In 2004, Yuyi was featured in The Zephyr, the newsletter for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and was asked about her education as an artist. Yuyi’s answer is below, as is an illustration she made later inspired by the contents of the newsletter. That illustration became the primary source and thematic material for her presentations for many years after.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned, as an artist and personally, form illustrating children’s books?
Faith. When I squeeze inside my workspace every morning, I inhabit a realm where believing in the impossible is required.
This movement involves following my first impulses, imposing a great deal of commitment, and even exercising some arrogance. After all, my job description says I am supposed to create a new world, and, at first, all I have in front of me is a piece of paper as blank as my mind.
My first act of faith goes to my hands. They, which don’t have thoughts, reflections, or expectations, merely do what they know. Starting with crooked lines, loose doodles, and bad looking sketches, they find me an entrance to the path.
My second act of faith goes to the humble pencil and eraser. Do I believe that I have forgotten how to draw? No problem. Pencil and eraser retrace, rub out, transform again and again. They look anew and create!
My third act of faith comes just in time to save me from the attack of a universe of possibilities. Should the house in the background be red or blue? Should my main character wear a hat or a coat? I will remain paralyzed for eternity if faith didn’t point out that, at the end, there is not right or wrong decision, only commitment to what one chooses. As long as I stick with my favorite option, I will work on it with such a conviction and passion that you’ll believe it was the only possibility in the world.
My last act of faith goes to my backside and its capacity to keep on the chair in the most despairing moments. This faith allows me to trust that as long as I stay put, even when an illustration seems ruined –my paper looking like a disastrous mass of wrong colors –, one more line, one more layer of paint, or one more detail to place, might spark the moment when I blink my eyes and there, in front of me, on what used to be a blank piece of paper, a new world comes alive.
