Jason Chin received the 2022 Caldecott Medal for his illustrations for Andrea Wang’s autobiographical picture book Watercress. As an author-illustrator, his acclaimed nonfiction books include Grand Canyon, Your Place in the Universe, and The Universe in You. In Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall by Lynn Brunelle, Chin depicts the decomposition of a blue whale over the course of a century, giving life to new ecosystems. Katherine Roy is the creator of the Sibert Honor Book Neighborhood Sharks and, most recently, Making More. Sea Without a Shore: Life in the Sargasso by Barb Rosenstock, Roy lends her eye to a single piece of seaweed and the diverse and interdependent marine life it buoys. We asked Chin and Roy to discuss their new books and their techniques for bringing complex underwater worlds to life for young readers.
Jason Chin: Hi Katherine, nice to see you again.
Katherine Roy: Hi, nice to see you, too!
Chin: I like illustrating books by other authors because I get introduced to these subjects that aren’t on my radar. This was the case with Life After Whale, and I’m guessing this was the case with Sea Without a Shore. Are there any facts that you found really interesting?
Roy: I’m so grateful to get to work on a second book by Barb Rosenstock after we did Otis and Will Discover the Deep in 2018, which we did not work closely together on. Here, since we knew each other and got along, we got to work together and go to Bermuda for three and a half days for research through her contacts. Before she said, “Hey, I’ve got this book about seaweed,” I didn’t know that this whole tiny world existed with all of these endemic creatures that only live in the Sargasso. And I didn’t have to come up with the cool content as the author, so it was a playground for me to figure out how to frame a composition that highlights the content.
I saw a lot of similarities between Lynn Brunelle and Barb’s clear enthusiasm for the topics, the way they used lucid prose that is very fresh and alliterative and fun to read. What were your favorite facts and your biggest wows with Life After Whale? What did you geek out about the most?
Chin: Isn’t it wonderful when you get a manuscript where you can just feel the author’s joy in writing it and enthusiasm for the topic? I geeked out on whale anatomy and did a lot of whale skeleton drawings to prepare. I visited an 87-foot-long mounted blue whale skeleton in California. Finding visual source material for other parts of the anatomy was more challenging, but it was a fun research rabbit hole to go down.
Speaking of research, you mentioned your recent trip with Barb, which is totally cool. How did you budget your time for sketching and drawing and painting?
Roy: I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself to do much. I focus more on taking video and photo coverage. I probably took, in the upper hundreds, photos and videos of the seaweed. In terms of sketching on location, I’ll create color charts to think about the upper and lower levels of the color. When we were snorkeling right at the beach, for example, the water had a specific color, vs. when we were out on the boat. I’m also thinking about how I’m going to show information from the very beginning, especially if I have the manuscript. But I don’t put pressure to make nice drawings because that paralyzes me, personally. I’m just trying to remember as much as I can.
Jason, this is at least your fourth book that heavily features water. What were the challenges for you? Did you set out to do anything new with painting water this time around?
Chin: Every book has different challenges. For this book, I would say one of the challenges was that I couldn’t go see the subject in person. I did go to Monterey Bay, where the book takes place, but I wasn’t able to get in the water and experience the deep seafloor. Another big challenge for me was to try and illustrate the living whale and give this sense of depth and scale. It’s the biggest animal of all time. One of the ways that I tried to do that was to use what we call sfumato in the atmosphere, but underwater sfumato. In some of the pictures, the tail of the whale is obscured by all of the water that’s between your eye and the tail, so it looks closer in value to the background water. And then the front of the whale is more in focus and has higher contrast.
Roy: I wanted to ask you about all the darkness. I suppose Lynn and your editor, Neal Porter, would not have been happy with you if you’d been 100% honest about a whale fall, because what it looks like is 100% black, and I imagine that you could not turn in black art. [Laughs.] Can you talk about how you thought about the dark as the illustrator?
Chin: I totally lied. [Laughs.] I had a conversation with Neal about it and I said this is a 100% dark world. The one solution that I could think of that could be accurate was to put a submersible with a light in the illustrations. But there was a slight barrier to that, which is that this story takes place over a century, and the whale fall actually starts 100 years ago. Adding a submarine would be more inaccurate than just showing the scene with false lighting. So that’s what I did, and tried to indicate that it’s very dark down there by using lots of black, grays, and limited colors.
I wanted to know more about how you think about color. Is it intuitive, or do you have any rules that you go by? How do you interpret what you see in real life, what you observe, and translate that into an illustration?
Roy: I love using lots of very saturated color. With this book, there’s a built-in contrast between the golden hues of the seaweed and this incredibly deep Windsor blue of the water. I wanted to actually see the seaweed in person on our research trip because so many pictures of Sargassum seaweed online are blurry iPhone photos, or it’s dead seaweed, or it’s news coverage of gross-looking Sargassum seaweed washing up on Florida shores. I really wanted to bring that vivacity of the true color when I was making these paintings.
From the start of a book, I always make lots of tiny drawings in my sketchbook that are just color or shapes or forms. But after having kids, I didn’t have time to spend 12 hours a day working on a single painting. So for my most recent books, I developed a different art style where I’ll sit down and draw pages and pages and pages of seaweed for three days straight. And then pages and pages and pages of fish. I treat it more like a sketchbook and do five or 10 snails and then pick my favorite. Then I scan those handmade pieces of watercolor art into my computer and combine them into the composition that I want. Making final paintings all in one piece is really grueling, as you know. With this new way of working, I can be playful up until the very end and I can move things around until I get the piece where I want it.
Chin: So this is like a digital collage process of handmade art?
Roy: Right, so this doesn’t actually exist, except that all the pieces exist.
Chin: That makes sense. One of the things I struggle with is, I’ll do a drawing and the gesture will be nice and loose and free. And then I go to render that into a painting process and I struggle with losing the initial spirit.
Roy: Exactly, like how do I not kill it?
Chin: Right. It’s my painting to lose, is always the feeling. But your approach is really effective. Every page has that energy. It’s neat to hear how that comes together.
Roy: For Life After Whale, I was struck by how gross the topic of a dead whale is. It’s a rotting corpse and you have to draw it for 40 or 48 pages. And yet, you’ve made it beautiful! Can you talk about how you made a rotting corpse appropriate and interesting for children?
Chin: I focus on trying to communicate what the author has written in an accurate way. There are some things that I chose not to show because they might be too much. I also know that Neal will be there to catch anything inappropriate. After the whale falls to the sea floor, I started to think of it less as a body and more as a landscape because that’s the perspective of all of the small animals that are living on the whale fall. I was really focused on getting the light and anatomy right and I became desensitized to the grossness of it. There was a moment when I was halfway through painting a spread with a whale carcass, painting these little flaps of flesh waving back and forth in the current and I thought to myself, “Man, this is gory!” [Laughs] I totally forgot. I was just thinking, “I gotta get that muscle; there’s about this many inches of blubber here....” This happens a lot—I get so close to the book I’ve been inside the process of making and I lose perspective. Then I step back, or I hear a reader’s response, and I get a better understanding of it. One person wrote that Life After Whale was “a surprisingly moving meditation on the cycle of life, on life and death.” That’s really great, I just thought it was gory. [Laughs.]
Where does curiosity come into play for you as an artist who’s interested in science?
Roy: I don’t think of myself as that brave of a person, but my curiosity pushes me to walk up to the edge of my comfort zone. Those experiences make me feel alive. I approach the art from how I want it to feel and the emotions of excitement, joy, curiosity, and wonder that I experience. It’s a joy to be paired with a text that has that liveliness in the words, and to work with the author’s curiosity and let it feed my own.
I don’t think school is always good at building curious kids. If I can share something that I’m really enthusiastic about with a reader, then maybe that will re-engage them or give them a new perspective, too. I think your book does a great job of taking something that kids know something about, which is whales, and turning it on its head to say, what about a dead whale? Sea Without a Shore does that with seaweed by saying it’s not green, it’s yellow. And there are all these crazy creatures on it and it buoys the whole ecosystem! Who knew?
I’m excited to have Life After Whale in my now even bigger Jason Chin collection. This has really been a pleasure.
Chin: Thank you, Katherine. I’m excited to have Sea Without a Shore.
Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall by Lynn Brunelle, illus. by Jason Chin. Holiday House/Porter, $18.99 June ISBN 978-0-8234-5228-6
Sea Without a Shore: Life in the Sargasso by Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Katherine Roy. Norton, $18.99 Sept. 10 ISBN 978-1-324-01607-6
