was a story that I read, actually it was a story in Esme’s manuscript, he would travel around and he would stay in people’s homes. And he was quite educated, he read a lot and he would leave chapters of books in people’s houses so that they could read them too.
And so share what you have, I looked up what books would have looked like at the time and I physically made a little fake book and the title of the book was share what you have and it was a book that had been separated into sections. So it was really interesting, I got to research a lot of different things and you know any time you do a book you don’t use all of what you research, you learn a lot of things that don’t go in.
So for example, one of the things I considered using is I learned with money, people would actually cut money in half and so you know a dollar if you could cut it in half it would be a half dollar. So I learned a lot of interesting things on the way.