How Slippery is a Banana Peel?

Written by Rebecca Donnelly Publisher: Godwin Books (Henry Holt)

Out January 19, 2021!

Volcanoes roar,
But banana peels race.
Rockets soar,
Like bananas through space.

A group of kid-experimenters at a science fair explore the slipperiness of banana peels—a perfect introduction to scientific concepts! It's funny and STEM-inspired, with back matter on friction and a kitchen science experiment. These playful and mischievous banana peels will capture the imagination of readers.

Process

This is my second book with author Rebecca Donnelly, after Cats Are A Liquid. Similarly to Cats, the text for How Slippery Is A Banana Peel left me a lot of room to have fun. The only art note I got from Rebecca was to have a school science fair theme going, which made it easy for me to continue drawing kids in lab coats. At times it was very difficult to figure the images out as the text was often intentionally free of logic. In the image above, in order to have the moon in the picture, I had kids line up as planets of the Solar System.

When you are the illustrator, you can create weird worlds. Once I decided to draw faces on the bananas, it opened up a lot of freedom for me. They moved; had emotions; quirks; and many unique bananasonalities! That is how the racing spread was born. In children’s books illustration you often come upon moments of “anything goes”! Luckily my editors enjoyed this as much as I did. At first I had the sketch below, which had all the ideas in there already but was compositionally boring. I’m glad I fixed it to be the image above while I had the chance. This happens often - I’d be happy with a sketch if it has the ideas in there when I should spend a few more days on making the image as the most fun image as possible.

As boring as this sketch is, I was glad when I decided to let the banana slugs and snails race. The banners are my favorite parts. Once I started to find humor, my mind moved forward to making the image more fun.