My interview with creative Maddie Kimber, Children’s book illustrator
Children’s book illustrator Maddie Kimber on creating respectful stories for kids using animal allegory, remaining curious through sketchbook practice, and making art for the joy of expression rather than perfection.
In this interview I spoke with Maddie, a 25-year-old children’s book illustrator, graphic designer, and screen printer from Illinois who now lives in Savannah, Georgia. Maddie’s work focuses on telling stories to kids in a respectful and creatively fulfilling manner – avoiding the tendency to just use bright colours and crazy visuals to grab children’s attention, instead focusing on more mundane but impactful stories using animal characters. Her creative process is deeply informed by her own childhood experiences with undiagnosed ADHD, thinking about the difficult feelings and big issues she struggled to navigate as a kid without the nuance of adulthood. She works extensively with animal characters to create allegory that’s both fun and engaging for children without scaring or boring them, believing that kids don’t like being told how to do things but respond to stories that invoke imagination.
Her process involves lots of sitting, doodling, figuring out what fits the story, doing colour studies, and thinking about how colour engages different moods – using saturated colours because she feels things deeply, but not to dictate how viewers should feel. Maddie’s creative inspirations include her mum, a therapist who has a gift for making people feel seen and heard; Winnie the Pooh and A.A. Milne; Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson; and Louis Wain, known for painting anthropomorphic cats with gouache and his mastery of colour and brushstrokes. She emphasises remaining curious as central to her creative routine, spending lots of time with her sketchbook to practice skills and explore outside her comfort zone – especially important since client work requires more cautious steps, while personal art and sketchbook work allows experimental exploration. She’s particularly interested in drawing anthropomorphic animals living human routines, carrying over human elements into animals.
Her advice to beginning creatives is to make bad art – with the understanding that no art is ever bad if it’s bringing you closer to your vision – and to think of art like singing in the car: something you do not because you need an endpoint but because it’s natural to humans to have fun and express themselves creatively. She encourages people to keep making art while honing technical skills, taking the steps that feel right for them rather than the ones that will turn them into someone else.
Maddie Kimber, Writer
Interview with Maddie Kimber
Introduction
MD: Hi Maddie, thanks for agreeing to have a chat about your creativity. Can we start by just introducing yourself with your name and where you’re from?
MK: I’m Maddie, I’m 25, I’m from Illinois in the United States but I live in Savannah, Georgia now.
MD: Can you tell me what you do creatively?
MK: Yeah, so I am a children’s book illustrator. I’m also a graphic designer and a screen printer. My work focuses primarily on telling stories to kids in a respectful but creative, more creatively fulfilling manner. So I’m not keen on just using bright colours and like crazy visuals to get children’s attention. I’m more excited on more mundane but impactful stories and I use a lot of animal characters as well.
MD: I can see the moose behind you. And what’s the other one?
MK: Oh, there’s a lady and then there’s a bear, a bunny, all sorts of things.
Creative Process
MD: Tell me a little bit about your creative process.
MK: When I’m thinking about what I want to do for a project, oftentimes I’m thinking about either feelings I’ve had or experiences I had as a kid that were difficult to navigate. When I was little, I struggled a lot with undiagnosed ADHD. So oftentimes I have all of these ideas bouncing around in my head and that is still relevant today. But being a kid, I didn’t really know how to navigate these big feelings and these big issues. When I’m thinking about narratives that I want to share with kids specifically, I think a lot about those feelings that I had being young, not having the nuance of being an adult to navigate the world. And then since I work with a lot of animal characters, I think of how I can represent these in a way that’s both fun for kids, won’t scare them, and also won’t bore them. Because the thing about kids is they don’t like having a finger wagged in their face telling them, this is the way you ought to do something.
To me, it’s much more interesting to find allegory through animals and then to represent that to kids in a way that’s both engaging and fun for them to learn. Oftentimes that’s a lot of just sitting, it’s a lot of doodling, it’s a lot of figuring out what fits for the story. And then I also do narrative illustrations where I’m thinking about colour, I’m doing colour studies, thinking about how colour engages different moods within not just kids, but everyone.
That’s sort of whimsical, fun, and interesting, where I’m not using colour to tell you how I feel or how you should feel, but I’m using colour in a way where you look at it and you feel it too. There’s no certain way that I try to sway someone’s emotions with my work, it’s more I feel these things very deeply, so I use a lot of saturated colours, but you can have any sort of opinion on that.
Creative Inspiration
MD: Who or what is your creative inspiration?
MK: I have so many. For one, my mom. My mom’s a therapist, so she’s answering all the questions for people that I just present to them through art. She just has a way with people that I’ve always admired, where when you talk to her you feel seen, you feel heard, so I want to convey that same emotion through my work. Artistically, I’ve always loved Winnie the Pooh. I love Calvin and Hobbes. Louis Wayne’s one of my huge inspirations. He’s known for painting anthropomorphic cats with gouache, and that’s something that I also love to do, but he’s just he’s such a master of colour and brush strokes, so just on a technical level he’s probably one of my biggest inspirations, and then A. A. Milne, and oh my gosh, why am I blanking on who did Calvin and Hobbes? Oh, Bill Watterson. They both just, going back to what I said about respecting kids, have such a way with narrative where they’re teaching kids about being mindful, and being mindful, and kids are still learning how to tie their shoes, but it still resonates that these stories are important, and these stories are a way of life, but they’re not saying it in a way that it’s patronizing to kids.
They’re saying it in a way that invokes imagination, which I really admire.
Creative Routine
MD: Tell me about your creative routine
MK: I spend a lot of time with my sketchbook. The biggest thing that I carry with me throughout my creative routine is remaining curious. I think one of the best and worst things about being an artist is there’s no perfect artist. You’re always learning, you’re always growing, so I think having a sketchbook helps me practice my skills as an artist, but it also helps me get outside of my comfort zone. As an illustrator, I’m often working with clients, so it’s kind of hard for me to be super experimental within projects I’m doing for clients because they see my art presented to either Instagram or my website, and they have a vision in mind of what they want, so I take very precautious steps of showing them the colour, showing them the line art without swaying too much outside of that, but my personal art and my sketchbook really gives me an exciting way to explore and to ask questions visually that maybe I don’t have the answer to, and then, again, when I’m working with clients, it’s a lot of exploring with colour, exploring with value, trying to really tell a story through those elements, and then also just drawing a lot, drawing animals, drawing furniture, drawing people. I’m really interested in and how we can carry over human elements into animals, so it’s drawing a lot of anthropomorphic animals, animals just like living a human routine is really interesting to me, but anything that really keeps me asking questions and keeps me not getting bored of following a systematic routine every day.
Creative Wisdom
MD: If you were to meet someone who’s just at the beginning of their creative journey or they’re just wanting to explore how to do this, what are the pearls of wisdom that you would want to pass on to them?
MK: I would say make bad art, and when I say bad art, I’m saying that with a grain of salt in which no art is ever bad if it’s bringing you closer to your vision. I think often people think of art, whether that’s writing, whether that’s painting, drawing, whatever, as this higher level of being, like artists. We know the tortured artists, our minds are so scrambled and dealing with so much and we convey that in art, but I really think we should think about art like singing in the car. You don’t do it because you need to have an end point. You do it because it’s natural to humans to have fun and express themselves creatively. I would say make art and just keep making, and then also really hone in on your technical skills as well, whatever that is, whether it’s exploring colour, whether it’s drawing people, do life drawing.
Just take the steps that you think feel right, not the ones that will get you to be someone else.
Connect with Maddie Kimber
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Podcast for creatives
If you haven’t discovered Creative Momentum with Meg Dunley podcast, I’d recommend having a listen. It has weekly drops of these bite sized episodes that feature creatives talking about their creative process, routine and inspiration. Each week has some great pearls of wisdom for everyone who is living or wishes they were living a creative life.
