Sneak Preview: A Cat Nap Conversation with Brian Lies and a Peek Inside This Fall Release

What do we do when we experience extreme creativity in the picture book realm? Sort of a subjective question, I know. I might find something creative that you find pedantic or dull. And you might think something was brilliant that I feel is repetitive and old hat. But there are rare cases where an author or illustrator goes so far above and beyond the norm that they create something that is, quite frankly, inarguably without compare.

Enter Brian Lies.

Today we’re going to talk about his fall title Cat Nap (out September 30th). And since this book is a bit difficult to describe without having seen it first, here is the extended description from Harper Collins:

With lush paintings and intricately constructed 3-D artwork, bestselling and Caldecott Honor–winning author-illustrator Brian Lies introduces a sleepy kitten whose afternoon nap transforms into an epic journey through art, time, and history. Perfect for fans of They All Saw a Cat, Museum Trip, and Jumanji. Includes back matter.

In the warm, late afternoon sunlight, a girl sits on the couch reading a book. Her kitten dozes nearby. But when Kitten notices a mouse and dives after it through a framed poster on the wall, an epic chase through time, art, and history ensues. Is it a dream? That’s up to the reader to decide, but for the kitten, every leap and bound is full of suspense and makes for a masterpiece.

Caldecott Honor–winning and New York Times bestsellingauthor-illustrator Brian Lies creates a truly unique picture book journey that invites young readers through the galleries of an art museum as well as through time, space, and history. As the cat and mouse leap from one page to the next, they are portrayed in the style of masterful artworks from history—an ancient Egyptian relief, an illuminated manuscript, a stained-glass window, a ceramic dog—each painstakingly and lovingly re-created in its original media by Brian Lies. When the sly mouse gets away, Kitten finds himself lost and alone. Will art help him find his way home?

This visual showstopper by an award-winning and bestselling picture book creator offers readers a page-turning cat and mouse chase, an introduction to famous works of art throughout history, an epic adventure story, and a homecoming. Back matter includes information about how each of the illustrations in the book was created, notes on the original artworks featured in the book, and an afterword inviting young readers to make, create, and build things.

Now I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to put up the art from this book first (if you click on the images you can expand them). And only after you have seen them will I dive into my Q&A with Brian about the title. Otherwise, I worry you won’t get the full effect.

Take a gander:

Cool, right? Now please understand that this was all done by hand.

Every. Last. Image.

Oh yeah. We’re gonna have a lot to talk about…

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Betsy Bird: Brian! A million thanks for talking to me today about CAT NAP. The term “ambitious” doesn’t seem sufficient to describe this book. What you’ve done here feels as though it should rightfully have taken you a good decade. Where on earth did the idea for this book come from originally?

Brian Lies: This one has been brewing for over a decade.  Our gray Russian Blue / Siamese mix cat Dylan disappeared one day, and we searched the house from basement to attic—no cat! But then several hours later he sauntered into the room, his whiskers covered with cobwebs.  He’d clearly had an adventure.  But where?  We joked that he’d found a wormhole in space and time, and I started imagining him in ancient Egypt.  That turned into an adventure of my own, creating a story in which Kitten encounters a variety of artworks before he finds his way home again.  But the twist would be creating the book images in both 2D and 3D, as close to the originals as possible.  That sounded like fun!

BB: Yes, but in your rather extensive notes at the end of the book you mention how much easier it would have been to simply digitally place the kitten in each of these images. Instead, you opted to actually go so far as to make pieces that looked like the originals. At what point in the process did you come to the decision to go this route?

Brian: It was baked into the project from the very beginning, a self-dare.  I’ve worked with a variety of materials over the years, and the whole thing seemed a lot more fun if I attempted to create look-alikes of original artworks, all in their original media.  But the project started rolling for real two years ago, when I created a miniature display for Beacon Hill Books in Boston, a permanent, tiny home for their squirrel mascot.  I realized I was problem-solving and making things as I’d planned to do with this book—ultimately it was my “embravening” myself to attempt it!

BB: A perfectly cromulent word. You say that some of the artistic techniques were new for you. Which ones were they and how did you go about learning them?  

Brian: The Mblo portrait mask was probably the one I worried about the most.  While I’ve whittled at sticks with a Swiss Army knife before, I’d never actually carved in wood before this.  And it’s very different from working in clay, where you can always add more material if you need to.  In wood, it’s subtractive, so you’ve got to be sure you can fit the eventual carving in the block of wood with which you start.  And if you get too aggressive and whack a big chunk of wood away, you’re sunk.

BB: Paging through this book, it feels as though you purposely chose the most difficult styles imaginable. Clay! Gold leaf! Illuminated manuscripts! As you went through the Met and selected the pieces that you wanted to use in the book, what factors did you take into consideration?

Brian: My first research trip to The Met was a “what if?” lark—I was just looking for artworks that grabbed my imagination, things that might be fun for Kitten to interact with.  The delightfully odd “Portrait of Emma Van Name” was an obvious choice—it’s one of those strange mid-1800s portraits in which children appear as miniature adults.  In this one, Emma stands next to an enormous wine glass filled with berries.  What’s that about?  And she’s in a ridiculously ornate frame.  Could I duplicate that frame at home, too? 

One thing that was important to me was to reflect world art as broadly as possible.  Every human culture has created stunning pieces of art, and since there was only room for nine artworks appear in CAT NAP, it wasn’t possible to represent the entire spectrum of art history.  But I was able to include Egyptian, Asian, African, Mexican, U.S. and European artworks. I snuck in a trompe l’oeil painting, and some graphic novel-inspired pages, too.  Maybe kids can round out the representation by creating their own museum lookalikes!

BB: I like that! Was there any particular piece that gave you more trouble than you anticipated? Or anything you had to abandon along the way because it just wasn’t working out?   

Brian: In the stained glass pieces, “Gathering Manna,” I had to learn how to work with vitreous paint, which is essentially ground glass paint, brushed on a prepared surface and then kiln-fired.  I found a small craft kiln on Facebook Marketplace, and drove two hours to pick it up in a sketchy handoff in the parking lot of a derelict Friendly’s restaurant off of the Massachusetts Turnpike.  I had several failures with the kiln—laboriously painting pieces of glass, only to have them crack when I underestimated their cooling time.  But like most skills we learn, I developed a sense of how long they had to fire and cool to come out unscathed.

There were two places where I didn’t follow the original artworks as closely as I wanted to.  With the carved Egyptian panels, I knew I couldn’t source stone that was close enough to the originals, so I poured slabs of Hydrocal plaster and after carving the images with dental tools, stained and painted the slabs to look like stone.  And then, with the illuminated manuscript, I was able to source goatskin parchment from India—but the original prayer book is SO small –about 3” tall–that I can’t begin to imagine how the artist painted the miniscule marginal images.  And because we’d have to blow the image up for readers to see it clearly in the book, I decided to break away from strict exactitude, and paint the images larger.  I had to remind myself that the images as they appear in the book were more important than creating an exact “forgery.”

BB: In your Acknowledgements you mention that the photo credits are all public domain courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What was your relationship with the museum when crafting this book? Was it done in conjunction with them, or was it something you proposed and they allowed? (One certainly hopes this will be prominently featured in their gift shop at some point)

Brian: It would be an honor to see the book in their gift shop!   I made my research visits anonymously, but reached out to several experts with questions about particular artworks.  Michael Carter, the Librarian at The Cloisters, was generous in his time helping me view an exact-size facsimile of “The Hours of Jeanne D’Evreaux,” which was an exciting research experience.  But otherwise, I did my homework pretty much unnoticed.

At first, I had thought I might set the book at my other favorite museum, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where I spent countless hours during my time at the Boston Museum School.  but I have a long-standing emotional connection to The Met—sparked in childhood by E.L. Konigsburg’s classic  book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  As a kid, I loved the idea of copying Claudia and Jamie’s adventure at The Met, and CAT NAP was a way to have my own personal imagination adventure there!

BB: I think your note at the end talking about how you didn’t want your art to look like it was made by a kid when you were a kid is going to hit home for a great many people. How would you best like librarians, educators, and parents to use this book with kids?

Brian: For me, this project was a counterpoint to artificial intelligence.  Sure, a computer can create amazing images through prompts, but where’s the human feel in them?  Could a computer-generated magician’s illusions dazzle us the way a real magician’s does?  Or does the power of a magical illusion come from the fact that we know it can’t be done, but . . . how was it done???   Part of the awe we experience through real artworks is the idea that real humans created them.

So I hope that the story of CAT NAP will inspire some kids to wonder “could I really make that, too?”  The answer is YES!  Skills that previous humans developed can be learned.  Why not YOU?  There’s nothing like that feeling of “I made this!”

I also hope that some kids who never visit museums might get a tiny glimpse of the wider world of art (is it always just a painting in a frame?) and it might spark their curiosity to explore more.

BB: Finally, I can’t imagine you haven’t deserved a rest after this, but what’s next for you? What else is on your plate?

 Brian: I recently Illustrated Melissa Stewart’s Meet the Mini-Mammals / A Night at the Natural History Museum (Beach Lane Books), and then next year is the publication of Diffy (Christy Ottaviano Books / Little, Brown).  It’s a story of how we make connections and stories, as seen through the eyes of my fictional version of an anglerfish whose life is changed when an illustrated dictionary lands on his deep-sea ledge home—and reveals images in its margins that he can’t comprehend.

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If I haven’t stressed it enough, I will now. You absolutely need to see this book. Pre-order it now, if you can. Cat Nap, after all, will be out September 30th. Many thanks to Brian for his fantastic answers and to John Sellers and the team at Harper Collins for this early sneak preview.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Excerpts, Interviews