The sweet life Noted illustrator lives a storybook existence in midcoast Maine

Melissa Sweet lives in a lawn-green home trimmed with rose accents just above the meandering Goose River in Rockland. Complete with flowers bordering a picket fence, it’s a storybook home if ever there were one. How else would you expect one of the state’s premier children’s book illustrators to live?

But if your idea of a storybook life is sweetness and light, think again. The dramas of an illustrator’s life are subtle ones. They’re about sitting at a drawing table, tossing out sketch after sketch until you’ve finally captured the proper eagerness of the dog, the funniest possible expression for the pig, a bat’s appropriately bulging eyes. For every bunny hopping its way across the pages of a book, dozens of bears and dogs and maybe even armadillos – trials all – are lost in the wastebasket.

Six days a week, from early morning until well into the afternoon, this is the story of Sweet’s life. Her images, like her name, might imply a world of happiness, but getting there takes literally hundreds of sketches.

Think about the words of a storybook, after all. They may be little more than a list of rhyming ideas, as in the book “Won’t You Be My Kisseroo” by Joanne Ryder, which Sweet just finished. (It will be published by Harcourt next year.)

The words of this book are a series of kiss descriptions: “A breakfast kiss is nice and sweet. It’s fun when sticky lips can meet. … A gotcha kiss surprises you with tickles and some giggles, too. … A playful kiss will often squeak and make a POP! upon your cheek.”

Fun words, yes. But not quite a story and young children learn some important concepts about following a story by “reading” illustrations. So Sweet creates the story through her details, formulating characters that are recognizable from page to page. Be they bats or bears or lambs, they have personalities because of the lift of their leg, the clothes they wear, their expressive reactions to what they see happening across the page.

In this book, says Sweet, a straightforward woman with gray-green eyes and auburn hair that she holds away from her face with a red bandana, “I didn’t know where to begin. What’s a gotcha kiss? What’s a kiss that popped? I had to decide.” Moreover, she had to create an environment for the entirety of the book and figure out what other creatures would be getting those kisses. “Some were obvious,” she says.

Bears immersed in honey would be giving the sweet sticky kisses. A pop kiss clearly would be a frog. For the main character, she settled on a lamb. “I was looking for something that would fit. A lamb is soft and sweet and I was tired of bears, since so many children’s books have a bunny or bear carrying it through.” Besides, some lambs had just been born across the street from Sweet. Lambs were on her mind. While each page introduces a different group of kissing animal characters, the lamb is in each image, maybe peeking in the window, until all the animals arrive at the little lamb’s birthday party.

Using bits of colored paper, Sweet gives each animal clothes, creating a slightly textured, collaged effect. In other books, as in “Bats on Parade” from the humorous math series by Kathi Appelt, she distinguishes among hundreds of parading, musical bats by the look of the dot that is their eyeball and the tilt of their heads, creating depths of delight, even for the math phobic.

Sweet has lent her magic to more than 50 children’s books, working in acrylics with broad color for the youngest children and more detailed watercolors for the middle years. For older children, she often uses collage, as in the books featuring inventions and discoveries by women, such as “Girls Think of Everything” and “The Sky’s the Limit” by Catherine Thimmesh. The cover of “Girls Think of Everything” features an etching of a Victorian woman with the handles of scissors for eyeglasses and a brain overflowing with tools and maps and gears and springs and, yes, flowers, too.

Sweet generally signs contracts at least a year before beginning her work. While timing varies, she estimates it takes a couple of months to create the sketches, a few more months for the final art, working only one book at a time.

Currently on her long drafting table are images of birds, courtesy of a book about John James Audubon, “The Boy Who Drew Birds,” by Jacqueline Davies. On the wall behind her are preliminary sketches, pinned in sequence as if they were the frames of an animated movie. The flow of the story, the pacing of the pictures, where the type lies on the page, is that important. Generally, this detail is left up to the illustrator. “I’ll work one page of a book dozens of times to see where the type is going to be, and maybe what the pictures would be,” she says.

That’s the first go-round. Once Sweet has settled on the shape of the story, she creates a detailed model of the book, known as a dummy. These sketches go to the publisher for approval before Sweet begins painting.

But for Audubon, she’s not nearly there yet. She just returned from a trip to his boyhood home in Kentucky, a trip she financed herself, feeling she needed a stronger sense of his home, for the book is about the young Audubon’s first experiments with tagging birds. Explains Sweet: “He had the idea that birds came back, but no one knew for sure. Aristotle thought they did. Others thought birds went to the moon. One man thought birds gathered in a great ball, wing to wing, and stayed underwater all winter.”

Sweet will draw those ideas, but she will keep them like journal entries to separate the theories from the story, which is about how Audubon sat in a cave and observed a nest of phoebes to really learn how they behaved. Eventually, the birds got so used to him he could tie a thread around the legs not only of the parents, but also their babies. The following year, he had proof that phoebes return.

Seeing these caves made the ideas come to life for Sweet, enabling her to better animate the story for her readers when it is published by Houghton Mifflin in the fall of 2004.

Sweet never wanted to be a children’s book illustrator until she was in college, wondering how to earn a living as an artist. Then a dorm mate brought home a copy of Maurice Sendak’s “Little Bear,” a book she hadn’t seen since her father read it to her as a child. “It brought back so much to me,” she says. “I thought, if I could do children’s books, that would be ideal.”

It wasn’t easy. She estimates it took six to eight years of sending work out and having it returned before she figured out what publishers wanted.

“I felt like it was never going to happen,” she says, recalling how at times she would be overwhelmed by the huge mass of children’s books. “I just felt like I was a little minnow in a big sea of books – and yet I knew there were Maurice Sendak and Dr. Suess and they were light years apart from each other, but each was really valuable.”

Eventually, she realized she had to find her own voice as an illustrator. Finally, she decided to go to New York City for a week, making appointments to show her work to a dozen art directors while she was there. When she arrived at Simon and Schuster, the editor had the manuscript for James Howe’s “Pinky and Rex” on her desk. She gave that to Sweet to illustrate. That became not only her first job, but a popular series of early readers. To date, she has illustrated 11 books in the series. “It was a complete coup,” she says, though she attributes her success to persistence. “There was never a point when I didn’t stop trying to figure it out.”

Besides her illustration work, Sweet sometimes does residencies at Maine schools. Recently, at the Longfellow School in Portland, a child asked her what she would do if she hadn’t become a children’s book illustrator.

“It stopped me in my tracks,” she says. “I never really questioned that.” But she had an answer: “I might have been a gardener.” Flowers, colors, a lighthearted outcome from hours of planning, experimenting and getting your hands dirty. It makes sense. Still, many a child across the nation is glad Sweet chose illustration.