 Featuring author & illustrator
Erin Hourigan Email interview by John Repplinger February 12th, 2024 Erin Hourigan is an award-winning author and illustrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She grew up in Southern California, playing in the waves and dreaming up stories everywhere she went. She studied illustration at Cal State Fullerton before moving to Oregon, where she has learned to trade the waves for pine trees and rivers. She loves to travel and whether she is out on a hike, or people watching in a coffee shop, you will almost always find her with a sketchpad and pencil in hand. Erin’s picture books range from families finding joy in some of her favorite landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, to a personal story about a daughter learning about her father’s depression. Thank you Erin for taking the time to do this interview. It is always fun to start out with an icebreaker question, so your first question... If you had to swap your legs with any animal, which animal would you choose and why? I really want to be a seagull so I guess I’d trade my legs for wings. The way they float around the rocks at sunset looks like they are doing it for no purpose other than having fun and it looks like a blast. Thank you! You are an author and illustrator of four children’s books: When Winter Comes, When Summer Comes, When Fall Comes, and In the Blue. In the Blue was your debut as an author–congratulations on this major accomplishment by the way. Can you tell us about how you got involved with illustrating and writing children’s books? I always wanted to be an artist of some kind but didn’t know exactly what I would do for a career. When it was time to choose a college, I lucked out that my sister was going somewhere with a strong illustration/animation department so I went there. A couple of my professors were passionate about picture books and had started a masters program focused on that. One of them introduced me to the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and I started going to events. I learned a ton about the industry, had some really valuable critiques at conferences, and met my critique group and other Portland author/illustrators through the SCBWI. I had an online portfolio and would submit where I could. One or all of those things eventually led to me working a few freelance jobs here and there, and getting my first agent (who I parted ways with after over a year of not getting any work-turns out she was a fraud, eek). I kept submitting and going to conferences until I got an email from Little Bigfoot asking if I would like to illustrate a book about a family exploring nature in the winter. That couldn’t have appealed any more to me! That book did well enough that they decided to do a series. Meanwhile, I met my second/current agent while attending an SCBWI retreat, we hit it off and she loved and believed in a story I had written about depression. Several months later, we had sold In the Blue. :) I feel like that doesn’t fully explain the years long gaps of not working, rejections, and crushing self doubt, so know that all that is in there… a lot! From your website, Erinhourigan.com, you say that you studied illustration at Cal State in college. Were there any specific classes that helped hone your artistic style and skills? I think more than anything, my two professors that became my mentors (Cliff Cramp and Christian Hill) had a huge impact on me. Class wise, Sequential Art and Narrative Illustration were huge. I learned about composition, adding story telling details, page turns, avoiding the gutter, character and background design, and even writing concepts like the Hero’ Journey and plot structure. Style wise, it took me years after school to figure out what my style was. Also, lots of critiques at conferences telling me over and over that my sketches in my book dummies were way more compelling than the digital art I had in my portfolio. Finally, I remembered I love drawing with pencils so I should use them! I still try new ideas and materials out to see if they work. It took a lot of that to figure out how I wanted to make the art for In the Blue. You are also a fifth grade teacher. How has working as a teacher influenced your illustrations and stories? Do you have examples of how children provide inspiration in your stories? It’s my first year teaching fifth grade. [My students] all have told me I need to write a story about fifth graders (specifically them) now, but I don’t know what that would be yet. I did my student teaching with second graders and a couple of them have come to mind when I’m writing. My nieces and nephews spark lots of ideas, and they provide great references for my art (how kids move and sit, what they choose to wear, their proportions, etc.). But ultimately, I think I do my best writing when it speaks to and about little me. So those kids from my 2nd grade class who popped up in stories I was writing were going through something and feeling something that I could still remember very freshly feeling or I had been through. Otherwise, I’m too tempted to focus on all the adorable, weird, or silly things kids say/do and that’s not really that appealing to them as readers. On your website, you claim to “almost always have a sketchpad and pencil in hand.” What kinds of things do you sketch? What is the illustration process like for you? And what other mediums do you use? Going back to my college professors, we were required to fill a sketchbook in a couple of classes each semester. I was AWFUL at that! But it made me have to start drawing random stuff from life just to try to get those pages filled, and wouldn’t you know it, it worked. So, when I’m sketching now, I draw what’s around me. I take a sketchbook on hikes, when I travel, when I get coffee... and I draw people, the environment, plants, animals, anything really. I think that ends up helping a lot with my illustration process. I don’t do a ton of character sketching or lots of different thumbnails. I probably should! But I think, especially when I am illustrating things I have already spent a lot of time sketching at random, I have a reference for it already and can jump right in. Like a lot of artists, I also like my sketches more than my final art when it comes to the gesture or pose of a character, so I try to keep my sketch to final drawing as close to each other as possible. That might mean I scan my sketch, blow it up in photoshop and print it out to trace onto my paper, or a lot of times I do a super messy thumbnail and then do a final sketch on the paper directly so hopefully it keeps the looseness. I use watercolor, color pencil, gouache, and graphite in my illustrations (same things I use when I sketch, but I sketch in pen a lot too). I keep trying to like digital mediums. I have friends that make gorgeous things in ProCreate but I can’t seem to like anything I do with that. Your beautiful illustrations are filled with small details. When Winter Comes, for example, there is a two-page spread with a cougar stalking after a herd of deer, the deer are prancing away, there is a fox in mid-leap into the snow, mice are asleep in their burrow, there is a spray of snow as a rabbit dashes madly to its hole, and all of this takes place in a scene that is snowing (white on white is challenging). How do you decide on the small details? I feel like I keep referencing college, but one of my professors (Cliff) noticed the projects I turned in all used a very narrow level of contrast. And it’s something I keep doing. I have to really push myself to add things that are high contrast (value or intensity), so I think working on snowy scenes pairs well with that tendency in me to want to use a narrow subtle value and color range. With the season books like, When Winter Comes, we had talked about needing to make sure we showed a wide variety of wildlife so the reader can see how there are so many animals that are active in every season even when we can’t see them. So that, combined with thinking about what would have made me get super excited to point out to the grown up reading to me when I was little, or what could a parent/teacher/caretaker ask a child about to see if they could find it so they can spend time with the images on each spread, led me to want to add lots of detail. Basically, what would make a kid go “Oooh!” (Hopefully) There appear to be several Pacific Northwest references in your work. Mount Hood seems to make a few cameos, with more or less snow depending on the time of year. A Portland-like background with children walking under a bridge. Are those intentional Northwest references or are they coincidentally similar? Those are 100% Portland and Pacific Northwest references. The kids walking under a bridge was something I drew when I got back from a run and I saw some pre-K kids all holding onto their rope with their teacher walking along the water front. I thought, a, that’s adorable, and b, how cool would it have been to be a tiny human walking under the Hawthorne bridge and hearing all those cars rumbling up above you. For “When Winter Comes,” I worked with a local publisher and the focus was on including scenes of the Pacific Northwest, so I chose Mt Hood as my inspiration. It’s not exact, but HEAVILY implied. Glad you caught it. Rainier is my inspiration for When Summer Comes and touches of the Oregon Coast and the North Cascades are what I was thinking about for When Fall Comes. It’s really hard to not naturally start making art and stories about the area you’re living or somewhere you love. In the Blue, published by Little Brown Book, is about a girl who learns about her father’s depression. It was a 2023 Schneider Family Book Award honoree. Can you talk about how your choice of colors in this book adds value to the story? And why did you choose this particular age for the main character? Illustrating this book [In the Blue] was the biggest challenge. I had it written for a while but could not figure out how I could show the emotions and not have it feel too heavy or like an after school special, which is what would have happened if I illustrated it more literally as I did on previous books. I wrote the story in first person so I needed it to sound like how a child would talk about emotions. It’s nothing new to use colors to talk with kids about emotion, so I used that same language in my writing. I knew that would make sense to a lot of kids. I went back and forth for a while over should I use color more or the idea of waves and storms so then it became a matter of what makes the most sense visually. My editor got a very different version of the art (maybe a halfway realized version) but she still got it and with her and my art director’s encouragement, I started experimenting more. I chose a few gouache colors that felt like they expressed the different emotions I needed and then made a few pages where I mixed the colors mostly on the paper. Then I laid tracing paper over the painted paper and drew the characters and scene. After transferring that drawing I went straight in with color pencil. My art director encouraged me to fill in the characters more and add more color to the outline, and then we had our formula, which I love and never thought would be something I would make. I think one of the first things people say when they flip through it, is “Wow, it’s so colorful.” And that makes me so happy because it is a heavy book, and it end ups being filed on a back shelf under “emotional health and other issues,” but it’s also a beautiful book and I think pretty unique looking in its little corner of the bookstore. I don’t know if I was super conscious of the age I chose the character to be, but she is the same age as I was when I was closest with my dad and when he was the most involved in my life. I think that’s why. It felt true. She is me as a little girl, not understanding how we could be having so much fun and he could be so vibrant one day and then scream at me or lay in bed all day, the next. If someone had read me this book when I was the main character’s age, I don’t know if I could express how I would have felt, but that’s why I wrote it. I feel really lucky and honored that other people saw the value in it too. Do you have any projects or books that you’re working on that you would like to mention? I am working with Little Bigfoot Books again on a picture book called, A Home for Chocolate: The Real Life Story of an Orphaned Moose, that will be coming out next summer (2025). So I get to paint moose and the PNW again. Other than that, first year teaching is no joke and it takes a ton of my creative, emotional, mental, and physical energy so I am putting bits and pieces of some stories I’ve been working on for a while together. One of those is a follow up to In the Blue, that is about overly optimistic vs acceptance. Others are inspired by my current surroundings in Bandon, OR, think Rachel Carson and of course seagulls. We’ll see what comes of them. Thanks again Erin for your time and for the wonderful interview. Good luck with your upcoming book, A Home for Chocolate. To learn more about Erin or her online portfolio, please visit https://www.erinhourigan.com. |
