When they’re not writing and illustrating books, many children’s creators pursue other artistic paths, some far afield of publishing. We spoke with four artists who came to picture books and graphic novels with experience in design, typography, murals, and multimedia. Audiences may already have encountered their work outside the bookstore, without connecting their artistry to print media.
Designer Annie Atkins, a resident of Dublin, Ireland, creates props and period ephemera for film and TV, and moviegoers might recognize her creations, notably the coveted, pink Mendl’s Patisserie box from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or the maps in Anderson’s stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs.
“I was a graphic designer for years in advertising,” Atkins says, “but then I realized my heart wasn’t really in it. I don’t know if you can be good at something you don’t enjoy.” She left advertising for film school, imagining a career in directing or cinematography, only to discover that her design chops met on-set needs. “I put two and two together and was like, oh, right, you need graphic designers in film as well,” she recalls. Her style was perfect, she said, for “historical dramas or genre work set in other worlds.”
Atkins supplements her online image research with visits to museum archives and occasional purchases of mementos found in family collections. “I buy a lot of things from eBay, like old telegrams and odd love letters and stuff,” she says. “They don’t cost very much money, and it’s great to be able to hold things in your hand and feel the texture of the paper.”
This year, Atkins made her picture book debut with Letters from the North Pole: With Five Letters from Santa Claus to Pull Out and Read (Magic Cat), a nostalgic, interactive title Atkins compares to Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Jolly Postman toy book series.
Typographer Jessica Hische, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., specializes in lettering. Companies hire her to tweak and refresh imagery created by other designers, and she has updated the logos of brands including Southern Living and Eating Well. She and Atkins share a cinematic connection: Hische created the titles for Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom; she also did the main title design for the Lionsgate film Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, based on the novel by Judy Blume, the titles for Natasha Rothwell’s Hulu show How to Die Alone, and the main title for The Wonder Years TV reboot.
At the start of her graphic design career, Hische felt an affinity with editorial illustrators, book illustrators, and typographers. “There weren’t a ton of people doing illustrative typography, so it became this fun playground for me,” she says. Commercial clients came to know her as their go-to letter artist, and she channeled her love of illustration into children’s book projects including her debut, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave, which became a selection of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and a PW Flying Start.
Hische’s abecedary, My First Book of Fancy Letters, was published by Penguin Workshop in October.
Brooklyn-based painter Katie Yamasaki creates murals with communities in the New York metro area and far beyond. She’s worked with neurodivergent public school students near her neighborhood, young women questioning military recruitment in Sunset Park, and hospital staffers in the Bronx. She’s also created art with rural Appalachian residents and with the Zapatistas, a Mexican revolutionary group, and she now leads an expressive arts program at a maximum security women’s prison every week.
Yamasaki’s projects complement her picture books, which include Place Hand Here and Everything Naomi Loved (co-written with Ian Lender), stories of young painters. Her writing and illustration stem from formative experiences as a mural-maker, including her first collaboration with teenage girls in Brooklyn, more than 20 years ago. The site was “a 60-by-40-foot wall on top of another building; we had to take a 25-foot ladder up to a rooftop and go up a huge scaffold from there,” Yamasaki says. They prepared a grid to enlarge their image, painted each section, and only saw the results once the scaffolding was removed. At first, Yamasaki felt disappointed by the technical imperfections, yet “the girls in the group were so moved to have their image up in such a large scale and prominent place.”
She came to realize that a mural “is not about the artist” and her ego. Instead, a mural is a collective endeavor meant to “provide a platform for people to tell their stories.” She also believes mural making “sharpens your storytelling skills because it’s like trying to tell a whole story in a single image,” and she says her agent—Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon Literary—likewise “sees my work as a whole package of storytelling,” from picture book pages to grand-scale outdoor walls.
Yamasaki’s forthcoming Mural Island (Norton Young Readers, Mar. 2025), edited by Simon Boughton, features an unstoppable young artist who has talents in common with Yamasaki and the diverse people she meets on the job.
Fabric artist Kay Healy, who lives in Philadelphia, paints and screen-prints on fabric, and assembles it into large, pillowy sculptures sewn together with trapunto and quilting techniques. Among Healy’s creations are life-size houseplants and sprawling installations made of cloth and displayed on large gallery walls.
“My artwork tends to be very detailed, but it always has an element of story in it,” says Healy, whose pieces are based on interviews in which people describe objects from their lives. Her quest for stories led her to a degree in book arts and printmaking at the University of the Arts, where she learned bookbinding and created screen prints of armchairs and household items: “I liked the fact that I could make a lot of them. [Plus] we had a lot of abandoned buildings in Philly back then, [so] I used to wheat paste them” on bare walls. When she began screen-printing on fabric and creating reliefs using trapunto stitchery, “that started me on this new pathway.”
Healy also has turned her love of stories into humorous anecdotes about an 11-year-old semi-sleuth. She’ll make her comics debut next February with Casey’s Cases: The Mysterious New Girl, the first in a two-book deal, edited by Taylor Norman at Holiday House’s Neal Porter Books imprint.
Artistry On and Off the Page
Each creator brings their expressive ideals to their non-book art and children’s books alike. Yamasaki wrote Mural Island about a Black child named Kengi, who uses they/them pronouns and loves doodling on every available surface. Kengi’s teacher suggests they visit an outdoor art space, dubbed Mural Island, where kids can paint with abandon—but the catch is that visitors often paint over each other’s pictures. In Mural Island, graffiti isn’t permanent.
Yamasaki has met kids like Kengi, including a 14-year-old who was assigned to make murals as a punishment for his graffiti. “He would go into the bathroom and tag every square of toilet paper,” Yamasaki says. “He would go into the fridge and tag everybody’s food. He was trying to carve out his place, trying to have a voice.” She created Kengi to demonstrate how such an irreverent artist might find an outlet for their energy.
“When you’re doing graffiti or painting murals, you’re having a full sensory experience because your whole body is involved,” Yamasaki says. “There are the smells of the neighborhood, the heat, the sounds of the cars or the sounds of whatever. There’s the physical and visual component being embodied in whatever it is you’re doing. If you see people painting graffiti, they are fully in their moment,” and she wants to convey that liberatory feeling to her audiences.
Letter designer Hische, who works with Penguin Workshop VP and publisher Daniel Moreton and literary agent Seth Fishman of the Gernert Company, wants to awaken a sense of possibility in young readers too. Developing My First Book of Fancy Letters, she says, brought back “all these memories of learning to write in bubble letter styles and graffiti styles” and reminded her of that childhood realization that “letters can look cool.”
“Drawing fancy letters is a really accessible art form for kids who are worried about not being able to draw things correctly,” she says. Letters can be bent and shaped, and kids don’t have to “get hung up on it being realistic.” In her alphabet book, a “hot” H blazes, a brassy J is “jeweled” with gemstones, and a “short and sweet” S looks like a candy stick. “I wanted to make sure that all of the words that I picked were easy to visualize,” Hische says, so “everything’s a concrete word or adjective.”
Healy, the fabric artist, says she came up with Casey’s Cases “organically” while working on other projects, and her character projects a casual DIY aesthetic. Casey—whose wide base and pointy noggin recall a piece of candy corn—was “a little character that I would just draw in my sketchbook and put in situations. What would she look like in a swimsuit? What would her best friend look like, what would her mom look like, what would her cat look like?”
Jotting stories of Casey—who reckons with a snarky classmate, a crush, and a rescued cat named Mr. Muffin—Healy envisioned elementary-age students in the community art classes she taught: “I was always trying to think about what they would find funny or important, and using that as a guiding light.”
After working on the comics in secret, Healy put together a dummy for her husband, Greg Pizzoli, author-illustrator of Lucky Duck and The Watermelon Seed. “I had no other aspirations for it,” she says, but “I knew he liked it because he had notes.” She reworked it for three months, and Pizzoli’s agent, Steven Malk at Writers House, suggested his colleague Hannah Mann. “I know what a struggle it can be to produce the thing and get it in front of people who can help you turn it into something,” Healy now says. “So I had a fast pass for that one.”
For props designer Atkins, Letters from the North Pole likewise came about serendipitously, when the Magic Cat team and publisher Rachel Williams asked her to recommend a designer for a seasonal book with paper props. “I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to write a book!’ ” Atkins says. “And they said, ‘Oh, you want to write it?’ So we started a whole other conversation. It was a real gift.”
When making props, Atkins says she stays “in character all the time. I use the real tools that the characters would use, so I started thinking about, ‘How would Santa Claus write his letters? Does he use a fountain pen? Does he use calligraphy?’ ” To keep Santa’s script legible, she gave him “a vintage typewriter, one of those old smudgy ones” with imperfect keys and an unevenly inked ribbon; she reserved calligraphy for Santa’s signature and the addresses on the envelopes. “For the franking marks and postal marks, I had real rubber stamps made,” she added. “It was all hand-done and then scanned in,” for a “subtle” and realistic look. Illustrator Fia Tobing contributed color imagery, and Jonathan McGonnell drafted diagrams of invented toys.
Atkins saw Letters as a rare chance to get her meticulous pieces into people’s hands, in close-up, and she’s now at work on a middle-grade book with interactive components too. “The sad thing about film is most of this stuff is never, ever seen by the audience,” she reflects. “You’re [creating] deep background work or it’s just off camera, out of focus, or not in the frame at all.” Atkins—like Healy, Hische, and Yamasaki—transformed her custom handiwork into a book of “paper props that would actually be held” by a reader and studied in detail.
