Jessica Love grew up in
California, with two artist parents. She studied printmaking and drawing at UC
Santa Cruz, then went to study acting at The Juilliard School in NYC.
Jessica currently resides in
Brooklyn, New York, toggling back and forth between her work as an actor and
her work as an artist.
VS: Jessica, I want to thank you for taking the time to be interviewed on my blog today. How long
have you been illustrating?
Love: I've
been doing it since I was a kid. The way that I have drawn has always been
story-based. That was what drew me in, stories about people, the way you could
tell a story through images. So when I was little I would narrate the story out
loud as a drew, and I suppose that's still what I do.
VS: Is your
family supportive of your work?
Love: Very. My
parents are both artists (my mom is a basket weaver and my dad is a potter),
and so I grew up believing it was a totally normal job to have.
VS: Was Night Buddies your first publication?
Love: This is
my first full length children's book to have published. When I was at Juilliard
I would do cartoons for the Juilliard Journal, but this is really the first
thing I've had published.
VS: Can you
share with us a little about your favorite scenes in the second Night Buddies
book?
Love: I loved
the character of Fast Fanny, and when I read the scene where she first appears,
in the Blimp Emporium, I thought that was fantastic. I love that she's this
tough talking broad, sort of a Girl Friday type, and so it was really easy to
imagine what she ought to look like just from the way she talks.
VS: What did
you find to be the most challenging part of illustrating the Night Buddies
series?
Love: Collaborating
with a writer can be challenging, but Sands has very specific ideas of how he
wants things to look. Sometimes the way we imagined a scene was totally
different, and it was hard at times to throw out something I was quite fond of
to try to get closer to what he wanted. But that is part of the process.
VS: Do you
have any other works in progress? Can you share a little about them?
Love: I am
currently working on a children's book that I'm both writing and illustrating.
I hope to have it completed by Summer. It's about a six year old Dominican kid
who lives with his Grandma in Queen. I don't want to give too much away, but
the book is about celebrating uniqueness, even when at first, that uniqueness
comes in a challenging form.
VS: What do
you think are the basic ingredients of a good book?
Love: I think
the great children's books all have this curious combination of feeling
extremely familiar; tapping into some deep and recognizable experience; and
also creating the sense of strangeness and wonder that is intrinsic to all
childhood experiences. That is what made Maurice Sendak so great. He never lost
that sense of terrible wonder, and that's why his books were never saccharine,
or simple. Because that's not actually the way children experience the world.
That's the what adults project onto kids. But I remember childhood being much
more complex than that. I believe children have the same range of emotions that
adults do, but because they don't have the range of experience that allows for
easy filing, those feelings strike them more vividly.
VS: What is
required for a character to be believable?
Love: It has
to be three dimensional. The books that stick with us have characters that are
not just one thing; they have layers. Kids are absolute geniuses for detecting
phoniness and pandering, and they get bored with it immediately. For a
character to be engaging, they must be true.
VS: Where
can the readers of The Writing Mama find out more about you and the Night
Buddies series?
Love: I have a
website, JessicaLove.Org, where I post about various projects I'm working on.
I'd love to see you there.
You can find out more about Sands Hetherington, Jessica Love
and the Night Buddies series World of Ink Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/bysdkbv
Follow the Night Buddies at
Fan Website: www.nightbuddiesadventures.com
Facebook Fan Page: www.facebook.com/nightbuddies
Twitter: @Night_Buddies
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/nightbuddies2/
GoodReads Author
Sands Hetherington
Publisher Website: www.dunebuggypress.com
To learn more about the World of Ink Tours visit http://worldofinknetwork.com