Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“I am not small! My dog is small.
See how tall I am when I stand on my toes?”
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It’s a pleasure to welcome author-illustrator Nina Crews to 7-Imp today. She and I talk about her new picture book, released this month — I’m Not Small (Greenwillow) — and how she momentarily put down her camera to work in a new style. I’m Not Small is an empowering tale about a child exploring how all things in nature are relative. Stepping into the yard — “Sunshine! Daytime! Time to play outside.” — the young child experiences the thrill of doing so independently: “You’re a big kid now,” says mother. The child feels small next to the big tree but tall next to the dog, as pictured above. “I am big!” the child declares triumphantly after exploring creatures in the yard.

Nina also gives us a sneak peek at some illustrations for Tameka Fryer Brown’s Not Done Yet: Shirley Chisholm’s Fight For Change, coming from Millbrook Press this November.

I thank Nina for visiting and sharing lots of art. …

 

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Jules: What do you like about working in digital collage and how has it opened new possibilities for you?

Nina: I tried out a few different media as I began working on I’m Not Small — pencils, watercolor, and acrylics — and was happiest with a gouache and collage piece I made. I liked the directness of working in gouache but found that incorporating the digitally created patterns I wanted to use was cumbersome. It seemed that the best way to get the look I was after would be to work digitally. I could integrate photos, patterns, and textures seamlessly as well as create flat areas of color that had a similar look and feel to gouache. Another bonus was that the digital tools were familiar to me. I used Adobe Photoshop to create the art. This program has been my go-to digital tool for decades of photocollage work.

 

Nina: “An early sketch of the cast of the book …”
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Nina: “Watercolor and colored pencil experiment …”
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Nina: “Gouache and collage experiment — the patterned papers were created digitally and printed out on my inkjet printer.”
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Nina: “Another experiment with the same image — scanned it and digitally manipulated the background elements.”
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Nina: “This is the sample I sent with the book proposal.”
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Jules: What drew you to putting down your camera and working in a new style?

Nina: I’ve been creating photo-illustrated books for a long time and was looking for ways to stretch creatively. While, I’m Not Small could have been done with photo-illustration, I think the simplicity of the digital collages is a better solution. And this new style has brought projects that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do otherwise, like the Shirley Chisholm autobiography. It hasn’t been really obvious, but drawing has always been part of my process for a long time. With my photocollage books, I use drawings to plan my photo shoots. Now my drawings are the base for my digital illustrations.

 

A final spread: “But the sky is big. The trees are big. The backyard is big.
I am small.”
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Jules: I am always struck by how, in your books, you tap so directly into the way children think and see the world, and I’m Not Small is no exception. How do you do that? Do you remember your own childhood vividly?

Nina: I’m very happy that you feel that my books succeed in this way. It is important to me to reflect a child’s inner life in my stories. I think children are interesting and delightful people, and I am often struck by how adults aren’t very different from them underneath all their clutter and complication. I don’t actively strive to “think like a child” but follow themes and ideas that interest me and that I think will interest kids. Picture books are all about distilling down thoughts and feelings and getting rid of complication while respecting the curiosity and intelligence of the reader. When I write, I dig in and try to tell an interesting story as simply as I can.

 

A final spread: “My cat is small. My dog likes to lick my cat with her big, pink tongue.”
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Jules: What was your favorite part of illustrating this story?

Nina: I loved creating the scenes with the boy and his pets. I thought a lot about touch and gesture as I worked and drew inspiration from my memories of when my son was that age (though we did not have a dog or bunny.) Each of the boy’s pet acts according to its nature. The dog is most active and present; the cat, more aloof (but not entirely disinterested); and the rabbit, mostly cautious and needing care. However, they are all clearly bonded with the boy. The story is primarily about relative size, but it is also about caring relationships — between the boy and his parents, and the boy with his pets, and the birds and insects that he encounters.

 

A final spread: “Hey, big guy! Are you ready for breakfast?”
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Jules: I haven’t seen Not Done Yet, but can you talk about how that book came to you and why you wanted to illustrate it (other than the obvious fact that Chisholm was amazing)?

Nina: Tameka Fryer Brown, the author of Not Done Yet, and I have the same agent, Marietta Zacker. I had been talking with Marietta about developing a new style, and she sent me a draft of Tameka’s manuscript. I liked it a lot and created a sample piece that week. Tameka liked my sample, and Marietta pitched the project with both of us attached.

 

Nina: “I looked at a lot of Jacob Lawrence paintings while working on Not Done Yet. This red brick wall inspired one illustration.”
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Nina: “Sketch for pages 6–7, inspired by the Jacob Lawrence painting.”
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Nina: “Here, Shirley Chisholm is campaigning in Brooklyn. Sketch for pages 12–13.”
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Nina: “I created digital patterns based on Chisholm’s clothing to use in my illustrations and repeated them in the backgrounds.”

 

Shirley Chisholm was amazing! As I began working on the project, I took a deep dive into research. I found that there were so many things I needed to understand better to be able to “see” her story. So, I read Chisholm’s first autobiography and watched video interviews she gave. I researched images of civil rights protests from the 1930s through the ’60s and studied photographs of Barbados and the New York State Assembly. I watched the Netflix series, Mrs. America, which devotes an episode to Chisholm’s presidential run. In doing so, I deepened my understanding of her time and mine! I was raised in New York City, and my childhood overlapped her years in public office.

 


A final spread: “What Shirley didn’t love was
the unfair way certain people were treated in America. …”
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A final spread: “She was Brooklyn’s first Black assmeblywoman.
A great triumph — but she wasn’t done yet.”
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A final spread: “It was a difficult battle from the start. …”
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Jules: Did you illustrate this one in the same style?

Nina: The illustrations for Not Done Yet are created the same way, using layered colors and patterns in Adobe Photoshop, but the look is a bit different. There is a lot of energy and movement in Tameka’s free verse text, so I used colored shapes and patterns to create visual movement and rendered the figures with strong highlights and shadows. Everything buzzes and bounces. And there are lots of people in the scenes! Chisholm was a gregarious, caring person who focused on serving others. She remains the focus of each illustration, but we see her with family, community, and colleagues.

 

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I’M NOT SMALL. Copyright © 2022 by Nina Crews. Published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

NOT DONE YET: SHIRLEY CHISHOLM’S FIGHT FOR CHANGE. Text copyright © 2022 by Tameka Fryer Brown. Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Nina Crews. Published by Millbrook Press, an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group.

All images here reproduced by permission of Nina Crews.