Ellen Jin Over is an art director, visual development artist, and illustrator. She’s also our featured artist in this quarter’s Illustrator Gallery! Her work has appeared on televisions all over the world for the last 20 years. Spirit Riding Free, now on Netflix, is her latest project. Before that, she was art director on Disney’s Tinkerbell movies for nine years.
She didn’t always know what she wanted to do with her life until her senior year in high school pushed her to figure it out. “I got lucky that my long-forgotten childhood obsession of drawing and making paper dolls suddenly came back to my mind one day and I decided to major in art. After studying illustration at Otis, I stumbled upon a job interview for a position in an animation company.” The rest is history! Her program of choice is Adobe PhotoShop, something we tend to think of for editing photos, not creating illustrations, but Ellen does beautiful things with it! She tells us more in the interview below.
Sarah Parker-Lee: How did you choose to use Photoshop over other programs?
Ellen Jin Over: Photoshop has been around for 30 years. When I was going to school in the early 90’s, that was the only computer software that was available for students at Otis School of Art and Design. It was mostly for graphic designers. It just happened that illustrators like me found it useful to create images too…Photoshop started to be used more in some animation studios for digital paintings [in the] late 90’s.
There are many painting software today such as Painter, Coral Painter, Illustrator, etc–some for professionals and some for “regular Joe” doodling. I just have not found any other software that is comparable to Photoshop. It’s fast and easy.
SPL: Do you only work digitally or do you do any hand drawing? What do you think are the benefits of each? Continue reading
SCBWI loves celebrating our members’ successes and noteworthy news, and there are many! Read on to find out who’s got something to shout about. Digital high-fives welcome in the comments!
Snowed by Maria Alexander has been nominated for the 2017 Anthony Award for Best Children’s YA Novel. The World Mystery Convention, aka 
Sleepy Toes, by Kelli McNeil, illustrated by Cori Doerrfeld, Scholastic, ages 0-5, Board Book, ISBN: 978-133-803-07-23, released 3/1/17.
A Squirrel in Trouble, by Farida Mirza, Oxford University Press, ages 4-6, Picture Book, ISBN: 978-0-19-940485-8, released 5/1/2017. 
Once a month, I lead a group called 
Most folks in kid lit were big readers, and writers, as soon as they could string together sentences, myself included. But literacy among children isn’t a given. Kids’ book sales have been rising, which is great news, but there are still huge populations of kids who are underserved and overlooked when it comes to literacy. And that isn’t just bad for kid lit sales, it’s bad for society at large. According to the 
Ashlyn Anstee: It helps that all of them are a little different, so it’s actually been fun to jump between them, thank goodness. I started out first as a reader–I was a voracious reader as a kid (and my mom’s a teacher-librarian). I didn’t really start to draw until my teens. I fell in love with animation, and it wasn’t until I graduated from college that I started to rediscover illustration and kids’ books. I find writing the hardest, so I’ve been focusing on that, lately!
Agent and author 
Kari Sutherland: I’d say both fields help me pinpoint when a character is behaving in a way that isn’t authentic or in a way that may produce a reaction in readers that the author is not intending. Having studied the way minds work, it gives me insight into personality and character growth. With my English studies, I know how to catch and keep a reader’s attention through voice, sentence structure, and plotting. Psychology classes also prepared me to be an excellent listener and to help coax out what a person really wants to say – in this case, through their manuscripts.
Written by Heather Banis and Ronna Mandel
Kite Tales 