KB: What is your favorite picture book and why?

TM: Saving Sweetness by Diane Stanley, illustrated by G. Brian Karas. It’s about a daffy sheriff who heads out to the desert to retrieve Sweetness, an orphan who has run away from the orphanage and its caretaker, mean ol’ Mrs. Sump. Time after time the sheriff gets into a pickle, and it’s Sweetness who keeps saving him but he hasn’t got a clue to her cleverness. The humorous cowboy dialect puts it over the top, as well as the art of G. Brian Karas, one of my favorite illustrators. It’s just the right marriage of words and art.

KB: How do you choose the look of characters or scenes in the story?

TM: I let the characters speak to me. Sometimes there is a bit of research, but mostly it involves being very quiet at the beginning and really listening to the words of the author. There is a passage in Stephen King’s book “On Writing” where he writes, “Good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky...your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” It’s much the same way with illustrating. I’ll sketch and sketch, tossing some things, keeping others, until I recognize a character or a scene has suddenly come together. Then I’ll play “cinematographer,” figuring out which scenes lend themselves to close-ups, group scenes, birds-eye view, or exaggeration. That is the nuts and bolts of designing illustration. Then comes the fun part....painting! And in that process, I keep watch on the empty sky.