“We just happen to have the same sense of humour, we like all the same things, and we have an enormous amount of trust in each other. Usually Jon will write the story, send it to me, and I illustrate it. We both like what each other does.”
Smith says the real collaboration comes in a post-production phase when Smith’s wife, designer Molly Leach, begins the design process. “Then it’s a question of making it all fit, editing stuff out and adding all the funny little jokes about the UPC code or the price or our biographies.”
Animation in Final Cut Pro
If Smith depends on Photoshop for his illustration, he also sees Final Cut Pro as an essential tool for his art.
“I’m obsessed by Photoshop and Final Cut Pro,” he says. “Jon and I are both huge animation fans and aficionados. We know everything about Czechoslovakian puppet animation, pin screen animation, Russian cutout animation and UPA cartoons from the 40s and 50s.”
“Our family would take the old Route 66 highway with its surreal architecture and lonely, desolate landscapes. I think that’s where my bizarre sense of design comes from.”
Smith uses Final Cut Pro to produce short promos and to explore animation concepts for some of their books.
“Right now I’m doing some pretty cool Happy Hocky Family animation tests in Final Cut Pro,” he says. “I love being able to import a Photoshop file into Final Cut, get a song off of iTunes, bring that in to the video and just burn the video onto DVDs.”
A Happy Childhood and Edward Gorey
Smith’s attributes his minor-key look at the world partly to a happy childhood influenced by Dr. Seuss, Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, monster movies and family road trips to Oklahoma.
“Our family would take the old Route 66 highway with its surreal architecture and lonely, desolate landscapes,” he explains. “I think that’s where my bizarre sense of design comes from.”
After studying illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena — where one teacher warned Smith that he’d never find a job in the U.S. — Smith moved to New York and promptly established himself as a successful freelance illustrator for some of the country’s leading magazines.
“If I had a Mac then…”
Today Smith works with his wife in a converted barn on their Connecticut property, which is populated by wild turkeys and bobcats. Flying squirrels cavort in the attic of their house. “‘The Happy Hocky Family Moves to the Country!’ is somewhat autobiographical,” Smith observes dryly.
“When I look back at some of my other books,” he adds, “I wish I had been working on the computer.” When Smith worked with writer Jack Prelutzky to bring an unfinished manuscript of Dr. Seuss to life in “Hooray for Diffendoofer Day,” he “worked in traditional collage, gluing stuff by hand.
“If I had a Mac then,” Smith says, “I could have made that book look 100 times better. You can solve a lot of problems painting manually, but I work much more decisively and faster on the computer.
“It’s like Kubrick,” Smith adds. “When he watched his films, he would want to go back and reedit them. I look back at my old stuff and say ‘I wish I’d had the computer then; I could have tweaked this…done that…”
