Inside the Mind . . .
of Shawn Boyles - Illustrator of Cavern of Babel

QUESTION: How did you get interested in drawing, and how old were you when you knew you had artistic talent?

SHAWN: I got interested in drawing when I was in 4th grade. Someone came to my school and taught us all how to draw Mickey Mouse. I went home that very day and started drawing. I started copying the characters in the Sunday funnies - Garfield, Snoopy, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible. I was pretty proud of my work so I went and showed my mom. She looked at them and said I did a really good job tracing them. I told her I hadn't traced them. I had just looked at them and drawn them. She told me I shouldn't lie. So I went and grabbed the originals and showed her saying "See, mine are larger, I couldn't have traced them." Since that day my mom has been one of my biggest, if not my number 1, supporter. It's nice to have a supportive family. From that time on, I've always had a sketch book and it goes with me everywhere.

QUESTION: Are you able to draw for a living? What do you do?

SHAWN: Yes, I'm lucky enough to have found people that are willing to pay me for my artwork. I work for a video game company named Wahoo. I am a concept artist there, which means I get to design all the characters and spaceships and aliens and everything that goes into the videogames. I've worked on quite a few games now including Outpost Kaloki X, Cloning Clyde, and Band of Bugs for the xbox 360 and some other projects that aren't out yet and I can't tell you about (or I would have to kill you).

QUESTION: What did you think about illustrating alpacas? Did you know anything about alpacas when you started working with Cavern of Babel?

SHAWN: I am sorry to say that when I started this project I thought alpacas and llamas were the same animal. To be truthful, if confronted by a herd of angry alpacas and llamas, I would still be hard pressed to tell them apart. Don't tell Buttersby that though, she's already mad at me enough for not getting her good side in one of the pictures.

QUESTION: Who was your favorite character to draw? Why?

SHAWN: To draw? I'd have to say Meander. Giving him all those dreadlocks was a lot of fun to do. He seemed to come around much more quickly than some other characters. My favorite character in the book, however, would have to be Ozzy, the sarcastic, larger than life mouse. (Again, don't tell Buttersby.) I do have to give props to the two snakes that appear in the book. I had a ton of fun drawing them because well...I'm a boy, and snakes are cool.

QUESTION: Which character in the book do you think you are most like?

SHAWN: If I were to answer that question I would say Meander, because I'm so cheerful and optimistic. If my wife were to answer for me she would say I'm most like Ozzy. You can ask her why yourself.

QUESTION: We've gotten such great comments about the book cover. What made you decide to illustrate Buttersby and the snake?

SHAWN: See question #4 - snakes are cool. Really though, whenever I read a book, there are moments in the book that seem to pop out at me and demand to be painted. There are quite a few images in my head waiting to come out from books that I've read. And going through Buttersby, there were a couple that begged and pleaded with me. This is the one that won. It started out as just a cover image and not a wraparound cover, but talking with Isaac Stewart (the books designer and a heck of a nice guy) we tossed around the idea of it being a wraparound cover and loved it. So now it's much cooler than it would have been otherwise.

QUESTION: How would you advise someone who had an interest and talent in drawing and wanted to pursue art as a career?

SHAWN: Talent is irrelevant. Everyone thinks that artists are magicians and we are born with this amazing ability to make pretty pictures. I'm not going to deny that people have varying degrees of talent, but work is the most important factor. I have a brother-in-law who has way more natural artistic talent than I ever had, but he went through years and years of study to be a doctor, while I went through years and years of work to be an artist. Because of our respective lives of work, he'll treat my kids with broken bones and I'll paint the pictures. Anyone can be an artist, it just takes practice. No one is born a great piano player, it takes hours and hours of work. Art is the same. Sorry to beat this one over the head, but I've heard from enough people that think they can't be artists. There's no mysticism about it. I'm an artist because I spent the majority of my life practicing at it. If you practice enough it will come. I once heard a very respected artist talk about becoming an artist as like a road trip. The person that drives 8 hours a day toward that destination will get there a lot faster that the person that drives 2 hours a day. Also the chicks dig it.