Donald Crews
This is where I keep everything I’ve learned about children’s book author-illustrator Donald Crews.
I’ve organized it like a Q&A for easy perusing. At the end, you’ll find a list of his work and a bibliography of the resources I’ve found so far.
His life and work
“Crews has elevated books for very young children to an art form. His bold illustrations raise the ordinary into stylized representations.”
—The American Library Association
What was his childhood like?
Donald Crews was born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey and lived with his dad, mom, older brother, older sister, and younger sister. Both his parents had Southern backgrounds.
Their farm roots produced people with the need and ability to find inventive solutions to everyday problems. Those solutions had to be crafted from whatever materials were at hand. Artistic solutions sometimes; practical solutions always.
His mother was a seamstress with a great work ethic who worked in the garment industry. Crews remembered “her turning brightly colored feed bags into cotton dresses for my sisters.” She lived until she was 105 and her favorite books were Bigmama’s and Shortcut.
His father worked by day as an “independent small-job provider” and by night at the Pennsylvania Railroad.
My father…wanted me just to succeed at something. He was not specific about what that might be.
Because of his father’s job, they got free trips to visit family, so Crews spent summers at his grandparents’ farm in Cottondale, Florida (which inspired some of his books). Though his grandma couldn’t read well, she loved being read to by Crews and was always supportive of him.
She declared early on that I was clever and smart and would someday be somebody. Of course, most Bigmamas say that about their grandsons. But I didn’t know that then and considered it as a prophecy meant for me alone. Failure was impossible.
During the year, Crews attended school, did chores, and hung out with friends in the neighborhood.
Our apartment was very small. We made our own wagons and scooter, forts and cabins. We staged plays and made the costumes and scenery. We made one working bicycle out of two that didn’t work, and one scooter out of a pair of skates. It might have been possible to buy some of those things, but not as much fun.
He was a good student and was known as an artist. Teachers often asked him to draw stuff for lessons (like a map on the chalkboard). He took “Saturday art classes” at the local high school.
We all did fairly well in school, but I developed a tendency to doodle in the margins of papers instead of solving the problem at hand. My mother was summoned to school for consultation more than once.
He was surrounded by books in his school’s small library and indivudal classrooms. And he was surrounded by books at home.
We had books at home—lots of books illustrated with pictures, which extended the pleasure and understanding of the words.
How did he get his start as an artist?
He applied to Newark’s Arts High School and was accepted which expanded his friendships. He also connected with a teacher during his senior year named Seymour Landsman who taught him, inspired him, and encouraged him.
He introduced us to art and culture. We read the New Yorker and designed covers for it. We copied art from books and posters. He got us into the habit of reading the New York Times and taking advantage of the Newark Museum.
At the end of the year, Crews faced graduation. Landsman “announced” the plan he thought Crews should follow. He said, “You will apply to Cooper Union, you will take the test, you will be admitted, and you will do well.” They stayed in touch until he passed away.
The opinions of outsiders usually make a stronger impression than relatives.
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How did he develop his skills?
He attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City.
Cooper Union was a fantastic place to be in the fifties. It was full of like-minded students and instructors who appreciated willing learners. It was an ideal place from which to discover museums and music and film and the electric environment of New York City. Our graphics instructor, Rudolph de Harak, gave each student a private evaluation early on in his class.
During a private meeting, his teacher Rudolph de Harak told him, “Don, you don’t have very much talent, but you do have the determination to stay with a problem until you make something of it.” He took it as a compliment.
He met artist Ann Jonas during his second-year.
We had an immediate attraction and quickly became fast friends. We shared a reserved reluctance about exchanging personal information—except with each other.
They both graduated in 1959.
How did he begin his career?
After graduation, Jonas and Crews were reunited through a job with their teacher Rudy de Harak (Crews worked as an assistant art director at Dance Magazine).
Our friendship blossomed into a lifelong love affair lasting fifty-one years. We did briefly discuss the social impediments of a black/white relationship, but we decided that we had no problem with it and would avoid anyone who did. Our now-friend Rudy suggested that since we were artists, nontraditional behavior was expected from us—and was even an asset. Nothing major ever seriously challenged our lives.
In 1961, he was drafted into the Army and deployed to Frankfurt, Germany. Ann eventually came with him, and they were married about six months after in Germany. They had two daughters, Nina and Amy.
While living there, Crews worked on his portfolio. Inspired by his favorite designers like Paul Rand, Bruno Munari, and Charles Eames, he included a sample picture book.
I was enamored of the spare, abstract approach of the Swiss Design movement, and so I used abstract images to introduce the alphabet and words in a book I called We Read: A to Z. The German couple with whom we shared our house was very excited by it and suggested I submit it to German publishing houses. I did—and it was promptly and reasonably rejected. It was, after all, a primer written in English.
After their family returned to the United States, Jonas was determined to support themselves with freelance work. While she took care of the kids, Crews looked for jobs for both of them. They designed book jackets, college texts, science books, record brochures, and other printed material.
Nina explained that because her parents worked at home, “they were always working and never working at the same time.” Their house was full of jazz music and talk radio programs. Though they were “shooed away when deadlines loomed,” her parents were always available. Sometimes they asked the girls to pose for photographs and drawings used in their freelance projects.
They raised their daughters in the city for the “high and low” culture and “marveled at the architecture and the energy of our hometown.” Though they sacrificed some feeling of safety, they wanted their family to “be inspired and creatively energized the minute they walked out our front door.” They took bike rides together “past the abandoned piers on the west side of Manhattan, down to the Staten Island Ferry,” just to see the view. Crews always carried a camera with him to “record scenery and signs, or events such as parades, bicycle races, and county fairs” for his books.
When his daughter was away from camp, she would receive long letters from her mom with sparse special details from her dad.
One letter begins, “Don’t have much to say so I’ll write small…” It is a tiny handwritten message occupying a rectangle the size of a postage stamp in the middle of a letter-sized page. On the envelope of another letter sent by my mother, he drew an elaborate gothic-style N for the first initial of my name. A third letter featured a self-portrait, because while he had sent photos of my sister, my mother, and the cat, he had none of himself to send.
How did he break into publishing?
One of the first art directors he met was Ava Weiss who gave him assignments and called him a “genius.”
I would duck into her office sometimes on the way to other appointments, for a “genius” recharge.
Later, he met editor Elizabeth Shub at Harper & Row who asked if he had ever made a picture book. He shared it and she passed it on to Ursula Nordstrom. We Read: A to Z was published by Harper in 1967.
I was elated but not yet convinced that children’s books should be my main focus, so Ann and I continued as freelance designers. But I was curious enough about my ability to create something else for children—this time intending it for publication from the start.
What inspired Freight Train and his other books?
Though their freelancing business gave them work, Jonas and Crews weren’t “first call” for big projects. Their friend John Condon advised them:
Find something that only you can do, and be the only one who can supply it.
Crews immediately thought of books. The result was Freight Train which he submitted to Greenwillow Books where his editors now were.
[They] responded to the dummy with the kind of enthusiasm that keeps creative juices flowing.
They wanted to buy it before seeing the entire dummy, but Crews told his editor “she couldn’t have it until she had looked at all of it.”
Crews was now a full-time children’s book creator, and the response to his book was incredible. HIs first picture books explored concepts like locations and transportation in innovative ways like Ten Black Dots in 1968 and the famous Freight Train which won a Caldecott Honor in 1979.
Freight Train inspired other popular transportation-related books like Truck (1980, Caldecott Honor), School Bus (1984), Flying (1986), and Sail Away (1995).
After that, the things that had pleased me as a child—trucks, planes, boats, buses, and bicycles—seemed like appropriate subjects. Many of my books are taught in school and catalogued as transportation, and that’s fine with me. I enjoy finding the exciting details of a vehicle’s trip through thirty-two pages.
In 1983, he started making books with people at the center — like a cameo of himself in Parade (1983), “a sort of Hitchcock moment.”
In the autobiographical books, Bigmama’s and Shortcut, I had the opportunity to put a physical black presence in my books. My world is full of black people, and they had always been in my books when a person was needed. But now they were the very subject of the book—the lead characters of the story.
He drew from his childhood summers spent in Cottondale and the characters were inspired by family members.
Some nights even now, I think that I might wake up in the morning and be transported to Bigmama's with the whole summer ahead of me.
Who has been the most influential person in Crews’s career?
In his Wilder award acceptance speech, Crews credits his wife Ann Jonas as the most influential person in his career:
Ann is the love of my life—first, last, and always. She is, as I said at the beginning, most responsible for giving me—us—the courage to try to be successful artists in New York. She supplied the will to stay on course and to try and try again until we accomplished what we had started. I can’t say that too loudly or too often. Any honor that comes to me I unreservedly share with her.
What or who inspires his work?
Some inspirations include childhood memories of traveling to his grandparents’ house, his dad working for the railroad, his love of the space between thing, and his explorations of the world — armed with a camera.
He was also inspired by Paul Rand and his picture books called Sparkle And Spin, I Know A Lot of Things, and Listen Listen.
These were books that I looked at and thought that if such a good graphic designer as he was could do a picture book, so might I. The bold colors and the simple forms and just the straightforward way he presented materials were things that I thought I might emulate.
Other designers like Bruno Munari and Charles Eames who also made children’s books to “bring joy and entertainment to young people.”
I decided on the form of a picture book because of my knowledge of people like Paul Rand and Bruno Munari and designers who had worked in picture books as a medium and had all the elements that I needed for my own work needs: design and color and typography and all the things I wanted to demonstrate my abilities in.
As Minari and Rand were influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, and Futurism (celebrates the creation of machinery), it is no surprise that you can see those influences in Crews’s work as well. Other comparisons have been made to Futurist artist Boccioni (machinery), Pop artist Robert Indiana (bright colors, graphic shapes), and Constructivist picture books of the Soviet Union in the 1920s (emphasis on transportation and natural science).
How did he develop his unique storytelling voice?
His daughter Nina describes her childhood years as a “visual education.” Her parents taught her and her sister Amy “to look at the world” and shared their “passion for visual and cinematic art.” Both of her parents taught her that “the way something is presented is a form of expression and has meaning,” and emphasized the actions, gestures, and pictures in the space between words.
When I look at my father’s body of work, I marvel at his elegant visual solutions for telling any story. He knows how to communicate in the spaces between words. This ability is something integral to his temperament, and it was an elemental part of my childhood.
Nina describes how his storytelling voice is similar to his personality and communication style.
They are often brief and to the point, their tone imperative — the complete opposite of the longer digressive chats we would have with our mother….He’s not one to ramble on but is clear and concise in word and gesture.
How does he view picture books?
Crews asserts that he wouldn’t have ever started in picture books if they weren’t “primarily stories that can be told without the words.”
Ideally, if the pictures are done well enough you shouldn't need the words; the pictures should tell the story. The story should be full and fulfilling and interesting even without any words.
He was drawn to the use of illustration, color, form, and design.
So, being a designer and being a communicator, pictures came naturally, because telling stories and explaining things is what designers do. It's the same thing with a picture book. You're telling a story, primarily in pictures, with some words as support. I think that's the only way I can be involved in it. The fact that they call it literature is an extension I didn't intend.
What is his creative process?
His daughter Nina describes the hard work behind the scenes of her father’s successes.
My father had success followed by success, and with each new project he worked to match the design of his art to the story at hand. I remember him doing photo experiments for the blurs of the moving carousel in Carousel, and expanding upon his use of airbrush in Flying.
Her parents both made books, and though they never collaborated, they both supported each other’s work. To both of them, what mattered most was making the best book they could make. Nina describes their process:
I saw my parents create meticulous book dummies. I watched them start final art for a page and then abandon that art if it wasn’t quite right. I learned that it is not enough to have words on the page, but that the words must be well spaced and well placed. I learned that a beautiful picture book takes months and months of thoughtful, careful work.
Nina describes the experience of reading her father’s books with her own child and continuing to learn from his unique use of space and simplicity.
My father knows how to hit the right note at the right time, as a jazz musician might. He punctuates a simple text with an observation that gives us a reason to look and look again at that train, bus, or busy harbor. He shares with very young readers his deep engagement with looking at and observing the world. A visual education.
When formulating a story, Crews first pictures what it looks like and then finds the words to support the pictures.
You make the decisions about what you do, how it proceeds, when to start and when to stop; that’s what an artist is.
Do the words or pictures come first?
The pictures always drove his creative process, but he liked having a framework before starting.
As far as working, you need to know what the story is, what you're talking about, what it is you plan to do in this project in order to do the pictures, but I don't need to know the precise words that I'm going to use. I like to change as I go along if I find a better word. I can make that adjustment up until the very end.
When doing illustrations for other people’s books, he “always had trouble with the words the other authors had used.” This inspired him to do Freight Train, so he could choose his own words.
So, that's when I got back into doing picture books, and keeping the words short and brief, making my own choices, and changing them right up to the very end, right up to the point when you package the project and turn it over to the publisher. Words are the easiest part to make an adjustment in, even after the book comes back from first proofs. Something may come to mind long after you've started that would be more fitting than the word you already had. So I reserve that right to make those adjustments.
How does he develop a book idea?
Crews doesn’t put any restrictions on his ideas or subject matter. But he doesn’t believe it is an idea until you’ve tried developing the pictures.
You have to get some sort of image on paper, in sequence, and some sort of direction established before it becomes a real idea to you. The artist is the first line of attack in terms of making a picture story. You have to get started somewhere and clarify the idea that you've got: start it and give it some flesh in the middle. And you must break down that story in your own mind into parts and develop those as brief sketches, as pictures.
During this part of the process, he doesn’t tell anyone about what he’s planning—even his wife—until he figures out the heart the story. For him, showing someone too early gives them a part in the decision-making process and the approach to the problem. He doesn’t “want to take the chance of losing it” before it becomes a solid premise.
I have to make a choice in terms of what I'm going to include in that story, what each page is going to lead to, and how the pages are all going to support each other. Telling the story in pictures is a matter of eliminating a lot of things because there's not a lot of space to ramble. Those are all things you do before you show it to anyone else.
He only shows other people his ideas after they’ve become his idea and not “someone else’s pot where everybody can put something into it.” Then he would show his wife to see what things aren’t communicating well. For him, it all boils down to communication.
The point of getting another opinion, another person to look at it, is to find out whether or not it's a transportable idea, or one that you only have in your own head. You want to find whether or not you're communicating.
After revising the project “in sketch form,” he would talk with the editor. Most of his projects were accepted, though some included “a series of disagreements” that required adjustments. If at any point, the projects became “more theirs” than his, he “decided not to go along with them.”
You really have to solidify your base before you find some other person that you get to be involved in a project. Once the thought becomes an idea, a developable idea, one that you've chosen to put into practice, you can have a sketch ready in six weeks or so.
Once his idea became solid, he would make a mini book with the rough sketches and type to give them a clear idea of his intention. He liked to do this as soon as possible as he knew he’d eventually have to do it anyway.
What does he do with his unfinished stories?
He put the unfinished stories in a box in his small studio “out of sight.” But sometimes things from his “unsuccessful file” would inspire him later. For example, he had collected images and sketches for years before making Bicycle Race until one day he realized it would make a great book. Or he had put the idea for Harbor away because it wasn’t working with the river at the center of the story. A while later, he returned to it and had an epiphany that the trade boats at the harbor were actually at the center.
What are his thoughts about the submission process with editors?
As he knows publishing teams make decisions quickly in their meetings, he likes projects that he can develop in about six weeks before submitting them. He prefers working with teams who respond quickly and support him in developing the book versus teams who have long stretches of "space around the decision of whether or not you’re going to complete it” as it is “hard to get emotionally involved.”
What about the publishing part of the process?
As it takes more than a year “before you’re going to know whether or not you've got something that's generally popular on your hands,” Crews liked to start working on a new project immediately. He tries to gauge the success of the idea based on how family, friends, and editors receive it. And his next book is usually a response to his previous book to try to push himself to greater heights.
If they're enthusiastic about the way you've done a project, it fuels the fire to start another project, and that's why I started Shortcut. - It's a test as an artist. You're always trying to extend the things that you can do, and once I'd worked with the style I used in Bigmamas, I thought, Why not try it again? I'm not all that happy with the way I draw things actually. It could be better. Since it was done and it had some effect, I decided to do another.
What are his favorite illustration tools?
Crews’s “hands-down” favorite tool is graphite or lead, specifically a freshly sharpened TICONDEROGA #2.
Lead makes the words, images, idle thoughts (doodles), specific information — crucial and otherwise — visible.
He likes its versatility as he can make “thin delicate words and lines, bold solid black forms, and wispy, smooth gray shadings. All with the same soft lead.” And its accessibility as anybody can start “right out of the box.”
Up/down, side/side, cross/cross, scribble/scribble, swirl, and then smudge/smudge with a thumb or finger. A wonderful way to make marks on paper. Spare use of the eraser preserves it and avoids losing some potentially useful bit.
To sharpen his pencils, he started out with a hand-held sharpener but graduated to a more “interesting and bold” choice: the penknife.
He uses a number two pencil for most things, but if he needs a "very bold, extra-black image for a dog or a train in a tunnel or the night sky,” he’ll only use an EBONY VERIBLACK, especially for its “smudge-ability.”
Sketching, note-taking, list-making using a lead pencil in sketchbooks, on envelopes, and on bits of paper of every size and description is a necessary, useful, and pleasurable part of my life. Finding a bit of an old pencil note or sketch, no matter how cryptic, can bring entire events into focus.
What motivates him to make stories?
For a long time, he saw himself as more of a designer than a picture book maker. But once he called himself a writer and saw himself as an author, it gave him the courage to write more personal stories.
To tell a story, to write so that people call you an author...it's very heady to be called an author and writer, to know that things you create could be useful…I think that gave me the courage to work on Bigmamas. Partially it's telling the story to family, and partially you're aware of the fact that there aren't very many books about Black families and their lives, and partially you have a responsibility to contribute to some of that. Since there are stories that I have that deal with Black lives and there is an audience out there for them, why not tell those stories as well?
How does he transform his childhood memories into stories?
When he liked the subject of the book, understood the statement he wanted to make through the book, and it was something he would have been interested in as a child, he knew he had a good idea.
I guess you have to observe children and think about whatever it was that you found valuable in the beginning. I think that's why I started with Freight Train when I had the idea of going back to picture books and creating a picture book. I wanted to find out what it was that I found enjoyment in while growing up.
He would tell stories of his memories during conversations with his nieces, nephews, siblings, and parents — while paying attention to the elements of a good story. Bigmamas was inspired from the kids’ questions about what it was like to grow up at that time with the “outhouse, and the barn and the big house.” For him, the book was a way to clarify the story as they didn’t have many photographs.
It's not really the way I drew or illustrated things when I was working that characterizes the way I handled Bigmamas; it's more like the things I did personally, and I considered it a personal way of expression.
Only after sketching ideas a few times would he know if he had a book or not.
What does he hope for his work?
His first goal is “the enjoyment of the involvement of being in books.” He doesn’t usually think “in terms of education or messages, or things that they needed to take away.” He cares more about adventure and observation, “a learning to look, to be more observant about what you see.”
Crews wants readers to experience the book and the way he tells a story and “hopefully finding pleasure in it.” And he wants his approach to the topics he explores to be refreshing and exciting.
Where is Crews now?
Crews and Jonas moved to Germantown in 1994, at “the end of a long search for a second home outside of New York City.”
You define what it is you’re looking for with the help of those who know you. We were looking for a view, countryside that we could see—not wilderness, but an openness that we didn’t have in the city.
Jonas passed away in 2013. Crews now lives in a restored farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley.
His books
Author and Ilustrator
We Read: A to Z (1967)
Ten Black Dots (1968) (1986)
Dedication: “For Louis whom I just met, and Nina & Amy whom I’ve known a good while”
“The four-color preseparated art was printed in red, yellow, blue, and black. The typeface is Helvetica Bold.”
Freight Train (1978)
Crews used blurred photographs of train cars to create motion in his book. He also used this technique in a few other books (like Carousel).
Freight Train was close to the time when I was doing most of my work as a designer, and abstraction and brevity and symbol were more important to me, were more significant to the way I did my work.
Truck (1980)
Light (1981)
Harbor (1982)
Dedication: “To the women in my life & Malcolm”
Harbor came from an idea “about a river's birth in the mountains, flowing out to the ocean and, at the end, flowing out through the harbor on the final page.” The idea didn’t work until he realized that the story wasn’t about the river at all — the river was “setting up that endgame” for the “boats that piled their trade on the harbor.” The story was about the boats!
Carousel (1982)
Parade (1983)
School Bus (1984)
Bicycle Race (1985)
For Bicycle Race, he had collected sketches and notes over time and put them away. Then one day he came across them and said, “That really is a pretty good idea, why don't I finish it, why wasn't it finished, why wasn't it turned into a book?”
Flying (1986)
Bigmama's (1991)
Inspired by summers at his grandparent’s farm — gave him a sense of freedom from the city
Often sat on the porch watching the trains go by
Illustrations made with watercolor and gouache on a brush with occasional airbrushing
There were many things I had to tell. There wasn't enough room in the picture book to tell the story in pictures only; the words had to be expanded. I don't think I have abandoned the brevity of a book like Freight Train. But in Bigmamas there was a need for more words in order to make the story whole, to give the story the completion I thought it needed.
Shortcut (1992)
Illustrations made with watercolor, bolder dark outlines, more airbrushed scenery
Shortcut was another story that needed more words, but there are a lot fewer than in Bigmamas because the graphics in that story were more easily a carrier of the story
Great deep dive analysis by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
Sail Away (1995)
Night at the Fair (1998)
Cloudy Day Sunny Day (1999)
Inside Freight Train (2001) — online read aloud
Ilustrator only
Rain by Robert Kalan (1978)
The way he designed diagonal lines of the word rain was an homage to Japanese artist Hiroshige.
Blue Sea by Robert Kalan (1979)
Dedication: “For Heidi and Slank”
How Many Snails by Paul Giganti, Jr. (1988)
Each Orange Had 8 Slices by Paul Giganti, Jr. (1992)
More Than One by Miriam Schlein (1996)
Tomorrow's Alphabet by George Shannon (1996)
“For Ann, Nina, and Amy, and the Gang at Greenwillow and Susan and Ava (who put her foot in it)”
“Watercolors were used for the full-color art. The text type of Akzidenz Grotesk.
This Is the Sunflower by Lola M. Schaefer (2000)
Eclipse: Darkness in Daytime by Franklyn Mansfield Branley (1973) (1988)
Bibliography
Articles written by him
Studio Views: Ticonderoga #2: a Horn Book article written by Donald Crews about his favorite tools
Wilder Award Acceptance Speech: Crews shares a lot about his journey, his family, and his books
Articles written about him
Donald Crews: The Signs and Times of an American Childhood-Essay and Interview by George Bodmer (English professor): a detailed overview of his life and work and an interview with Crews
Profile written by his daughter Nina: She shares what it was like growing up with two parents in children’s books and the lessons she learned along the way
Donald Crews, Ann Jonas, and Nina Crews by National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature: an overview of his life and work
Cooper alumni profile: a brief overview of his life
G’town’s Crews creates lively children’s literature: a brief overview of his life and some insights into his process
Kirkus reviews for a bunch of his books (if you are curious)
Videos
The Trumpet Club with Donald Crews: an awesome video that includes a studio tour, an explanation of his process, and the inspiration behind Big Mama’s.
Donald Crews-Influences: shares how Paul Rand and other graphic designers influence his work
Donald Crews Named 2015 Wilder Winner: shares the story of finding out he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement Award
2015 Newbery-Caldecott-Wilder Banquet: Donald Crews Wilder speech
Podcasts