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Hello Inklings!

This month’s Ink Splat Author Interview features John Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of a number of picture books and graphic novels. John’s newly released graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, features the story of two of our Inklings heroes. (Did you know that C.S. Lewis–author of the Narnia books and J.R.R. Tolkien—author of The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring—used to meet regularly and discuss their writing, calling themselves “the Inklings”?)

John Hendrix is also widely known as someone who inspires expansive thinking and creative courage. His guided sketchbook, Drawing is Magic, invites everyone, even those who don’t see themselves as great at drawing, to roll up their sleeves and experiment with visual thinking strategies. In this month where our theme is Play to Your Strengths, you’ll gain lots of inspiration from John about how to identify your strengths and make your creative practice your own.

Learn more about John Hendrix at johnhendrix.com.

Writing Challenge

Develop a secret identity that helps you play to your creative strengths with this lively activity. Once you’ve come up with your creativity suit and personalized hat, give your secret identity an epic name. You might be Maria, the Marvelous, or Ian of Imagination, Inc. Then, write or storyboard a scene, writing about your secret identity self in third person. How might this epic version of you tackle a creative challenge?


Tell us about your new graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien.

The story of writing The Mythmakers was really a love letter to Lewis and Tolkien. I owe them so much in my own creative life, they really validated imagination as a real thing that was worth investing in and thinking about and writing about. So that’s that’s where the seed of the book came from. I have lots of ideas for books, and the problem is figuring out which book or which idea I’m going to spend so much time on, and this was a story that I knew very early on I needed to make happen.

In your work, you’ve talked about starting with an image, but I also see you starting with a lot of research and a lot of study. How does that work in your creative process?

I’m a sort of an accidental author. I did not like writing when I was in high school, I found it very difficult, and so the 14-year-old version of myself would be shocked that I have author usually listed as the first thing in my my bio! I would say first about myself that I’m an artist, and yes, my first ideas come as images. So, I’m an accidental writer, and I’m also an accidental researcher. I wanted to write books about people like John Brown or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or whoever I was interested in, and I realized that to do that, I’ve got to read a lot and I’ve got to find a way to catalog and index that information so that I can use it in some way down the road. Really, I learned all those researching lessons the hard way, through experience.

The first draft I wrote of Faithful Spy, which is my book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer joining a plot to assassinate Hitler, I wrote quotes in my manuscript that I did not cite initially because I thought I could remember where they were. And of course, that did not work. I had to go back and track down all these citations and get the quotes accurate, and it was a mess. So I figured that for the next book I had to have a better system for that, so I got better at collecting and tracking information.

I like to make a giant chart of everything, something that I can flip through in a notebook and reference very quickly. Since I’m creating the manuscripts on a screen, I like to have the reference stuff on paper. I always read in paper copies of research books and as I’m reading, I just draw all over the book. I mean, I’ll make sketches, flag pages, put stickies in it. I create a visual index system that I can quickly flip through and remember great quotes or ideas. So then those books become really essential. Once I mark up a book, it’s my most valuable piece of intel.

What is your process for your images and pictures? You’ve mentioned you like working paper for research, are you also drawing on paper?

Yes, actually! So, all my images are drawn with ink on paper, and I scan those into the computer and then I color them digitally. I use fluid acrylics for my picture books, and I love doing that, but the hybrid process has really worked for me with graphic novels. The digital work allows me to do some more graphic things with the color so that things end up looking more like silk screens than than painted drawings, which is a design choice I like.

What do you do when you feel stuck creatively? Is there anything that you do for yourself to get out of that mess?

In those cases, I usually just do something else. I may set an egg timer to write or do an activity for 45 minutes or so, and after that, take a break and walk around or something like that. Sometimes I can get into a flow state in 45 minutes and feel like I’m really making stuff, and then you know what? A lot of times, I work past that little egg timer because I’m in the zone, right? But it’s just getting over that hump to just sit sit down and write. Everyone hates sitting down to do it. When you’re in it, it’s different, but breaking that seal is really tough. So when you’re stuck, you just can’t force it. Go do something else, you know, go outside, do a different creative activity. That’s why I like having multiple things in the studio at the same time.

A special thank you to John Hendrix for sharing with us! 

John Hendrix is a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. His books include The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, called a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Drawing Is Magic: Discovering Yourself in a Sketchbook, Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus, and many others. His award-winning illustrations have also appeared on book jackets, newspapers, and magazines all over the world. His collection The Holy Ghost: A Spirited Comic, with an introduction by Patrick McDonnell was released in 2022 from Abrams ComicArts. John’s newest graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, about the literary and spiritual friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, will be out in 2024, as a debut title on the new comics imprint Abrams Fanfare. The Society of Illustrators named John the Distinguished Educator in the Arts for 2024. John is the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art and the founding Chair of the MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture program at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2021, 3×3 Magazine named John the Educator of the Year in illustration.

Check out John’s book and all of our recent Ink Splat authors’ works at our Bookshop.org Store.

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