Julie Benbassat's THERE'S THAT SUN AGAIN

Illustrator Interview

Our new Design professor at Hollins University is the incredibly talented Julie Benbassat. She's been taking off in the illustration world the last few years and we're lucky to have her inventive and imaginitive voice and talent in our program. Want proof? I talked to her about her most recent picture book, THERE'S THAT SUN AGAIN, written by Mk Smith Despres for Neal Porter Books.

e: Hi Julie! We've loved having you as part of our Hollins family!
What was your creative process/medium, can you walk us through it?
I knew I wanted to do something different for this book than what I did for THE BOOK FROM FAR AWAY,

specifically in how I rendered the final art. I started off with sketching the child characters and my own Philly neighborhood I was living in at the time.

Mk’s poetry evoked images of a city landscape so I took in as much of my neighborhood as I could. With these sketches as well as some cute drawings from my very young cousins as inspiration, ideas began to form into whole compositions. I guess you can pinpoint my process as: Sketch, Thumbnails, More Sketches, Dummy Sketches, Linework, and then Color.

      For the final pieces, I used a mixture of traditional pencil line art and digital coloring in Procreate.

Mk’s poetry lent itself to this warm feeling that can only be expressed by the soft lines that graphite can give. I used a Kol-i-noor mechanical pencil specifically to get that buttery soft feel. It’s a drafting tool so it can get very fine details if sharpened while giving subtle shading gradients on its sides.

Procreate was used to color the piece with slight alterations in photoshop. I always try to restrict myself to as few layers as possible to maintain that sense of permanence that traditional media gives. I also made sure to start off each spread with a golden undertone to enhance that sun feeling. What can I say? I love the color yellow.

e: What was your path to publication?
I received the manuscript from my agent, Rebecca Sherman at Writers House, with a lovely note from the Holiday House editor, Taylor Norman, who said such wonderful things about my work and how this manuscript felt right in my hands. I immediately was in love with Mk’s writing style and honored by Taylors words, so I jumped on the chance to work on THERE'S THAT SUN AGAIN. We signed the contract and then went to working together in the next few months. It was such a pleasure to work with the whole Neal Porter books team, from Taylor’s expert input and Jennifer Browne’s page design instinct. They made the book just as special as Mk’s manuscript did.

e: Is there a unique or funny story behind the creation of this story?
I didn’t personally write it so I can’t say anything to the creation of the manuscript per say but I did find a lot of inspiration from these animal drawings my cousins made. They range in ages from 5 to 12 and have such a joyous way of drawing I wanted to bring to the children’s drawings in the book. One of these drawings hangs in my studio right now just because of how much I love it.

e: What do you think makes an illustration magical, what I call "Heart Art” - the sort that makes a reader want to come back to look again and again? I’m looking for your definition of “Heart Art.”
Personally, illustrations that bring you into the world/ concept so seamlessly you forget about the law of art. I used to be so enthralled by artists who applied realism (I still am) but as I’ve gotten older I see effective artists as people developing their own way of visualizing the world and stories they want to tell. It’s the reason Ezra Jack Keat’s shape dominant works are just as evocative as the more rendered works of Jessie Willcox Smith. How does this person draw a bird versus the next, and how do we as humans still recognize them both as symbols for birds. That’s the power and beauty of illustrating stories. You are allowing for people to suspend their belief through the way you see the world and in turn inspire them to create their own.

e: How do you advertise yourself (or do you)?
A mixture of social media and reaching out in real life. The world of publishing is in a strange place, where you are the one oftentimes advertising your book more than the publisher. That has positives and negatives, but you have to try and make the best out of it. Many of my fellow illustrators have very little followers but put so much effort into reels, blog posts, and public outreach that it makes up for the lack of social media presence. I have a good number of Instagram followers, but I hardly see that translate to helping me sell books. I recently had a successful book launch for THERE'S THAT SUN AGAIN at my local bookstore, Children’s Book World, and most of it came down to reaching out to people I knew in the area and not social media. It’s a capricious aspect to the job but you get a hang of it eventually.

e: What is your favorite or most challenging part of being a creator?
My favorite part is getting to work on a range of projects that offer up so much variety in subject matter. One day I’m illustrating an editorial article about the mafia and then I’m illustrating a chapter book about a girl growing a tree on her head. (This is for an upcoming chapter book with Candlewick woohoo!) It keeps the job from getting monotonous and gives me a chance to learn something new.
      The most challenging aspect is trying to make work without feeling beholden to impossible expectations. I consider myself new-ish to publishing, as I worked as an editorial illustrator for most of my professional career before transitioning to books. In that time, I developed a toxic trait of never feeling like my work was good enough. (Editorial can be cut throat). This transition to books has made me open my eyes to how vast the art world is, and the idea of the “best art” doesn’t really exist in that way. I still have issues unpacking those high standards for myself but I’m working on it.

Is there something in particular about this story you hope readers will take away with them, perhaps something that isn’t immediately obvious?
I hope that readers, young and old, will read this book as it was intended to be: a poem. It’s not just a story of two children becoming friends over the course of a day, it’s also a story of sensations that children might feel in times of change (adults too). I’ve done a few readings of it out loud and the warmth of the words feels like soup for the soul. A gentle slam poetry to the heart that reminds you how much one can feel over the course of a day.

e: Lovely! What are you working on next or what would be your dream project?
I’m currently in between finishing that chapter book about a girl growing a tree on her head, doing final art for a book about a fox named Mungo and planning out dummy revisions for a book about an art collector turned suffragist. I am so grateful to have this range of work and am excited to see what 2025 has in store.
      My dream project is something that alternates from day to day but right now it would be working on a book on fairytales/ myths around the world. I love those old Rackham and Dillon illustrations and if I could do something like that, that would be so cool. Fairytales and mythology have guided children and adults alike through hard times and I think we need that more than ever right now.

e: Thank you, Julie! Can't wait to see more of your evocative work!