Elise Primavera's Blog
April 10, 2020
How I Got Started
I don’t come from a family of artists.
I never visited an art museum until I was in college.
I was crazy about horses. Up until I was twenty-five I rode and competed year round.
There was no reason to believe that writing and illustrating children’s book was what I would have done with my life.
In the same vein of unlikeliness I had majored in fashion illustration at Moore College of Art because I loved figure drawing and—I know it sounds shallow—I loved clothes too. After graduation, I spent a year or so illustrating booklets for Seventeen Magazine. The zenith of my
fashion illustration career was when I landed an assignment from Henri Bendel for an ad in the New York Times. I think it was downhill from there. Fashion illustration was a dying profession and the jobs were few and far between. I knew it was over when I couldn’t even get a job drawing clothes for Butterick, the sewing pattern company. But here’s the thing: though I’d just spent four years at school thinking I was going to be a fashion illustrator now that I was actually doing the job I wasn’t loving it. The work had become boring. I knew I needed more. In the back of my mind I had the idea that I’d like to be a children’s book illustrator.
A couple of years before I graduated from art school there had been a pivotal moment where I happened to be in a bookstore and picked up a children’s book. I was mesmerized. It’s ironic since I never was much of a children’s book reader as a child—I was more of a comic book kid—but turning the pages of that children’s book I experienced a thunder clap of knowing that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Two years later it happened again when I was living in the Chadds Ford area of PA, and visited the Brandywine Museum. Standing before the N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Jessie Wilcox Smith paintings was that same knowing that I could do this. Granted, I had barely worked in color and didn’t know how to paint. I had absolutely no right to think I could do what they had done—just the same I knew I had to try.
I put together a portfolio for children’s books. There weren’t the amount of classes to help guide me the way there are now. There weren’t computers for me to find an agent. There actually weren’t even that many agents back then! I was virtually on my own with the New York
City Yellow Pages copying down phone numbers.
On the bright side those were also the days when you could leave your portfolio at a place like Harper & Row and if they liked your art you could get an appointment to talk to an art director or an editor. Armed with my phone numbers and addresses I schlepped around New
York City with my portfolio of mostly black and white and sepia ink drawings.
I spent hours looking at children’s books. I sought out established illustrators like, the Hildebrandt Brothers who created fantastic paintings from the Lord of the Rings and the great picture book author-illustrator Roger Duvoisin – miraculously both lived near me in Gladstone, NJ where I had moved. I was on fire to do children’s books. I don’t ever remember feeling discouraged or frustrated. If anything my strongest emotion was the fear that I wouldn’t be allowed to do this thing that I just had to do. I went everywhere. I called everyone. It worked because lo and behold I did get a book cover to do. I’ve included it in the drawings below for you to see just how little I knew about color—or even about making a book cover for that matter. Not long after I got a book to do from the famed publisher of children’s books, Margaret McElderry, who must have seen something in my work. The book was for an Irish folk tale called, The Mermaid’s Cape and in black and white which was common for publishers to do back then because of the cost of full color printing – but lucky for me!
I definitely got through that first book by the seat of my seats but enough for Margaret to give me a shot at another book called The Snug Little House – again in black and white. From that point on I was off and running.
Take away from my story? It doesn’t matter if you think the odds are against you—if you think you don’t have enough education, or talent, or money, or time. The only thing that matters is if you have the passion to keep going and the deep knowledge that this is something you can do—something you have to do. If you get the calling—which is what I really do think it was and still is for me—then you will eventually succeed—no matter how unlikely.
I never visited an art museum until I was in college.
I was crazy about horses. Up until I was twenty-five I rode and competed year round.
There was no reason to believe that writing and illustrating children’s book was what I would have done with my life.
In the same vein of unlikeliness I had majored in fashion illustration at Moore College of Art because I loved figure drawing and—I know it sounds shallow—I loved clothes too. After graduation, I spent a year or so illustrating booklets for Seventeen Magazine. The zenith of my
fashion illustration career was when I landed an assignment from Henri Bendel for an ad in the New York Times. I think it was downhill from there. Fashion illustration was a dying profession and the jobs were few and far between. I knew it was over when I couldn’t even get a job drawing clothes for Butterick, the sewing pattern company. But here’s the thing: though I’d just spent four years at school thinking I was going to be a fashion illustrator now that I was actually doing the job I wasn’t loving it. The work had become boring. I knew I needed more. In the back of my mind I had the idea that I’d like to be a children’s book illustrator.
A couple of years before I graduated from art school there had been a pivotal moment where I happened to be in a bookstore and picked up a children’s book. I was mesmerized. It’s ironic since I never was much of a children’s book reader as a child—I was more of a comic book kid—but turning the pages of that children’s book I experienced a thunder clap of knowing that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Two years later it happened again when I was living in the Chadds Ford area of PA, and visited the Brandywine Museum. Standing before the N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Jessie Wilcox Smith paintings was that same knowing that I could do this. Granted, I had barely worked in color and didn’t know how to paint. I had absolutely no right to think I could do what they had done—just the same I knew I had to try.
I put together a portfolio for children’s books. There weren’t the amount of classes to help guide me the way there are now. There weren’t computers for me to find an agent. There actually weren’t even that many agents back then! I was virtually on my own with the New York
City Yellow Pages copying down phone numbers.
On the bright side those were also the days when you could leave your portfolio at a place like Harper & Row and if they liked your art you could get an appointment to talk to an art director or an editor. Armed with my phone numbers and addresses I schlepped around New
York City with my portfolio of mostly black and white and sepia ink drawings.
I spent hours looking at children’s books. I sought out established illustrators like, the Hildebrandt Brothers who created fantastic paintings from the Lord of the Rings and the great picture book author-illustrator Roger Duvoisin – miraculously both lived near me in Gladstone, NJ where I had moved. I was on fire to do children’s books. I don’t ever remember feeling discouraged or frustrated. If anything my strongest emotion was the fear that I wouldn’t be allowed to do this thing that I just had to do. I went everywhere. I called everyone. It worked because lo and behold I did get a book cover to do. I’ve included it in the drawings below for you to see just how little I knew about color—or even about making a book cover for that matter. Not long after I got a book to do from the famed publisher of children’s books, Margaret McElderry, who must have seen something in my work. The book was for an Irish folk tale called, The Mermaid’s Cape and in black and white which was common for publishers to do back then because of the cost of full color printing – but lucky for me!
I definitely got through that first book by the seat of my seats but enough for Margaret to give me a shot at another book called The Snug Little House – again in black and white. From that point on I was off and running.
Take away from my story? It doesn’t matter if you think the odds are against you—if you think you don’t have enough education, or talent, or money, or time. The only thing that matters is if you have the passion to keep going and the deep knowledge that this is something you can do—something you have to do. If you get the calling—which is what I really do think it was and still is for me—then you will eventually succeed—no matter how unlikely.
