(sorry it’s taken me so long to post this, I wanted to do justice to this amazing event!)

Kadir Nelson, award-winning author and illustrator, had the crowd laughing at pictures he drew at five and learning from research he spent years on during his interesting and engaging talk at the PLA Children’s Author Luncheon on March 26.  (thanks to Simon & Schuster for sponsoring this event!)

Nelson opened by telling the audience the story of his beginnings as an artist.  He always thought of himself as a serious artist, even at the age of five, he considered his paper and pencil his tools, not toys.

Visits with his mother to his childhood public library in Atlantic City helped Kadir find art books, which helped mold his style, and books from the classic Lee J. Ames “How To Draw” series, which helped him with tracing and drawing practice.  Nelson shared childhood drawings (preserved by his mother) showing the evolution of his style from a very young age.

cartoon characters copied from Nelson’s math textbook

Nelson’s entry into a “create your own superhero” contest

Nelson kept drawing as he grew older, drawing his favorite athlete, Michael Jordan, and exaggerating the human form to try to use his illustrations to show feelings in his work.  Years later, he would collaborate with author Ntozake Shange on the book Ellington Was Not a Street.  Shange explained that in her work she strove to have “beauty overcome negativity”, something Nelson recognized had long been a goal of his own art and creation.

Graduating from college with a degree in illustration, Nelson spent some time developing the look of films through his illustrations.  Though he found his work on Stephen Spielberg’s Amistad particularly satisfying, he longed for more involvement in the end result of his work and he soon found himself illustrating picture books.

Still, Nelson found himself wanting to combine his more adult, painterly side with his work in children’s books.  He just wasn’t sure how.  Years ago, when he discovered an episode of the Ken Burns documentary Baseball that dealt with the Negro Leagues, he had been inspired to make a series of paintings about the Leagues.  Nelson sold them to Sports Illustrated in 1999 and had continued to make paintings in the series.  Maybe creating a children’s book about the Negro Leagues using some of these paintings was the combination he was looking for?

An editor agreed and asked Nelson who he had in mind for writing the accompanying text.  Though Nelson had many ideas, the editor mentioned it would take time to line up an author.  It was then he decided he would become the author and he dove into the complicated research process, not only conducting hours of interviews with surviving Negro League Players but reading dozens of books about the subject.  Nelson, who had admitted to the crowd earlier that as a boy he “hated” reading now found himself enthralled by his research, feeling that “it wasn’t reading, it was learning.”

Nelson shared some slides of the long, detailed research process that went into creating his 2009 title We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. This included process such as taking detailed notes before starting a painting; a laundry list of every detail that had to be included in each painting to make sure it was accurate, from the weather to the way uniforms fit.  The research process took seven years, from 2000-2007, but the results were stunning, his author debut winning both the 2009 Coretta Scott King Author Award and the 2009 Robert F. Sibert Medal.  The paintings from We Are The Ship are currently on a nationwide tour.

Nelson then shared with the crowd some of his newest work, including his foray into working with fabric arts in the newly released Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya by Donna Jo Napoli and a painting from his upcoming biography of Joe Lewis to be written by Matt de la Pena.

In wrapping up his presentation, which was full of laughter and not only glimpses into the artist’s development and his artistic process, Nelson summed up his work so far as the continued effort to turn something negative into something positive and there was no doubt the crowd at the 2010 PLA Author’s Luncheon agreed he had succeeded.

This was a truly enlightening and engaging speech from one of the most influential and creative children’s illustrators (and authors!) working today.  I’m sure everyone in attendance felt, like I did, that it was a highlight of the PLA conference.