Where does one have the perfect polar picnic?
Liam Francis Walsh an award-winning author, illustrator, and cartoonist. His cartoons and drawings have been published in The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Esquire, and The Guardian. He’s the author of two children’s picture books, Fish and Make a Wish, Henry Bear, and a graphic novel, Red Scare, which was called one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, NPR, and the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee. You can learn more about him at his website.
PENGUIN PICNIC is a picture book all about siblings Penny and Albert Penguin. They agree to go on a picnic together, but they can’t agree on the perfect location. As you can imagine, the argument builds, there’s a crisis, and of course, a resolution that will make you “Aww!”
Welcome Liam.
Me: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative journey? When did you start writing and/or creating art? How did that lead to where you are now as the author-illustrator of this book?
Liam: I always drew and I always made up stories. I grew up in northern Wisconsin on a dairy farm with no TV. We worked hard and made most of what we needed. I loved, loved, loved books and comics, but people who made them were a strange, fascinating other species that lived in distant cities, so while I won awards at school for my stories and art (does anybody remember the Young Authors Conference?), I never took the idea of being an author seriously. I even let my love of art and stories lapse for a few years after school when I decided to stop reading adventure stories about going to sea and actually do it. After a few years of living and working on a variety of boats, I was living in the Virgin Islands, teaching windsurfing, when I started picking up copies of The New Yorker that vacationers left behind. I really fell hard for the magazine. Windsurfing and partying were pretty much my whole life at that point and clearly something was missing. I gravitated toward the cartoons as something I could maybe do, and over the following five years I sent in hundreds and hundreds of samples. Finally, shortly after I actually moved to New York, I got the news that I’d sold one. That was a big day for me. From there I devoted every bit of my free time to becoming a cartoonist and had more and more of my cartoons published. When one of my cartoons was included in a show at the Society of Illustrators I was contacted by several literary agents, including Dan Lazar, who’s represented me since I got into the biz. He inquired if I was interested in making books. Was I ever! I quit my day job (Dan begged me, “Please don’t quit your day job!” and got his first taste of how good I am at following directions) and amazingly, in just a couple of months, he managed to sell my first book. Since then I’ve been making a rather precarious living writing, illustrating, and cartooning full-time. Penguin Picnic is my third picture book and I’ve also made one graphic novel for middle grade readers.
Me: Can you talk about your illustration process a little bit? Are you mainly a traditional artist, a digital artist, or a combination of both these days?
Liam: I like to draw on paper and I’ve never been tempted to draw digitally, but for various reasons (efficiency being foremost) I’d begun to do almost all my coloring in Photoshop. I mostly write longhand as well and I’ve been what you might call analog-curious or adjacent for a while, but when suddenly everyone started talking about generative AI I realized I wanted to go the opposite direction and decided to dust off my watercolors. I’d also become a big fan of Sven Nordqvist’s artwork and I admired how he didn’t correct small errors — you could tell a funny, interesting human had done them. It seemed to me that a lot of digital art in children’s books had become very “slick”, and I found his warts-and-all approach refreshing and inspiring. I tried to spend as little time on my computer as possible for Penguin Picnic. I draw with a sable brush and ink, or a Pigma Micron .08 pen. I use Talens watercolor and gouache and Blick Studio colored pencils.
Me: I love that you included a note about not using AI in the copyright info. I laughed when I read it. Why include that there?
Liam: Oh, you are a careful reader! Good for you! I just felt the idea that anyone would need a robot to get between them and the messy, wonderful, inefficient, joyful act of making art to be so wrong-headed. Create a tool that will do my taxes for me, by all means, but I like getting paint on my fingers! (“Oh, but AI can put paint on your fingers, too!” Um, you guys aren’t getting me, are you…)
Me: Ha! I agree! Penny and Albert are both such great characters. What gave you the idea for this book?
Liam: That’s often not an easy question to answer, but in this case I can specifically pinpoint it: I made a card for my wife that showed two penguins having a snowy picnic. I just loved the image of a red-checked picnic blanket in a snowy, white and blue landscape. The story itself went through many iterations. At one point, after seeing my graphic novel, my brilliant agent, Dan, suggested I try telling the story in panels, like a comic. That’s when it really came to life. I love comics and my six-year-old daughter loves comics, but I was still stuck on the idea of a picture book as something with an illustration on one page with text facing it. Comics are so great for kids. I suspect I will mostly tell stories in panels, going forward. I had tremendous help from Courtney Code and Melissa Greenberg in refining Penny’s and Albert’s personalities and digging deep into their relationship. You’d be amazed how much the question of how to be fully present in a relationship while still keeping your independence resonated with all of us, and how much we discussed it.
Me: How long did you sit with this story before you started writing or illustrating it. Once you started the work, did you have to revise it quite a bit? Or was it fully formed after the preliminary work?
Liam: My very first book was done in 1.5-2 drafts. That was misleading — since then I never seem to do fewer than ten drafts. The problem, of course, is that everything is a rush in publishing, but more drafts almost invariably equal a better book. This one took quite a bit of revising. The wonderful thing about revising, though, is that you’re spending time with the characters and the ideas, and from that new ideas are born — stuff you never would have gotten to without the revising. To circle back to the question above, this is why I think it’s a mistake to ask ChatGPT to spit out a new draft for you.
Me: What is one thing that surprised you in writing and/or illustrating this story? Is there anything still left to surprise you at this stage in your career?
Liam: I think it never stops being surprising and magical when you get to the draft where the pieces really come together. Lately I’ve been thinking of each draft as sort of like a puzzle and when you’ve got a bunch of them then it’s a bit like trying to make a single, best puzzle while discarding all the rest of the pieces. It’s easy to get discouraged and I have to remind myself this is part of the process — there’s no efficient way to tell a new story, you have to muddle your way along and go down dead ends, but if you keep at it you start to see it coming together, and then — like in that old Sid Harris cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard — a miracle happens. You have a story. You’re a god and you’ve created life. You’ve stolen fire from the gods. The feeling of ecstasy you get then makes it all worthwhile.
Me: I love that! Any advice for other aspiring picture book writers and/or illustrators?
Liam: I have a framed saying on the bookshelf facing my desk. I made it when I first started sending cartoons to The New Yorker, which was truly the longest of long shots, and it’s still the only piece of advice that’s applicable to everything I do, everywhere I go, all the time. It says, “Don’t Ever Give Up.”
Perhaps a more meat-and-potatoes piece of advice is to reduce the tech in your process. Write longhand, draw with a pencil, get paint on your fingers. I think it really helps make you more creative, and it’s fun. It’s such a cliche that life is short, but life is actually really, really short, so enjoy the process. Maybe that’s the advice: enjoy the process.
Also, some book recommendations: My favorite books lately are the Findus and Pettson series by Sven Nordqvist, This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews, and Origin Story by David Christian. Thank you!
Thank YOU for stopping by my blog today Liam.
Dear readers, this book published in September. If you haven’t read it yet, you should track down a copy. It’s a wonderful take on relationships from a creative human being. Trust me when I say, you won’t want to miss it!