Year of the Rabbit

Kidding aside, the good news was especially sweet for Rohmann: he had taken a creative risk with My Friend Rabbit. To illustrate the tale of a rabbit that creates havoc when it tries to help its friend Mouse, Rohmann had set aside his trademark oil paints and, instead, created relief prints—covering the uncarved areas of a linoleum-like material with black ink. He then painted bright, bold watercolors inside the prints' thick dark outlines. The gamble paid off.

Although Rohmann received a 1995 Caldecott Honor citation for the wordless picture book Time Flies (Crown), he admits that he was about to give up on children's book publishing because he was struggling to make a living at it. Now, buoyed by the runaway success of My Friend Rabbit , Rohmann is an overnight celebrity and, to the delight of his young fans, there are more books on his drawing table—and in his head. We recently spoke to the 45-year-old Rohmann about his experiences as a children's book creator.

I usually come up with an image first. For My Friend Rabbit, it was a little animal doing something with a big animal—pushing it, pulling it, throwing it, [gathering] it up in a pile. I think of text and then the picture changes. I make a picture, and then that picture tells more than I originally thought it would, so I edit down the writing.

My Friend Rabbit probably had a hundred words in it when I first started. I find that the more I make the pictures, the more they tell the story. What you try to do is have the words and the picture do different things. The words might describe smells or sounds, things that you don't know, or necessarily hear or see. So it's sort of organic.

Take us through the process of creating My Friend Rabbit .

I had this story that originally used words like "push" and "pull," "lift" and "drop." As I started creating it, I started to realize that there were other things going on in the story. I started making pencil sketches, and then I realized that I wanted to use a different media. So I tried pastels. I tried watercolor. I tried pen and ink and scratchboard. I made little paper sculptures—some of them freestanding, some of them like relief sculptures [in which the form stands out from the background]. I tried all different kinds of methods to see which one would work best.

Why did you decide to use relief prints to create the bold black outlines of the characters?

I made one print and that seemed to make sense to me. I intended to do all the other colors in relief print as well, but I had no place to print for very long. So I knew I would only [be able to print] the black ones, and [I would have to] apply the other colors later. That's how it came together.

I read that you felt it was risky to choose a different art style for My Friend Rabbit .

As an illustrator, it's easy to establish yourself as having one style, and then that becomes your identity as an artist. The risk is that you establish an audience for yourself. And then you switch your style and suddenly you have to look for a different audience. I had become so good at making the kind of paintings I make that it wasn't a challenge. And, it wasn't particularly fun. So I said to myself, you have to try something different. I have stories I want to tell, and I have to find the best visual way to make [those stories] work. Because My Friend Rabbit was for a younger audience, it just seemed that it needed something different from the large oil paintings that I did in Time Flies . As it turns out, the risk paid off.

Which one of My Friend Rabbit's protagonists is most like you, Rabbit or Mouse?

I would say I'm Mouse. In fact—not to give some great secret away—if you look at all my books up till now, the bird in Time Flies , the boy in Cinder-Eyed Cats (Crown, 1997)—things happen to them. In some ways, they are all observers, and so is Mouse. I think I'm one of those people. I spend a lot of time looking at the world like Mouse. I've never known anybody like Rabbit, but I've always, in some ways, wanted to be that carefree. But I've never been able to do it.

How have kids responded to your books?

Children are so generous and willing to give back. [When I visit schools] I show pictures, I talk, I tell stories, and I draw. I'm always flattered by the response from children, but I have to also realize that they're responding to me as well as to the book that I'm showing them. The way I find out how kids are really responding to my books is from librarians and teachers, who come up to me kind of blindly and say, "This is what happened when I read your book in my class…." So far, thankfully, no one's come up and said, "You know, I read it and they fell asleep."

What books did you read as a child?

I wasn't much of a reader as a kid. I played a lot of baseball. In the winter, we played hockey. I spent lots of time outside doing things. Just about every 40-something writer and illustrator that you talk to will mention growing up with Where the Wild Things Are . I loved The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I loved some of the Dr. Seuss books, but not all of them. I sort of loved any kind of book that had some adventure going on. I also read comic books. My schooling in visual storytelling was comic books. I didn't love the Sunday funnies until I was a little bit older. But in the '60s, when I was in grade school, I was a voracious reader and maker of comic books.

When did you become interested in making children's books?

I've always loved making books. In the early '90s, I started working with kids at a performing and visual arts program in Massachusetts. I started to see how their minds work—what they found interesting, what they found funny, and what they found fascinating. I discovered that a lot of that stuff I found fascinating and funny and interesting as well. [So] I decided to make books for them.

What's it like illustrating other writers' stories?

I think the books that I've illustrated for other people have been less successful. I just don't think I'm the guy who has that ability to tune in to the text that others have written. I find that the words and the pictures are always altering one another. I can't do that when I illustrate the words of another author.

You've also created the cover art for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. How does that experience compare with working on your own books?

I have great admiration for jacket designers. You have to take a large book, like a novel, which of course may have many levels of meaning, and find one moment that will in some way tell a reader enough about the book to make them want to pick it up and read it. That is an enormous task. You have only about three weeks to do [the assignment] from start to finish. So the process of making a book like My Friend Rabbit is very different. You have lots of time to make mistakes and try different things. You don't have that luxury when you do covers.

How has winning the Caldecott Medal changed your life?

Everything's happening so fast right now that it's like trying to describe a landscape [while on] a train that's going 200 miles an hour. What the Caldecott has done is enable me to make the books that I haven't seen—but I want to see—without worrying about all that other stuff that affects you in the world. Now I can make the books I would make anyway, and now people will see them. And isn't that what you want?