Doing things on your own for the first time can be scary.
Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator and painter based in Philadelphia. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she has gone on to amass a range of clients in editorial, publishing, games, and animation. Her work delights in the eccentricities and wonders of the natural world, indulges in the fantastical, mixes narrative and portraiture, and highlights the bridge between the cute and the horrific. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram or BlueSky.
MUNGO ON HIS OWN is a picture book about a young fox who wants to leave the den for another helping of delicious red berries before bed time. Mom fox encourages him to go find them and he trepidatiously sets forth. Yet the forest is dark and deep and full of scary things. This cute little fox trembles his way into independence and I guarantee that every young reader will love this story written by the brilliant Matthew Burgess. In addition to the deceptively simple plot, the illustrations do the most amazing things. Every little emotion carries a giant impact in every single spread. This is divine art work that you won’t want to miss.
Welcome Julie!
Me: Can you share about your creative journey? When did you start creating art professionally? How did that bring you to being the illustrator of this book
Julie: Art has always been part of my life, since I could hold a crayon, but I wanted to be a visual development artist at first. I chose my alma mater, RISD, not just because it was a good art school but also because one of the guys who made Avatar the Last Airbender went there (which in hindsight is a little silly). While pursuing a BFA in illustration, I loved creating odd little worlds full of different creatures and characters, which applied well to two fields I hadn’t thought of: Editorial and Picture Books.
My first professional projects melded those fields well as I got to make the variant cover work for BOOM! Comics’/ Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time series and do small editorial commissions on the side during my junior year of college. For my first few years out of school, I worked mainly as an editorial illustrator until an art director at Workman had seen my portfolio and thought I’d be a great illustrator for a nonfiction book, The Screaming Hairy Armadillo and 76 Other Animals with Weird, Wild Names by Matthew and Steve Murrie. Working on that book opened my eyes to the world of publishing and I wanted more.
I queried literary agents for a few months and then signed with Rebecca Sherman at Writer’s House. When I signed with Rebecca, the floodgates opened and I was able to start my picture book illustration career in earnest. The manuscript for Mungo came early on in my career, around late 2022, but HarperCollins wanted to push the publication back to Jan 2026 as Matthew had many different books coming out and didn’t want overlap. I had just been rejected from another picture book, so I was itching for a chance to prove myself.
Me: You have illustrated multiple picture books, book covers, comics, and zines. Was it intimidating to illustrate a book by a well-known author (i.e., Matthew Burgess) at this point in your career? What made you want to be a part of this project?
Julie: Mungo was one of my first picture book projects I took on and the pressure was intense. As I mentioned before, I was rejected from another picture book by another prominent author I will not name, and was deflated. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I’m only an editorial illustrator. So, when Mabel Hsu, who worked at HarperCollins at the time, came to me with a manuscript about a little fox written by THE Matthew Burgess, it felt like the universe giving me another chance. And it was a chance I couldn’t pass up. Mabel wanted a sample first, like the other rejected project so I put my heart and soul into the sample. And thankfully, that heart and soul was evocative enough to get me on team Mungo.
Me: I love the way you illustrated this book (there’s so much to love here!). Can you tell us a little bit about your illustrations for the book? Did you work with traditional media or digital or both?
Julie: Thank you so much! This art process started with the initial samples I sent to Mabel before we signed the contract. Looking back, I’m grateful I didn’t get the other book, as it provided a great baseline of what not to do with Mungo. I had treated the previous sample like an editorial article, showing everything on the page instead of trusting the sequential narrative and rushing the art making. With Mungo, I wanted to take things slower, wanted to look deeply into the manuscript and work with media that could balance the deadline with sincere mark making. So, I decided to work with pencils and charcoal for the linework and shading. And after the piece was 70% done, I colored the pieces digitally in iPad procreate. This process worked well and allowed me to breathe life into the forest Mungo was about to traverse alone, allowed me to emphasize the cold wind that swirled around the darkening sky, and allowed me to show Mungo’s hesitance at the daunting task at hand. It was almost as if Matthew’s manuscript was whispering its secrets to me and I was using the pencil/ charcoal to uncover the path that the secrets lead to. Luckily, Mabel liked this approach too and so I used this art process for the whole book.
I also made sure to look at other works of art for inspiration as well, specifically the work of John Bauer, Charles Santoso, The Fan Brothers, and Gustaf Tenggren. I just loved how all of these illustrators’ used shadows and forms to accentuate the drama in their pieces. You can’t make good work without being humbled by others haha.
Me: Ha! That’s so true. You really capture Mungo’s emotions in your images: his trepidation (shivering depicted in your line work!), his fear (imagination preying on him in the form of the bushes!), and remembering wonder with his mom (such a great perspective!). I’ve never seen anyone else make those choices. They’re so uniquely a part of your style. What gave you the ideas for some of those illustration choices? Did you focus on the character’s emotions and try to think of the best way to portray them?
Julie: Thank you and I’m so grateful you’re so observant of little Mungo’s features. I have this parent-like pride in him, even though he already has a mom. When I was crafting his character, I knew he had to be cute. There was something so intrinsic to a doe eyed little fox traversing the forest for the first time at night, where the shadows on the trees curl into gnarly claws and the sounds of predators create images of utter terror. I wanted Mungo to be so adorable that the kids and adults alike would want to go into the page and yoink him out, only to be so charmed by his courage that they would be dancing with him under the berry tree when he finds it. I also wanted to avoid making him so cute that he would be too saccharine, so I did tons of fox studies beforehand. I like to understand how to draw something on a basic level before simplifying the form. The first few sketches of Mungo were a little more realistic. He had a longer torso and was a little more gangly. The movements were good but sacrificed that cute factor, so I made his head a little bigger than the rest of his body and made his eyes larger. And by the time I was working on final art, I had adopted a cat (a cute chubby tuxedo named Mo the Moonpie) whose personality wormed its way into Mungo’s mannerisms. Mo has a way of charming everyone he meets, and I think Mungo got that from him.
Me: Do you have a favorite spread that you illustrated for this book? If yes, which one?
Julie: This book has a few of my favorite spreads I’ve made in my career as a picture book illustrator thus far but spread 5-6 really stands out to me. The scene depicts Mungo cowering from a possible predator rustling in the bushes. He wonders if it is a wolf, a boar or a bear. His imagination gets the best of him, and he visualizes the noises as the bushes coming to life, the bushes morphing into gruesome faces ready to pounce. I loved the whole process of this page from start to finish. The pencil and charcoal added a surreal, organic feel to the shadows around the bushes and the sharp orange of Mungo contrasted nicely with the pink and blue foliage of the forest. I was a little worried the page would be too scary for kids, as some reviews have already pointed out, but I felt it was necessary for the story. You cannot see how daunting Mungo’s journey is until you hit that page. You cannot feel his fear until those bushes appear. And you cannot feel his triumph at the berry bush without remembering the demons he had to pass.
Me: That is one of my favorite images too. What is one thing that surprised you in illustrating this story?
Julie: I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed working with charcoal. Charcoal was the bane of my existence in art school as we used it so much in all the drawing classes. I was sneezing charcoal and going to bed with it in my hair. But when I went about drawing Mungo’s world, I couldn’t think of any other medium that could embody the soft shadows of the forest or the hard branches of the trees better than charcoal. Pencil also works but it takes ages to get onto a page and charcoal only needs a little smear. Plus, when I needed snow, white charcoal came in clutch. Before Mungo, I was a charcoal hater, and now it’s one of my go-to mediums for black and white compositions.
Me: Any advice for other new picture book illustrators?
Julie: Sometimes failure teaches you more than success. I wouldn’t have been able to bring my best to Mungo without the rejection of that previous manuscript. So, if you’re feeling the sting of rejection, acknowledge the pain and do something productive with your restless energy. I’m not saying mindlessly grind or berate yourself (I hate self help culture) but to look at your work honestly and figure out how to grow. Growth can take many forms as well. Growth for me included resting and taking more time for each picture book spread. I was so used to working fast for my editorial assignments that when I applied that to my picture book work, it felt too expositive. If I didn’t face that rejection and see how I inexperienced I was as a picture book illustrator, I wouldn’t have slowed down and assessed how I can improve.
That is great advice Julie. Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today.
Dear readers, this book publishes next week. You’ll want to keep an eye out for it. It’s a story that stretches young reader’s imaginations and encourages them to take risks in small steps through both text and illustrations. Trust me when I say you won’t want to miss it.