Still Life: Cover Reveal AND Q&A with the Illustrious Alex London and Paul O. Zelinsky
That’s a double whammy of a combo, isn’t it? On the one hand you have author Alex London, who’s been doing novels for kids for years, but is getting more and more into picture books these days. On the other you have Caldecott Award winning illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky, producing a book in his own uniquely inimitable style. Put ’em both together and you have STILL LIFE, out everywhere September 3rd of this year. Here’s the plot, for the curious:
Every young artist has drawn or painted a still life scene. Perhaps it is a bowl of fruit, or a toy, or a vase of flowers, or a chair. The only rule is that a still life painting must stay still.
But staying still is hard! Especially for a curious mouse and a hungry dragon and a no-nonsense princess. Will the artist notice that his still life painting is breaking all the rules?
From award-winning author Alex London and Caldecott Medal–winning artist Paul O. Zelinsky, Still Life is a funny, subversive, and clever picture book that brings a painting to wildly imaginative life. Readers will pore over all the silly and surprising details in the illustrations—which tell a story of daring rescues, dashing heroes, and found friends. With its inventive humor, Still Life is for readers of Battle Bunny and David Ezra Stein’s Interrupting Chicken.
Now here’s the exciting news. Today you will get to see, for the very very first time, the cover of this lovely book. But before we get to any of that, let’s talk to the creators and get their spin on all the ins and outs of painting, breaking the fourth wall, sleep-deprived hallucinations, and more:
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Betsy Bird: Alex London! How lovely to get a chance to talk to you about STILL LIFE! Now this is, to the best of my knowledge (and correct me if I’m wrong) your first picture book. Where did the book come from?

Alex London: Thanks so much! I’m so excited to share Still Life with you. I actually wrote a previous—and very silly—picture book, some years ago, with the inimitable Frank Morrison, but Still Life is the book I wrote for my daughter when she was a newborn, with the dream of having a book I could read aloud to her when she was little. It’s my first as a parent. I thought of it while sitting with my daughter during an early morning bottle feeding, staring at the cover of an old art book that was on the coffee table. The picture seemed to be moving, probably because I was exhausted, but from that moment on, there was an idea simmering.
Of course, as is the way of these things, my daughter is five and a half now! And she’s very
excited for the book inspired when she was literally in my arms.
BB: Awww. One might argue that that’s the perfect age for this book anyway. And in our other corner here we have Paul O. Zelinsky. Hi, Paul! It’s been a minute since I saw you in person. Congrats on your work on STILL LIFE! How did you first hear about this project?
Paul O. Zelinksy: Hi Betsy! Yes, it’s been too long—except that in my head, time elapsed between the beginning of Covid and not too long ago doesn’t really count.
Thanks for the congratulations! To answer your question, the manuscript of Still Life came to me in an email from Greenwillow editor Martha Mihalick, who didn’t know that Alex and I had been friends for a long time. I’ve been working with Greenwillow for an even longer time—my second picture book* was with them, in 1981!

I thought Alex’s text was wonderful. It’s basically a harangue, hammering away about rules that still life paintings must always follow, while the pictures go off in another direction. (Definitely a manuscript that required author notes.) To be honest, though, I worried the sly humor might fail completely as an illustrated book, when you’re simply reading one thing while seeing another. So just to see how this text could function with pictures, I worked up sketches of the first few pages. Was it funny? I couldn’t tell.
So, I did more sketches, and more, and still didn’t know. I ended up working out the entire book before deciding that an illustrated Still Life could be hilarious, and I definitely wanted to illustrate it.
BB: I love the idea of sketches leading to the acceptance. Alex, the book is narrated, for the most part, by the snooty artist who is lecturing the reader on what constitutes a “still life”. Does he happen to have any real world antecedents?
AL: No comment, certainly no comment about a particular art teacher I had when I was an exchange student in Berlin in high school, who had very particular ideas about the correct subject matter for student paintings. Needless to say, I did not pursue the visual arts much longer after that…
BB: Well, since we’re already talking about art, let’s hand this next question to Paul. I’d love to dive in a little into the different styles you’re using in this book. While the artist and other characters are done in a flattened, more cartoonish look, the still life painting itself is exquisitely rendered. I know that you’re doing a mix of traditional and digital work with this book. Could you tell us a bit about what your process was in rendering both the painting in the book and the characters that interact with it?
POZ: Obviously, this is a work that addresses the question: “what is reality?” Also one that gives me the opportunity to draw a knight and a princess, and even better, a dragon.

I knew that the still life painting in the book should be a display of elegance and pomp. Otherwise, the gravitas with which the narrator addresses the topic would feel silly, and that would undermine the true silliness that comes in later. I looked at a bunch of Dutch and Flemish still lifes from the 17th Century—the high point of posh still life art—for guidance.
As for the actual reality surrounding the still life—the objects on the table that figure in the painting, the room and the artist himself, and also the little characters who have no business showing up in a still life, I thought it would be funny, and probably somehow deeply true, to make all of them as un-modeled and as loosely drawn as I could manage. That would be easy in Photoshop, where I’m comfortable with various tools I’ve made that resemble charcoal or pencil, and I can draw loosely without tightening up.
So I drew straight into my Wacom tablet with a stylus, no pencil or paper at all. I’ve been illustrating my books digitally lately, but I thought for this one maybe I could create the still life as an actual oil painting, and incorporate it digitally into the final art, to use again and again (at different angles, from different distances). I knew I couldn’t possibly paint that still life in oils for each picture in the book—not in what’s left of my lifetime—and I wasn’t sure I could paint it even once with the finesse I had in mind.
I tried painting a little bit when my experimenting began and was not pleased. So, I reverted to Photoshop. I’m afraid there’s not much traditional medium visible in what you now can see. There is a canvas texture on the painting, which comes from a piece of the actual canvas I did not paint on.
BB: Eh, I think the time has long since passed since people were wringing their hands over the effects of digital art on picture books. Next up, we’re talking process. Alex, how much, would you say, did the book change from its earliest first draft to the final product?

AL: There have been a lot of changes throughout the process, starting with the keen editorial eye of Martha Mihalick at Greenwillow. She worked hard with me to capture just the right tone both in juxtaposition to the art and for a compelling read aloud. We spent a lot of time with rhythm, batting single words back and forth, searching for the resonances and the giggles (“jam” was more lovely a word than “jelly”; “spoon” makes a funnier sound than “fork” in this context). The changes accelerated once Paul O. Zelinsky got involved. As his art developed, my text shifted, sometimes because he inspired better ideas with an image, and sometimes because he asked just the right question to push me into a new way of thinking about each moment. I’ve written 30+ novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder on a text than on the 2,000 or so words in this book.
BB: And Paul, did you determine from the start the way in which you’d render this book or was there a fair amount of trial and error? Did you try anything early on that just didn’t work out?
POZ: You may think that my last answer takes care of this question, too, but in fact I had so many false starts that it doesn’t begin to cover it. Even now, just trying to think of what to say is making my eyes want to close, and I have to go lie down for a while.
… Now I’m back. I expected Still Life to come so easily! After all, when I’d signed the contract for the book I already had a finished dummy, one I was fond of! I’d only have to choose the medium or mediums and go from there. The painting file began as a fairly detailed pencil drawing and took on layer after layer after layer in Photoshop…
The problems I created for myself were so numerous, so serious, and so technical that if I started getting specific here, your eyes would want to close, too. Suffice it to say that almost everything I cleverly did to make the work easier ended up creating impenetrable problems and massive roadblocks. I somehow plowed through, with much help from my infinitely patient art director, Sylvie Le Floc’h, who kept trying to lead me out of the labyrinthine tangle of difficulties I kept steering myself into. And now I am determinedly not thinking about that part of the work. Though if you need to know, ask me, and you’ll get a 40-page harangue about Smart Objects and missing layers and ….
BB: Honestly, I think a lot of folks reading this would find that scintillating, but we’ll save that for another interview day. Speaking of Paul, congrats, Alex, on pairing with the one and only Paul O. Zelinsky for this book! I know that when an author writes a picture book manuscript they have a rough idea in their head of what the final product might look like. Did Paul’s vision match yours at all? Did he do anything that surprised you?

AL: I am so lucky. Paul is not only a kind soul, but an absolute genius. While I had some visual sense of what I hoped the book would like with the different in styles of the still life painting and the narrator, Paul elevated it all and made the book about so much more than I had initially thought it could be. The snooty artist’s pathos really came from Paul’s work echoing back on mine. He found humor in moments far beyond what I had written and brought emotion to places where I hadn’t imagined it could hide. I am, simply, gobsmacked by his illustrations, having been a fan since my own elementary school days. Can I call him the GOAT? Too late, I have. I’m sure he’ll be mortified after finding out what that means.
BB: Doesn’t make it any less true. I’m not done with asking about process, though. Paul, I’m particularly intrigued by the patterns you use in the book. The endpapers. The pattern used on the chair. Where do you look for patterns when you want to include them in a book like this? Where did you find these particular patterns?
POZ: Well, the pattern on the chair in the painting is just stripes and triangles I thought wouldn’t compete with the painting’s tablecloth pattern. (I seem often to be spinning out patterns made of simple shapes when I doodle lately. A part of me is always trying to figure out the secrets of decorative art. FYI, I post my doodles a lot on Instagram.) The fancy pattern of the tablecloth had to be something better than I could make up, so I looked up damask patterns from the Renaissance. I chose one with peacocks that worked nicely with the shapes on the tabletop.
But drawing the pattern as it would appear on draped and folded cloth is something else. I’d already refined the still life image with its draping cloth (which I made up without a model), so how was I going to do this?
First I got the pattern into my computer, tracing it and adjusting the photo to make a true repeating pattern in outline. I have a supply of fabrics in my studio; I took a length of one that looked like it might drape nicely, printed out a page of pattern and spent an inordinate amount of time tracing it onto the cloth, using a light table and a Sharpie, only to find that it was no help whatsoever. Uncharacteristically but wisely, I gave up. I just had to try my best to imagine how this pattern would distort from draping, folding and wrinkling. If I did a bad job of it, I rationalize, it’s okay because this was not my painting, but a one by the artist in the book, and painting fabric could be his greatest flaw, who knows?

My patterns often become a book’s endpapers (not to mention a piece of clothing for me to wear at conferences, etc.). That’s again the case here: my Photoshop pattern found a use after all in Still Life’s endpapers, colored gold rather than the green and maroon of the tablecloth. I might add that the front endpaper is my Photoshop pattern. The back is different, subtly enough that I’ve been hoping only children notice, and what’s different I don’t want to give away!
BB: Nor should you. Alex, can we hope to see more picture books from you in the future?
AL: I truly hope so! I love the collaborative process of them and the deep care they demand. I love the deep focus on a short text and the way the words and pictures play with one another. I’ve always respected the form, since my own library school days, but I am now in love with the act of creating them. I hope I get to do more soon!
BB: And finally, this one’s for the both of you, what are you all working on next?
POZ: The answer to this question is up in the air still, so I will have to leave it a mystery, too.
AL: I’ve got a new middle grade series coming out, The Princess Protection Program, which is about fairy tale princesses who don’t like how their fairy tales go, so they flee to a boarding school in the real world, where things are not quite what they seem. It’s a super fun to be playing with iconic tales like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and the Little Mermaid in, hopefully, exciting new ways!
I’m also currently working with [another amazing artist who shall for now remain a secret] on a young adult graphic memoir from a time when I was 16, in the closet, and a championship skeet shooter. It too was story that demanded a visual telling. I seem to be all about words and pictures these days. I wonder if the artist in Still Life would give me lessons? I like the idea of a work that breaks out of its borders and makes its own rules. After 30 published books, I love that I still have so much to learn and so many new creative challenges ahead.
*it was called What Amanda Saw, written by Naomi Lazard, and I think only five or ten people ever saw it.
Ahhhh. My favorite interviews are the ones where you get just a sheer whopping amount of amazing context for a book. Now all we need to do is kick back and wait seven months for it to come out. Easy peasy! So while we wait, here’s the gorgeous cover for one and all to see:

You know what? That STILL isn’t enough! So we’re throwing in a book trailer that Paul created for this title as well. Just because I love you:
Such HUGE thanks to Alex and Paul for taking all that time to answer my questions today. Thanks too to none other than Martha Mihalick herself for taking the time to help put this all together. STILL LIFE is out everywhere September 3rd.
Filed under: Cover Reveal, Interviews

About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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No one writes book reviews the way you do, Betsy. So many times over the years I have tried to express just how much your words and illustrations add to my enjoyment of children’s literature. This post today is no exception. I’m filled with curiosity and looking forward to the experience of discovering STILL LIFE’s wonders . . . . if I live that long!
My question for you today is about timing. Why in the world would February 21st be the day you chose to introduce your readers to STILL LIFE? Publication in September is months and months away. So much “REAL LIFE” will take place between now and then for all of us. I personally would have preferred this review much closer to the fall debut. But my preferences do not matter in the overall world of book publication and promotion. I ask the question in all seriousness because I think your answer(s) will probably increase my understanding of book publication and promotion. I thank you as always regardless of whether time allows you to respond.
” I’m filled with curiosity and looking forward to the experience of discovering STILL LIFE’s wonders . . . . if I live that long!” —
Please live that long!
I’m not really the expert to answer your question about why a cover reveal takes place so long before publication, but I’m pretty sure I’m correct in saying that once a book is shown to reviewers and to buyers from bookstores and institutions, which has to begin well before publication and should ideally come before the big national conferences like ALA and whatever national and regional booksellers conventions take place, then the cover is public knowledge and it’s too late for a reveal. So early reveals have to be a fact of life. I hope the interest that this blog could stir up (and I’m so happy for it and grateful!) will spark more as the months go by. I wonder what kind of giant climax Alex and I can plan for September… Suggestions welcome!
Yes, Paul’s on the money here. The whole point of an early reveal like this is to build buzz amongst reviewers, award committees, booksellers, etc. There’s no advantage to coming to people’s attention last minute. Hence the early reveals.
Can you imagine Paul, himself, actually took time to address my question to you? Count me in as one “starry-eyed” recipient of an author/illustrator’s attention. So special that happened and so obvious he cares for ALL potential customers . . . My comments to him explain I was responding to you ONLY from my own personal viewpoint. But perhaps there are other blog readers who will learn from the replies from both of you!
Thank you, Paul, for taking time to address my question. Your explanation makes perfect sense. Betsy’s post was far more than a cover reveal . . . an introduction to STILL LIFE I found so filled with detail I immediately felt personal irritation to have this presented to ME at this time. I represent one elderly children’s literature enthusiast who will have no connection to your book until I am able to order a copy from Amazon in September. Her readership definitely includes the very individuals you were so kind to name. I see the advantages and also need for advance planning and early exposure.
I wish you much success with STILL LIFE.