 My name is Kay Pie Steele and I write and illustrate picture books. I'm also the San Francisco Public Library Summer Stride Artist for 2023. I wanted to make a video showing you my process for making the art for Summer Stride because I think that oftentimes we see a poster or we see a book and you just see the final product. You don't see all of the ideas and the thinking that went into it. Do you ever sit down to make something like a story or a comic or something like that? Oftentimes you don't get it perfect on the first try. You have to do a little bit of thinking and do a little bit of planning and sketching and maybe you even have some drafts that you throw away first, right? That's called a process. And a process is something that a lot of picture book authors and illustrators go through every time they make something new and it's exactly what I went through when I made the art for Summer Stride. The place that I begin that process is in my sketchbook. This is where I write down ideas. I carried around with me pretty much everywhere. I also use my phone if I need to use that but I try to keep everything in my sketchbook because it's physical and I get I like to write things down but this is where I kept track of all of my ideas that I have for Summer Stride. And these were all topag ideas. This is the final one that we ended up with. You can see there are a lot and then this is where I wrote down just everything I could remember about San Francisco and all the things that I wanted to include in the artwork. So things like rainbow flags and hummingbirds and ravens and cargo bikes and the fire department and burritos and my favorite place to get like pizza and pastries and all of that stuff. Now as I was making the art for this I was really thinking about like okay what do I want to communicate about libraries? What is my experience of libraries? What is my experience of San Francisco and reading? So I wrote down some ideas and then I started doing some sketches and so this was the sketch I had to do for the um this is the bus ad. I started with this idea and I knew that there were going to be a bunch of people basically on the bus and all engaged in different kinds of reading and listening of things like audiobooks and stuff like that. So I took this idea and then I made it a little more clear so that I could send it to people at the library and they would actually be able to like see what was going on because you can't really see what's going on with that one. And so I came up with all these different characters of people you might see on the bus and then um we emailed back and forth about this. I wanted to make sure that a lot of San Francisco was represented so the staff was really amazing at getting back to me and giving me suggestions. There's a lot of back and forth which I really appreciate and then when it came to make the final art I made a bigger sketch and so this is the same dimensions as what you see on the bus and then I traced over that and made the final art for this. The final art meaning I used actually this pen to ink it and then I scanned it using the scanner over here and then I colored it all digitally with my computer. My process changes a lot I would say even though I am a professional I still am learning all the time and I like to give myself the space and time that I need to be able to feel comfortable doing new things. James Marshall who's one of my favorite picture book makers once said about his process what I do is I sit down and if I fall over laughing I know I'm onto something right and I think about that a lot because sometimes when you get an assignment or in my case if I get a job I can get overwhelmed pretty easily and when I get overwhelmed it's like my whole body tenses up and I'm holding my pen and the drawings that I make tend to be a lot tighter and they don't really have that liveliness and fun that my drawings are or that my drawings have when I'm working at my best. So I try to remind myself to at least try to have fun while I'm making this art and there are a few ways that I do that one way is I will make a really quick drawing on a scrap piece of paper just to loosen up another way I do that is I just start with something that I know I can draw easily like if I'm drawing a person the eyes or something that they usually start with and they're a really nice anchor just make a face around and another thing I'll do if I'm starting to notice that I'm getting kind of tense and overwhelmed I'll just stop working for an hour or so and go outside and take a break I really recommend that. I really hope that you enjoy the summer stride art for this year and I hope that it inspires you to spend some time at your local library and to check out some books to go to a new library branch or to maybe even grab some paper and some pencils and make some drawings of your own.