Your Questions, Answered!
An exclusive look inside a very mediocre life
Here is a previous post that goes more in depth into my process: All the Hidden Work Behind a Book as well as this post about how Pig Town Party came about: My Book Releases Today!
I covered this answer in my popular post How to Learn to Draw Anything which goes over how I design characters!
If you’re wondering, “wow Lian, way to ignore my question???” I’m so sorry! I am only one woman. There are still a couple questions that I didn’t get around to drawing because it is tiring to draw so many answers so I’m just going to answer some of them in text below.
Q: When you’re writing for books, do you write for adults or children in mind? Do you picture specific people or kids when you’re writing or do you think about what inspires and entertains you the most?
I don’t really write with too much of an audience in mind. I do try to picture what things kids may have an interest in, but I find that the things they fixate on are really unpredictable. They never laugh at the points I want them to laugh! I simply approach each story with whatever interests me and what I personally find funny and hope that people feel the same. I always think about that Maurice Sendak quote:
I don't write for children. I write. And someone says, 'That's for children’.
That’s kind of how I feel about making my books. I didn’t actively pursue working on picture books. In college I thought perhaps I would end up in editorial illustration just like every professor told us to do.
When I was in school, my website was discovered by an editor at Harper and an art director at Penguin RandomHouse and that’s how I got started. I didn’t really intend for my art to be for kids, it just kind of happened to be the perfect place!
Q: What comes first, the story or the images? How do you write your story? Outline first or jumbled thoughts and ideas?
Literally any way that works! Unfortunately every book has been different. There is no set way for me to be creative. Sometimes the idea comes and I jot it down. Sometimes it comes when I’m drawing and I form a story from there. It all just comes from living life to be honest. I may hear something or see something or read something that sparks an idea in me.
The constant thing is that I’ll always do a thumbnail layout of a story when I get to a serious stage. This helps me to picture the entire book and see how much story I can feasibly fit into a picture book.
When I was first starting out, I found it difficult to write a story straight into a word document without any visuals. My solution for this was to write it out in panels. I think I struggled to think of myself a writer and every time I sat down to “write, write” I felt like a huge fraud!
Recently, I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea of being a “writer” and now I feel more confident writing stories in a word document without the visual component!
Q: Do you ask others to read your story and at what point do you look for feedback in the process?
Yes! I always share my stories with my besties in the business: Monica Arnaldo and Jess Hannigan. Our brains are weirdly on the same wavelength and they are really good at providing feedback as well as support.
I am really annoying and I like feedback at any part of the process so I’m constantly spamming our group texts with questions and solutions to previous problems. If you’re reading this Jess or Monica, thank you so much for putting up with me.
I also run an online discord group where we all share our works and get critique. Usually the besties get first look at everything as I hone out ideas and see if they are actually worth anything.
Eventually if a story becomes developed enough, I share it with my agent to see whether it is worth pitching. Together we’ll workshop it more. Then once a story is bought, I have the editor and art director and whoever else is on the team pitching in their ideas! For me, a book is always done with a community and never in a vacuum.
Q: How do you balance freelance work and life?
I like to think I have a really good balance! I’ve never been late on a deadline before and I also have never pulled an all nighter before. My secret is that I always ask for more time than I think I need before a project starts. I always give myself a cushion of time in case anything unexpected comes up or life gets in the way. This way, I can make sure I don’t overwork myself. I covered this and other lessons I’ve learnt from working in this newsletter: 5 Lessons From 5 Years of Illustrating.
Adam (my partner) also works a proper job so I usually adhere to his schedule. When he leaves for work in the morning, I’ll start my work and I usually clock out when he gets home. This way, I maintain a healthy balance and don’t let work overtake my life! Although I will admit I always work on my newsletter at night when I should just be chilling… Whoops.
Q: What’s your favorite place that you’ve lived in?
I… do not have a favorite place I’ve lived in… I think because I’ve moved around so much at this point I’ll never be satisfied in a place. There’s always something better out there and nothing is perfect I guess?? Maybe one day I’ll find the perfect utopia of a not racist, walkable city with good weather, lots of stores, good food, nice people, affordable housing, universal healthcare, great education, a vibrant culture and a good art scene. One day… a girl can dream.
Q: Can you live off your book income or do you need to take on other projects or work to supplement?
I am really lucky that I can live off my book income! In the beginning I would illustrate multiple books to earn a living wage. From there onwards, I started writing and illustrating my own which in turn got me higher advances and I could start to do less books a year. I’m lucky to have an agent who is great at getting good deals for me and I personally always advocate to be paid more.
I also hustled really hard when I was in school because I was an international student. When you’re an international student in the US, you’re forbidden to work during school and once you graduate, you only get a one year visa to work. During this time, you’re not allowed to take any sort of job in a field outside of your major so I had to really hustle to make sure I could make a living outside of school in illustration since there were no other jobs for me to fall back on.
Q: What is the best way to retain spontaneity of your sketches and thumbnails?
I honestly struggle with this a lot. I think at this point I’ve accepted that my final art will never be as spontaneous as the sketches. If I do want to keep it more spontaneous, I make sure that I won’t work out the sketches too fully and let myself improvise on the fly. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn’t! But in the end, I just tell myself that nobody will see my sketches to compare the final art with. It’s like when I had figure painting in school and our professor would tell us: “There’s no need to beat yourself up if your painting doesn’t look exactly like the model. At the end of the day, nobody is going to put your painting right next to the model and compare it. Nobody is going to see what you’re seeing right now so just focus on doing your best.”
Okay!
That’s it for now!
Also, if you are in New York, I have two original red envelope paintings in the annual Grumpy Bert Red Envelope show!
The show opens this Friday from 6-8pm at Harman Projects (210 Rivington Street NYC). There will be a lion dance at 7pm and you can purchase either of these envelopes during then! If it doesn’t sell that night, it’ll be listed on the website for purchase and I’ll share the link in that case if any of y’all are interested in owning an original piece. The show will be up until Feb 22nd.
I’ve been participating in this show since 2018 and it’s kind of fun to see all the different envelopes I’ve done over the years since I was in school till now! Here are some from the past that I could find:
It is also hourly comics day this Friday so PREPARE! I can’t believe it’s come around again.
Anyways, hope everyone is staying sane (lol i am not)!
America is sooooooooo great right now!!!!
As long as you keep having dumb ideas i will always be the sounding board for you to bounce them off of 🫶
Thank you for the Q&A. As someone who keeps intending to set a writing schedule (Anthony Trollope's dedicated 3 hours every day before going off to work at the General Post Office glares at me--despite the fact that I have never actually finished any of his novels!), I love that you have an organic day-to-day (AND still actually accomplish so much great work). Have you listened to (or been able to see) Maybe Happy Ending? I've been obsessed with it ever since I saw some of the clips from the original Korean production. I love that it's such a small intimate show with such big ideas. I'd love to do it when the amateur rights become available, but there's also the question of whether it's a show that inherently needs a Korean cast (being set in a future Seoul and maybe rooted in a specific cultural space--and I'm not Asian and live in rural Illinois) or whether the speculative/metaphorical nature of the story--and the fact that it's not about race--make it more open for a diverse casting? And finally, with theater in mind, and a look at your favorite picture books sample, I have to say I'm also a Shaun Tan fan--have you ever run across Red Leap Theatre in New Zealand. They did a production of The Arrival that was a magical blend of dance and puppetry (https://redleaptheatre.co.nz/production/the-arrival/) A number of years ago I tried to get permission to show a video of the show at our library, but there was some kind of rights deal in the offing and so everything by Tan was off the table for a period of time (this was after The Lost Thing won the Best Animated Short Oscar). One of my personal bucket lists is to do a piece of guerilla public art like "The Stick Figures" in Tan's Tales of Outer Suburbia (see his comments on his webpage https://www.shauntan.net/new-page-30), but I haven't worked up the nerve!