I have seen Arctic Terns here in Alaska and knew they traveled long distances. Yet nothing prepared me for the truth of that journey seen in today’s stunningly gorgeous picture book.

Lindsay Moore studied marine biology and fine art at Southampton College on Long Island and figure drawing at the Art Students League of New York and earned her master’s of science in medical and scientific illustration from Medical College of Georgia, now Augusta University. Her author and illustrator picture books include Sun Bird, Sea Bear, and Yoshi and the Ocean, and she illustrated Rosanne Parry’s bestselling novel A Whale of the Wild. Lindsay Moore lives with her family in Northern Michigan. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram.

SUN BIRD follows the journey of an arctic tern from one end of the globe to the other. To say it’s stunning or gorgeous doesn’t even begin to cover it. This book was so beautiful it made me sad. I cannot believe I haven’t read or seen any of Lindsay’s other picture books! YET! I will absolutely be rectifying that. Not only does the text sing, but the illustrations (watercolor paintings that made me drool with delight) reminded me ever-so-slightly of Katherine Roy’s NEIGHBORHOOD SHARKS (and what a stunner that was when it first appeared). Her illustrations feel SO real and SO true and just … incandescent! I cannot rave enough.

Welcome Lindsay!

Me: Can you share about your artistic journey? When did you start creating art?  How did that bring you to where you are now as an author and illustrator of this book? 

Lindsay: Drawing was one way that I processed stories and expressed myself early on.  Stationed at a Fisher Price kids table in our sunlit living room, I spent a lot of time making pictures. One of my favorite stories was the Nativity story and I would draw pictures of it all year.

I remember sitting next to my  grandmother, listening to her explain perspective because I was struggling with drawing a halo.  I couldn’t have been more than 4.  All my halos looked like circles, hovering over angel heads (if that makes sense) and she showed me how the shape of a halo looked different based on the point of view. It was my first lesson on perspective.

My mom would also write stories down for me before I could read or write myself and then I would illustrate the pages. My parents were (and still are!) very encouraging.

I went to an art school in 6th grade where the arts were integrated right  into the curriculum. I was exposed to more music, theater, dance and of course visual arts during my middle and high school years.  A lot of the work was project based, requiring research, synthesis of information and creative communication, which is the mode I still operate in today.

I wanted to study marine biology in college, but I didn’t want to give up art, so I majored in both. Through the experience I learned that I was interested in science communication. I was not thinking about a career as a writer yet, but towards the end of my time in college, my art professor introduced me to the field of Medical Illustration. It was a new and exciting possibility for me and I began to focus my efforts on getting into a masters program.

After college I worked in an oceanography lab at Stony Brook University in New York studying harmful algal blooms.  I took art classes at the Art Students League of New York on the weekends to build a strong drawing portfolio.

I went to Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia and was immersed in science and visual communication. Along with taking classes in the School of Medicine,  I learned to work in both traditional and digital mediums. It was an intense and rewarding program  that required that same process of research, synthesis of information and creative communication that felt so natural to me.  During a group critique of a scapula early on (now I wish I still had the illustration) I was corrected for having line work that was too whimsical and messy.  We had critiques in the medical illustration library and I remember the professor pulling out Where the Wild Things Are and pointing at Sendak’s illustrations and saying, “Your work looks like it belongs in here. It needs to be more clean and clinical.” It was obviously not meant as a compliment at the time and I changed my style to match the standard. Which, I think, is important for students to do.  I needed to learn the rules before I could break them. I think back now and what influences I had as a child and I spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about Where the Wild Things Are, so of course I had absorbed it.

Still though, I did not consider making books as a career. For whatever reason, I believed that books were made by special people that knew they were destined to be writers.  I was fully aware of my ordinariness.

It wasn’t until I had kids of my own and bumped into a few authors that I realized authors and illustrators were real people with regular problems.  They were parents and wondered if they were doing things right. They went to the dentist and the grocery store, and they occasionally burned their oatmeal in the morning,  just like I did. This probably sounds obvious to you, dear reader, but to me it was a surprise.

I checked out a copy of Writing With Pictures by Uri Schulevitz from the library and that was a life changing book for me. Not only did it cover the picture book fundamentals, but I couldn’t believe how much I could relate to the process.  I thought about story and projects the way Schulevitz  thought about the picture book making process and it was the first time I felt like maybe this was where I should focus my free time.

So I did.  I wrote and illustrated for the joy of it. I took one night a week and would go out after the kids were asleep to a coffee shop and write and storyboard ideas. Eventually, I met some other aspiring writers and we formed a critique group, which helped with prioritizing my time. I joined SCBWI and learned from other writers and illustrators.  I had to draw a lot and find my voice outside of medical illustration.  It was a process, but I like the medium.  Picture books make sense to me.

me: As an Alaskan, I knew all about Arctic terns in theory.  I knew they were known for amazing migrations, but your book really nails that home.  It’s incredible!  What gave you the idea for this story?

Lindsay: The idea for a book came about indirectly and was a convergence of multiple ideas. A  few years ago I learned about nocturnal migration in birds, where billions of birds are moving seasonally under the cover of darkness over our heads as we sleep and honestly, that sounds so absolutely magical to me that I became obsessed with the idea.  Did you know that you can get a rough count of migrating birds by fixing your binoculars on the full moon and counting the number of birds that fly past and then inserting that number into an antique equation? Stuff like that makes my heart sing. I suggested that as an idea for a book, but was told by my editor gently that I write books about the ocean, so I put the idea on hold.

A year or so later, I was thinking about how Antarctica and the Arctic are really opposites.  The Arctic is an ocean, surrounded by land and Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean.  I started thinking about how to tell a story about opposites and then trying to come up with an animal that visits both. That’s when I started thinking about Arctic terns. It was a way to write about bird migration. 

That’s sometimes how story making works. So, I dropped night migration and polar opposites (ha!) and focused on Arctic tern migration, which is a thing of absolute beauty.

Me: Your illustrations are glorious!  What media do you use to illustrate?  Are you a traditional or a digital artist?  Or do you use a blend of both?  What did you use for this book? 

Lindsay: Thank you! I use traditional materials, mostly watercolor, but also gouache, pen and ink and color pencil. Sometimes my art director will move things around digitally, especially the back matter.  I will have a general idea of the layout and then send in a bunch of spot art for the back mattermatter, then he arranges it on the page to fit the text.  I am thankful for his skill and eye. He definitely makes the books better. That’s the thing about making a picture book,  it’s very much a group process. Both my editor and art director make the book better. I trust their advice.

Me: I understand that you have degrees in Marine Biology and Medical Illustration.  I can definitely see your passion for those subjects and talent in those areas in all of your books.  So how do you choose the subjects you examine in such wonderful depth in your nonfiction author-illustrator picture books?  What makes you focus on just one aspect for a story?

Lindsay: Brian Floca once described his process as having, “lots of rabbit trails and dead ends” and that has proved to be true for me as well.  I let myself get obsessed, but not everything works for a story…..YET. In his book The Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murikami describes having a mental bureau where each drawer stores an idea or a conversation he overheard or something he finds fascinating and as he works on a novel, he can open the drawers and access the contents. I think that’s a good way to look at research and planning.  Not everything is going to work for the next project, but the more you learn and treasure, the deeper your well is to draw from. You and I Jena, our job as writers is to stay amazed by the world as we live life; to be aware of bird songs and the smell of precipitation and the shapes of clouds and the feel of bark or the sound of a word. That way, when an idea hits, we’re ready.

Me: Oh I love that. Yes! Stay amazed by the world. Even with your rich educational background, do you still have to do a lot of research to write and illustrate your picture books?  Can you talk about your research process?  What did it look like for this book?

Lindsay: Absolutely. So. Much. Research. Honestly, I think I would be a little bit bored to write about a topic I already knew a lot about.  Part of the fun of writing a book for me is discovering new things through research. Each book I have worked on was really a response to something interesting I learned initially, something that caused me to want to dig more deeply into a subject. I studied marine biology, which gives me a general idea of how the oceans work and a general knowledge of ocean life, but each organism is unique and complex and a good book doesn’t over generalize.

My process involves learning jargon and combing through peer reviewed scientific journals for information not only about animals, but also ecosystems (so that I can illustrate the backgrounds accurately). I try to get overviews, like for Sun Bird, I used Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s online database to get an overview of the information available for Arctic terns.  I also watched interviews and talks by researchers in the field of bird migration, read books including World on the Wing and Living on the Wind, both by Scott Weidensaul and Bird Flight by George Ruppell. Finally, near the end a content expert looked over the manuscript.

The only thing is, I can get stuck in the research phase, because there is always more to learn about something.  So, at some point I need to stop actively gathering information and start creating.

It’s my jam: research, synthesis and figure out a way to creatively communicate it.

Me: This is now your third picture book as author-illustrator.  Are there still surprises in the creation of them?  What surprised you in the creation of this book?

Lindsay: Each book is different. For my previous two picture books,  the text and images kind of arrived together, like a photograph developing in a dark room, it all slowly comes into focus in concert. I had a good vision of some of the spreads that would be in the books from the start, but I was writing faster than I was planning them visually. With Sun Bird however, I knew what I wanted to illustrate, but was struggling with how to write it. So, I story boarded out the images first, then submitted the idea to my editor before I wrote the text. It felt backwards, but then I wrote what I saw in the images and it was (in somevways) the fastest a book has come together for me. I don’t know if I will be able to replicate that process, but I hope so. I have struggled in the past with a lot of self doubt where I hear the voices of former professors in my head critiquing my work as I create and it can be hard to avoid paralysis under those self-imposed conditions. I don’t know if it’s just that I have gained more experience and my attitude has changed or if the approach I took this time around softened the voices of some of my internal critics.  Either way, it was a surprise to work that way.

Also, watercolor as a medium always leaves room surprises.

Me: Isn’t that the truth! And congrats for being able to ignore those inner critics. Any advice for other aspiring picture book writers and/or illustrators?

Lindsay: Write and draw about what you’re interested in and do not worry about keeping up with  fads or hot topics.  If you’re interested enough, you can create an inviting story that makes other people curious too.

But remember, all advice should be taken with a grain of salt (even mine).  Whether you get a critique, or you take a class or read a social media post or a book, publishing is not one-size-fits all.  Once you know the rules, you’re allowed to break them. Going way back to the beginning of this interview, I think it’s important for students to try new things and listen to their teachers. That’s how you grow. However, once you’ve tried something out, you don’t have to stick with it. Find your voice by making lots of art and writing lots of words. There’s something only you can bring into the world because you have your own experiences and perspectives. You have to put the leg work in though.

That is great advice Lindsay.  Thank you so much for stopping by my blog.

Dear readers, this book is published next week. If you’ve been lucky enough to ready any of Lindsay’s other books, then I suspect you already know what a treat you’re in for.  But seriously, are you prepared for the magic this particular text and illustrations combined together with incredible nonfiction matter can truly bring here? Prepare yourselves! This is definitely a book you won’t want to miss!