Sweet Work

Over the last 20 years Melissa Sweet has illustrated over 80 books, from board books to nonfiction to vegetarian cookbooks. In 2005, she published the first book she both wrote and illustrated, Carmine: A Little More Red. The New York Times named it one of the top-10 illustrated children’s books of the year.

Sweet works six hours a day, five days a week in her two-story studio adjacent to her home on Main Street in Rockport. The studio is pink on the outside; the house is green with a pink door.

Her neat, pristine working space belies the hoarder she is, collecting and storing old buttons and papers, rusty old bottle caps, anything that might be needed in her increasingly mixed media pieces. Her playful watercolors are vibrant; her vision is quirky and compelling; you know a Sweet piece the minute you see it, even the stacking blocks, games, and notebooks she designs for a small toy company.

As usual, she is currently juggling a number of illustration projects for other writers. One book’s tentative pages are tacked up on her storyboard on the wall as she explores possible designs. Another’s dummy (the mockup of what the book will look like) is being reviewed by the publisher, and another, about the poet William Carlos Williams, will be out in August.
The second book she has both written and illustrated—Tupelo Rides the Rails—has just shipped and is in bookstores. Tupelo (named after a Van Morrison song) is an abandoned dog, and the story is told from a dog’s point of view: dog culture, dog heroes and heroines, a dog’s vision of the night sky. Sweet has two shelter dogs, one rescued from Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and she’s created a website for the book to benefit animal shelters (www.mydogisabonehead.com).

Sweet grew up in a medium-sized family in a medium-sized town where children were children, riding bikes, building forts, exploring. She knew from her earliest days that she would be an artist, but she didn’t quite know how that would play out. She was illustrating greeting cards, working in a children’s bookstore, sometimes waiting tables, all the while trying to break into the world of children’s book illustration for five years and getting nowhere.

She finally gave herself one month in which to make it work. She made appointments with a dozen publishers, created paintings she hoped would say she knew what she was doing, and then took herself off to New York City. Her first meeting netted an assignment, illustrating a couple of books by James Howe, already a big deal in children’s literature. Sweet left New York with three books to illustrate and never looked back. She’s now booked two to three years into the future.

So you spent five years trying to break into publishing, and then once you went to New York and did a face-to-face, it all came together?
Well, maybe more importantly in
hindsight, I drew for those five years. My guess is I just wasn’t strong enough artistically before that. There’s a difference between designing a book and loving to draw.

So you actually design the book.
I do. It’s almost like a small movie, with 32 frames to tell the story.

When you’re working on someone else’s text, how much freedom do you have?
I always want to bring more to the party. If the text doesn’t indicate where the story takes place, then, for example, if it’s a bedtime story, I could make them aliens in outer space going to bed or bears going to bed or a child in the Bronx going to bed.

How do you decide?
It often depends on what filter I seem to be seeing things through. Lately, I’ve been seeing things through the eyes of the old Golden Books illustrators. They were amazing. While I was working on the William Carlos Williams book, I saw everything through the filter of old book covers and end papers, the physical characteristic of old type faces.

Could you take us through the process of the most recent book you wrote and illustrated, Tupelo Rides the Rails?
[She pulls out a large plastic see-through tub filled with papers and notebooks, sketches, books.] Well, here it is. Everything that fed that little 32-page book.

That’s a mountain of stuff. Do you have one of those for every book you’ve illustrated?
I do, but not like that. Some are just little plastic bags. I didn’t know what this book was about for years. I had seen the movie The Station Agent, and there was the seed of the train. I couldn’t shake it. When I approached my editor with the idea, all I could say was, How about a book with a dog, a train, and the night sky?

What do you do when you get stuck?
Two things. One is research. I love research. I read, read, read. For Carmine, I read a lot of folktales and fairy tales. I read a lot about color, and a ton about wolves. And then I write to see what happens the way I paint to see what happens. You make a mark, and then another. You’re just responding. And it opens up.

This is solitary work.
Yes, it is, but it was never a daunting notion to work for myself or by myself. I grew up in a family that was always into projects. I had the notion of projects in my blood. And I was a little entrepreneur, too. When I was 11, I had a donut delivery route. I’d take orders from the neighbors, they’d give me 50 cents, and I’d pick up donuts at the crack of dawn from the local bakery, and deliver them in little white bags at their doorsteps. Two dollars a day was a lot of money to me. I made potholders and those little leaded stained glass geegaws, too.

Humor is everywhere in your work.
Thanks. It is, but people don’t always see it. I’m not sure it’s intentional. My hunch is it’s like I’m wearing eyeglasses that say, Let’s not take ourselves too seriously. I love to laugh, and I grew up with two brothers. We teased each other mercilessly. I’m OK with being laughed at. No one laughs harder than me when someone gets it right.

Your relationship with color is so strong, so clear, so particular, actually. Could you talk about that?
I studied for a brief time with Robert Spellman [now head of the art department at Naropa University]. Now that I think of it, it was a beautiful way to learn. He’d set up his palette with certain colors, his water jars in a certain way—like a Zen monk. I used a lot of black at the time, and he took it away and taught me how to really mix colors. To this day, I put my water glasses just like Robert did.

What would you be if you weren’t a children’s book artist?
A New Yorker cartoonist, or really I’d love to work for Aardman Animations, still might, on the Wallace and Gromit films and just make stuff. You know they have to make a million things and I’d love to make all the little trees. But honestly I don’t have much in the way of regret. I’m so happy doing what I do.

Is there any writer whose work you’d
like to illustrate?
I’d love to illustrate Calvin Trillin.

But he writes for adults.
That’s right.