Why My Paintings Look Like Pages From a Children's Book Gone Wrong

The best children's books were never as safe as people remember them. Somewhere between the talking animals and the friendly monsters, there was usually something a little too strange, a little too honest about being scared or sad or weird, sitting right there in the pictures. That's the part I kept.

Picture books were never just cute

Maurice Sendak filled Where the Wild Things Are with genuinely unsettling monsters and let a small child rule over all of them anyway. Shel Silverstein's drawings were scratchy, a little sad, often quietly about loss, right there in books meant for kids. The best illustrators in that tradition never fully sanitized anything. They just trusted that children, and honestly most adults too, can hold a little bit of strange right next to a little bit of sweet without needing it explained away.

That combination, whimsical on the surface with something more complicated underneath, is exactly the visual language I grew up reading, long before I had any idea it would end up as my own style.

Where it shows up in Candy Decay

Cloudy with the Chance of Frogs, pictured above, could genuinely be a page out of a picture book: a surreal sky full of frogs drifting past tiny umbrellas over a dreamy version of London, playful and a little absurd, built the way a good illustrated spread is built, with small hidden details rewarding a longer look. That's a very picture book instinct: reward the reader who lingers instead of the one who flips past.

The bittersweet undertone comes from the same place. A children's book illustrator learns early that kids don't actually need every hard feeling removed from a story, they just need it handled with care. I paint the same way. The skull tucked into a strawberry cake or the goldfish frozen in a rubber duck's ice cube isn't there to shock anyone, it's there the same way a slightly sad page in a beloved picture book is there: honest, gentle, and still somehow the page you remember best.

More storybook worlds in the shop

Cloudy with the Chance of Frogs is part of the hand-signed print collection, alongside plenty of other small, strange little worlds. If you're curious how this style actually came together over time, I wrote about that in Finding My Art Style: Candy Decay.

Thank you for still believing, even as a grown up, that a good picture can hold more than one feeling at once.