Drawn

To say that Bob Staake is just an illustrator is like saying The Beatles were just a bunch of musicians; the title doesn’t do the artist justice. With projects that have ranged from books, to toys, to countless magazine covers—even an upcoming kitchenware line—Bob has left his thumbprint on our everyday lives. Recently, Bob was kind enough to field a few questions about his career, his work, studio life, and his new book, “This is Not a Pumpkin”.

How did you start out in illustration?

I can hardly remember anymore because I started working professional at the age of 17 — that was a long time ago. I think the better question is “when did you drift away from being known as a cartoonist and more as an illustrator?” I guess I started getting pretty bored by my “cartoonish” approach ten years ago, and I became increasingly interested in how illustration and design worked together to make a visual statement. What I try to do today is combine a playful aesthetic with a (hopefully sophisticated) design presentation.

Can you talk about how you first begin to work after being given a new job? What is your process for visualizing ideas?

That’s really hard to answer because I’m fortunate in that every project that comes my way has its own set of challenges — and requires different aesthetic solutions. When I’m designing a line of greeting cards, the issues are different than if I am designing an animated TV show. When I’m illustrating a book, there are unique challenges that aren’t the same if I’m illustrating a magazine cover. The process always starts by determining what the specific needs of the project are. I’ve always been strong with my conceptualizing skills, so on any different project I could have 10, 15, 20 different ideas. Of those, I may only show the client 5, but they will be the ones that I feel strongest about. The worse thing you can do as an illustrator is to submit ideas you’re not completely committed to because they might get selected — and there’s nothing more boring than going to final on an idea that you don’t feel works well visually or conceptually.

When talking to you before, you mentioned that you do most of your illustrations these days in Photoshop 3, all on a single layer. How did you come to working this particular way?

Yeah, I know – crazy, huh? What’s even crazier is that I’ve somehow figured out how to keep Photoshop 3.) running in classic mode on a G5. In the “old days” of 1995, I made the determination to start working digitally. I was very successful with my “cartoonish” style. I talked with an art director friend and asked him if there was some program that would allow me to scan my line art and then color it digitally. He said “well, you can do that in Photoshop”. I think is was my initial naiveté regarding digital world that in many ways helped me develop a style that sort of happened organically and naturally. Today I “draw” I pull, click and fill shapes and forms in Photoshop not by dragging around a pencil, but a mouse. Sometimes it’s a little like trying to draw with a bar of soap, but it feels absolutely normal to me. People are kinda stunned I work this way and suggest that I work in Illustrator or use a Wacom tablet. That’ll happen sometime, but for the time being I’m just too busy to switch to something new. The great thing about Photoshop is that it is stunningly flexible. I just finished a New Yorker cover and while I originally thought I’d create this character with ellipses and circular forms, I found it just didn’t have the visual nuance I thought the piece required. I would up cutting out the character from a piece of black construction paper, scanned it, and then added color and details. It all feels like play to me — anything BUT work — and I am still constantly astounded that people pay me to do this stuff.

I’ve read that you don’t always do a rough sketch before starting on an illustration, opting rather to work on the final piece. I would think that working this way would bring a special spontaneity to the finished piece that a pre-planned piece wouldn’t have. Do you find this to be the case? What other things have you discovered about working this way?

Yeah, it’s a very liberating approach. I think it just comes with trusting myself and my decisions as an illustrator and designer. I see the image in my head, so sketching it out first is sorta superfluous. I have done complete children’s books — 32 pages each — where no single sketch was created. For those unenlightened people who wonder if digital art has any “organic” component, it’s hard to imagine a more organic process than looking at that blank screen and just organically attacking it with no sketch to work off of as a foundation — just your mental impressions.

What are your thoughts on self promotion? How important do you think it is?

Other illustrators have always commented that they are “amazed” at how well I self-promote, but I honestly don’t promote that much at all because I’m always too busy. For me at this stage in my career, I think the key is just trying to do good work, letting clients react to it, and other fun projects come my way. I’m just very fortunate that people seem to respond so enthusiastically to what I do.

Can you tell us about your Pop Bead People project for Scholastic?

It was just one of many book projects. The most notable thing was that I worked with a pretty “unique” art director on the project. She’d literally call me three times a day and I had finally had it. We had a heated phone chat that evolved into her firing me and me quitting at the same time. The thing was, everyone at Klutz/Scholastic loved what I had done with the book, and they were infuriated when they learned that the art director had caused me to quit the project. They called and pleaded for me to come back, assigned a wonderful new designer to the project, and fired the original art director. It was such a completely bizarre series of events. I’m lucky because on 99.9% of the project I work on, savvy art directors know to leave me alone and they’ll get the best work out of me. The new art director sat back and let me do the book and they were just delighted with the end result.

Were there any challenges that arose from designing three-dimensional characters two-dimensionally?

I’ve always been interested in 3-dimensional design, so I kind of think in both 2D and 3D levels anyway. When I design a 3D character or element, I am always making decisions in the 2D sketching stage with an understanding of engineering requirements. For example, I’ll accept and work with a requirement that says “to make this leg, you’ll need to have rounded corners” even though I may want to have a sharp right angle. Scale, texture, manufacturing logistics and tactile considerations — these are ALL things that I determine before approach a 3D design. Right now I am designing an entire line of kitchenware — teapots, coffee cups, french presses, etc — in addition to creating the packaging for the products. I have no training in industrial design, but there is really little difference between designing in the 2D and 3D worlds. For me, it’s really an issue of “translation” — finding a way that the flattened drawing will “work” when concerted into something tangible that literally can hold water. When I receive a new prototype from Asia, I hold it in my hands and say “wow! they really got this RIGHT!”

Your answer to the previous question brings up an interesting point. In your experience, how do you deal with difficult clients?

Honestly, it is just so rare that I ever have a bad experience with a client. I think I’ve been doing this long enough and my work is respected that art directors and editors really give me amazing freedom to do what I do, and they know that the more freedom they give me, the better the work will be. I’m lucky enough to work with a very diverse group of clients, but the one common denominator is that they all give me pretty uncommon room to experiment, try different things and solve visual problems in unique ways. That’s the working relationship you need if you want to grow as an artist.

Care to tell us about your newest book, “This is Not a Pumpkin”?

It’s an odd book. It’s a homage to Magritte but an effort by me to sorta redefine what a children’s picture book is, or can be. It’s just one illustration of a pumpkin — page after page. I sat down one afternoon and said “I wanna do a book based on a pumpkin”, and a couple days later, I had finished the entire thing. My agent thought it was pretty out there and suggested some tweaks. I said I wanted the book submitted just the way I wrote it and I think she reluctantly took it out there — and Simon + Schuster bought it immediately. The one thing I try to do with each picture book is to try something a little different. If you lined them all up, you’d see that my aesthetic and point of view is unique from book to book because each story requires a unique visual presentation that supports the individual storyline. I cannot imagine illustrating ‘The Orb Of Chatham’ with the same aesthetic that I used for ‘Struwwelpeter’, or illustrating ‘The Red Lemon’ in the same way that I illustrated ‘The Donut Chef’. In many ways, it’s my story that dictates where I need to take things visually — though my process of creating a children’s book is one of always going back and forth between the writing and the art by placing the same level of importance on each component.

So what do you do when you find that one component of a book, whether it be the story of the illustrations, isn’t working out?

That rarely happens, because if I’m working on an idea for a children’s book and have taken it to the point of fully fleshing out the story, I’m really seeing the images and design along the way. Once I’m happy with the story and it’s been edited, wordsmithed and refined, I’m always excited to start seeing some of those mental images come to life. I almost ALWAYS start with a cover illustration because it truly sets the tone for what’s going to follow inside. ‘The Red Lemon’ is a unique book for me in that it’s one I essentially did in a vacuum. I wrote the story and completed all the illustrations without showing anyone. When I was finished, I had no idea if it was a good book but sensed it might be. Thankfully, all that work was validated when I took to the book to my editor at Random House and she immediately bought it. You also have to understand that I work very fast, so if something isn’t working on a book, I can fix it or go in another direction easily and barely notice what happened. A book like ‘The Red Lemon’ took me two weeks to complete, though I just finished a picture book for HarperCollins that was finished in 5 days. I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever completed a book.

Being both a freelance illustrator and the author/illustrator of your own books, how are you able to manage the challenges and duties of each task individually and yet, at the same time, manage them both together?

Well, you know, I like to write as much as I like to illustrate — and at the end of the day, illustration really IS writing, albeit it in pictures. I’m actually working on a book right now called ‘The Word And The Art’. They each have a love/hate relationship with one another and deep inside envy the abilities of each other, but by the end of the book we learn that they truly function as a team and validate one another. It’s been an interesting book to work through. All I can say is when I’m writing, I’m completely cognizant of the images for those words, and when I’m illustrating, I’m always faithful to the tone of the text. It’s important that neither component — the art or the words — overpower the other, so you have to be careful that you don’t SEE everything in the art because it would make the text superfluous, and it’s likewise important that you don’t READ the entire story through the text because it would make the art completely redundant. A textual storybook is something that a writer does when he can’t draw, so I try and bring both of my strengths into the literary process to try and create a synergy between the images and words. That’s always the plan, at least.

Where do you find inspiration? What types of things do you find inspiring?

Oh, man. The list is endless. Mid-20th Century European advertising posters, 1950s animation, architecture, photography, reading, children’s books, film, furniture design, typography, cooking, travel, daydreaming, humor, nature, cities, it just goes on an on. I tend to be one of those people who others comment has a “different” view of things — and notices stuff that others don’t even perceive. I’ll be walking along with a friend and will suddenly be captivated by the naive design of a manhole cover and will stand there analyzing the beauty of it. I’ll walk along the beach and find one rock among millions that looks like the Guggenheim Museum. I’ll be in a restaurant scanning the menu and when the waitress comes by, I’m not
ready to order because I’ve been wondering if this typeface is Frutiger Light or Futura Condensed. That stuff never overtly is
apparent in my work, but trust me — it’s always there in subtle and impossible to detect ways.

Finally, what are you listening to in the studio these days?

I can go for days without having anything playing because I always get in a zone when I work, but when I’m listening … X, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Gnarls Barkley, Steely Dan, Aimee Mann, Raymond Scott, David Byrne, Fiona Apple, Imogen Heap, Miles Davis and a whole lot of other stuff. I’ll also go through periods where I’ll listen to streaming radio, usually 70s pop stations. It’s cheesy as Hell, but it really transports me back to my youth, and when you work in children’s literature, it’s essential to do whatever you can to transport your mind back into the sensibility you had as a child. It keeps the work honest, real and hopefully gives it a solid foundation built on innocence and a certain naivety.

Thanks for the interview, Bob! To see more of Bob’s work visit his website or blog, or, order his books through Amazon or your local bookstore.