The Beauty of Imperfect Children's Book Art

New York Times

23-05-2025

I can't draw hands. Or horses. If horses had hands instead of hooves and I had to draw that, I'd be in serious trouble. I'm more comfortable drawing fields or cats. But I had to draw a child's hands — big and up close — for the cover of a book.
My first attempts looked like fleshy mittens.
When I get stuck, I turn to other children's book artists for inspiration. Barbara McClintock is my go-to artist. I leafed through her books. Her drawings of hands in 'Adèle & Simon' were beautiful but too small. Next I turned to Kevin Henkes and his Caldecott Medal-winning 'Kitten's First Full Moon,' but his drawings of cat paws were no help at all.
As I kept messing up — my wastebasket filling with crumpled paper — I felt like I was 6 years old again, trying to draw cows.
I grew up on a farm. Cows roamed the fields outside our kitchen window. When I drew them, and their weird bony legs, frustration rose inside me — my cows didn't look right — then burst into a red-faced, paper-destroying tantrum. I would run away from home, up into the apple tree outside the back door.
Now when I get frustrated, I head to museums. So I biked to MoMA and wandered the galleries, looking for big hands. I found Picasso's 'Two Nudes,' the women's hands captured in a few quick brushstrokes.
Then I biked to the Whitney, where there was a Ruth Asawa exhibit with an ink study of hands. Her line was bold, effortless. How did she do that?
Artists often have that reaction to others' art. We look for clues. This is also true for children learning to draw.
On author visits to schools, I lead drawing classes. As students sketch the trees outside their classroom window, I look over their shoulders and offer encouragement. 'You call that a tree? Come on!'
I don't say that. But I have the urge, especially when the students' teacher says, 'Emily, that's a perfect tree!' I don't think that's helpful when Emily is furiously scowling. I recognize that scowl. I say, 'Look close. Keep drawing.'
There's always one child who sticks with it. She makes me think of Simone Biles. Biles was the same age as these grade schoolers when she started tumbling in a gym. Falling down, getting up. All that practice and grit. Now when we see her take flight into a ridiculously difficult twist, we ask how did she do that? Well, easy. That vault took decades.
Biking home from the museums, I thought about training. Picasso started drawing as a young child (his father was an art teacher). He was an excellent draftsman before he became the Simone Biles of art. Asawa drew flowers and plants as a child, and studied with professional illustrators. Even when she turned to abstract sculpture, she drew every morning, as exercise.
I went back to my bookshelf and leafed through more children's books. The artists I admire all share a certain looseness. Quentin Blake's scratchy ink lines bursting with motion in the Roald Dahl books he illustrated. Christian Robinson's colorful cut-paper circles in 'Another,' bouncing across the page. Sydney Smith's brushstrokes in 'Small in the City,' radiating light.
Underneath their looseness is craft. Blake drew countless drafts before finding his fluid line. Robinson's bouncing art was arranged with serious deliberation. Smith's brushstrokes look like a moment's thought but — my goodness — the years it must have taken for him to achieve that. Carefree art takes great care.
There was a paradox here. All the training and discipline built up, then came out on the paper in an almost unconscious act of letting go. A splotch of ink, a wayward wash of color. Imperfect but right.
Finding beauty in the flaws, and acceptance. As if the artist knew when to walk away.
By now there were more books in my lap than on my bookshelf. I saw the same pattern in all the children's book art I loved — in all art really — from Picasso to Sophie Blackall. Craft, imperfection, grace.
Before I went back to my desk, I looked hard at one painting in 'Hello Lighthouse' by Blackall — an ocean of waves rendered in exquisite detail and technique, before it exploded into a wild storm of watercolor clouds and her art took flight. How did she do that? Maybe even she didn't know.
I still had to draw the hands for my cover. Here's what I did. I stopped thinking of hands as hands.
There were other things I could draw. Landscapes. So I painted the hands as if they were fields. Vertical fields, in burnt sienna and burnt umber. An hour later I was done. The hands weren't great, but I didn't rip them up. I wanted to keep some roughness.
I love the whole messy process of making children's books. Starts, stops, odd hacks. I appreciate how technology improves books, but I'm also wary. About how it smooths rough edges. Makes art a little too neat. Too perfect, maybe. What gets lost if we don't hold onto the necessary frustration of the handmade? Thinking about the answer to this question makes me sad.
When I'm feeling low, I go to the water. So I biked to the Hudson River, took the ferry across it and climbed to the cliffs of Weehawken. It's beautiful up here — Manhattan a mountain of glass and steel, held by the river, with clouds racing above.
Sometimes, when I look at our city, I imagine forests. How it must have been. Oaks, deer, Lenape villages. Then fields, Dutch cattle, masts of ships. Centuries of stories and lives, pain and beauty, on this island.
Standing at the edge of these cliffs, I close my eyes. Daydream backward, crossing oceans and epochs, to the walls of the Lascaux caves and the famous drawing of a prehistoric horse. Rough, charcoal. Perfectly imperfect. A drawing that looks like it's straight out of a good children's book.
I think we know that artist. How she looked at the world, how much she desired to capture it. Her unpolished line, communicating with us across time, connecting us with our past, then forward to our children, to all of us who open a book and hold it in our hands and say yes.