How did you get started as an illustrator, and what drew you to this kind of work?

Like lots of people, I drew as a kid as a way of making up stories, fantasizing on paper. Drawing became a habit long before I thought of it as a possible vocation.

It took a long time, and an indirect path, for anything like a career to take shape. I majored in art at Oberlin College, and had some vague notion of being an art-for-art’s sake fine artist. I got an MA in creative writing at Temple University, then did doctoral work in English, but I lost my way, or my will, part way through a dissertation. Then, through an old family friend who was a chemistry professor at the University of California at Berkeley, I got involved with a high school chemistry curriculum development project, Living by Chemistry. I drew illustrations and cartoons for the preliminary drafts they were testing in classrooms, and also helped write and edit some lessons. I felt like I’d finally found a way to be useful while enjoying work that used the different skills I’d been cobbling together my whole life.

Can you walk us through your process—from receiving concept to final illustration?

Sometimes someone else at SERP has a specific request for an illustration. Other times, I’m coming up with illustration ideas for material I’m writing, so there’s more of a back and forth between my writing brain and my illustrating brain, so to speak. I might even change the writing a bit to set up an illustration idea. Either way, content comes first: the illustration has to serve the ideas that are important in whatever project we’re working on. 

How do you balance visual storytelling with educational clarity?

Good illustration should delight and instruct: docere et delectare, to use a formulation from classical rhetoric. So style and content are not at odds; they’re two sides of the same coin. You try to entice, entertain, explain, and clarify all at once. The content motivates the form, and the form should make the content more accessible.

What’s unique about illustrating for education compared to commercial or editorial illustration?

I suppose someone who buys an illustrated magazine or a book might be ready to meet you half way, but a captive audience of students could be less receptive. So engagement and accessibility may be especially important in educational illustration. It’s also important to try to let as many students as possible see themselves in the worlds conjured by educational illustration. People who work in all aspects of education tend to have a strong sense of mission, and it’s fulfilling to contribute to that mission through illustration. 

What do you find most rewarding about seeing your work embedded in WordGen, STARI, or other SERP programs?

It’s been fun to see students using and enjoying my work on a few occasions when I’ve done classroom observations, or to hear back from teachers that students really enjoyed or “got” certain illustrations. I did some fairly simple, almost stick figure–like characters for SERP’s Math by Example project, and students started spontaneously modifying the figures, adding hair, clothes, and props to the cover illustrations. It was really gratifying to see kids playing with the drawings, making them their own—kind of becoming friends with their math workbooks!

What do you find most rewarding about seeing your work embedded in WordGen, STARI, or other SERP programs?