A lot of the time, when I'm drawing a cute hedgehog in yellow boots or another whimsical scene on my iPad, I find myself thinking about the words one of my college professors wrote on my final exam. The exam allowed professors to leave a comment at the end, rather than simply give a grade. And there, in that little box on Canvas, I remember reading something along the lines of, "I loved reading your thoughts on question X! Now get out there and design some great cities!" The class was called “Theory and History of City Planning”. While that comment certainly boosted my confidence, it still wasn't enough to make me devote my whole heart to pursuing city planning as a career.
Before that degree, I had spent five years studying architecture. During those years, both my professors and I had come to recognize that my strength was storytelling. To me, the most exciting part of designing a building, a masterplan, or a park was always the story behind it. Every line, every placement of an element had to make sense and work toward a greater purpose: the creation of a thoughtful design that had a story to tell.
After spending seven years studying architecture and city planning, I had become rather accustomed to thinking of my work in terms of buildings, cities, public spaces, and the great responsibility that comes with shaping the environments people live in. These were serious things! Fellowships and research grants are awarded to study the challenges facing our cities. Conferences are held around the world! Entire reports are devoted to analyzing population growth, housing shortages, land-use patterns, and transportation networks. Professionals spend their days poring over demographic data, mapping urban inequalities, studying traffic flows, and developing strategies for everything from affordable housing to climate resilience. All big words! So, this has to be important work, no?
I had spent seven years preparing to contribute to this kind of work. There was a certain seriousness to it all, a sense that I was being equipped to tackle important problems and make some meaningful contribution to the world. And yet, here I am, drawing a hedgehog in yellow boots. Every now and then, a little voice in the back of my head wonders whether this is really what I should be doing. Whether, after all those years of education, I ought to be designing something a little more substantial than an imaginary cottage with a crooked chimney. Whether illustrating children's picture books is, well, a rather unserious way to spend one's life.
There's a lovely line in C. S. Lewis's dedication to “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. Writing to his goddaughter Lucy, who had grown older while he was working on the book, Lewis tells her: "But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." I wonder whether growing up sometimes involves a peculiar sort of forgetting. As children, we delight in imaginary worlds without ever questioning whether they are worth our time. But then we grow up, and we begin to associate importance with things that are practical, complicated, and impressive. Lewis makes another observation in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” that has really stuck with me. He argues that since children will inevitably encounter cruelty and evil in the world, we ought at least to let them encounter brave knights and heroic courage in their stories. I think that's a rather wonderful way of looking at children's literature.
The stories we read as children are often among our earliest encounters with things we have yet to experience ourselves in real world. Through them, we begin to recognize courage and cowardice, goodness and wickedness, generosity and selfishness. We discover that the world can be frightening, but also that there are things worth being brave for, people worth loving, and goodness worth pursuing. And all of this can happen through a story about a little animal wearing yellow boots. That’s not to say that I believe every picture book needs to teach a profound moral lesson. Some stories are simply funny, beautiful, or wonderfully silly, and I think there is room for all of that. There is value in delight, too.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that my years studying architecture and city planning might not be as far removed from illustrating children's books as I once thought. In architecture, I learned to think about how people experience the spaces we create. Now, when I illustrate a picture book, I find myself asking similar questions. How do I make a little cottage feel like a home? What details make a room feel warm and lived in? How can a scene tell a story before the reader has read a single word? Can you also notice a common thread running through both pursuits? I think that common thread is the desire to create something thoughtful and beautiful for the people who will experience it. I've only illustrated a couple of children's picture books so far, and I am very much at the beginning of this journey. I still love architecture and city planning, and I don't regret the years I spent studying them. But I am beginning to think that work doesn't always have to look impressive to be meaningful and have value. It definitely doesn't have to always involve complicated plans, technical reports, or projects that can be measured in square meters and millions of dollars.
Sometimes, it may look like a mother sitting beside her child, turning the pages of a beautifully illustrated book. And I’ve come to realize that contributing to that little moment is a rather serious business after all.