Real Talk: A Poetry Comic

Words by Shoshana Flax and pictures by Grant Snider

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This comic appears in the latest issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Huge thank you to author Shoshana Flax—your words were a joy to illustrate! And thanks to our mutual friend and my trusted editor Ariel Richardson, who connected Shoshana and me for the project.

It’s always a challenge to take someone else’s fully-formed work (in this case, a poem) and try to illuminate it with pictures to create an illustrated narrative.

My experiences illustrating children’s books have each been unique. I’ve drawn comics and spot illustrations for Quiet Power by

Susan Cain

. I’ve cut and pasted ocean collages for Blue Floats Away by

Travis Jonker

. And I’ve worn down an entire spectrum of colored pencils on There Is a Rainbow by Theresa Trinder.

Illustrating the words of others lets me get out of my narrow headspace to try new techniques and inhabit new characters.

For “Real Talk” I inked lines on tracing paper, touched them up in Photoshop, printed them onto Arches watercolor paper, and colored the pages with washes of Dr. Ph Martin’s Bombay India Ink. A reminder: I need to get out of my digital routine and try messy, unpredictable art supplies more often.

That’s all for now. I’m off to the library. I’ll leave with a new stack of books. I’ll dodge the owl-like librarians—until I eventually befriend them. And, if all goes well, I’ll get lost in my imagination.