Interview with our storyboard artist, Jeremy Polonen

Our brand-new custom children’s book is here! So our Hooray Heroes author, Ryan Quinn, sat down with Jeremy Polonen, our storyboard artist, to talk to him about his thoughts on this project.

Ryan: Hey Jeremy, thanks again for agreeing to do this. And before we begin, how would you quickly introduce yourself?

Jeremy: Hi, I'm Jeremy. I'm a full-time illustrator. I've been doing that since 2018-2019, somewhere in there. I do illustrations, mainly for a children's audience, family audience, that sort of thing. I've done toy catalogs, board games, and notably some books for Hooray Heroes.

Ryan: You said you're a full-time illustrator. What's the most fun part of it?

Jeremy: It is fun. It's a demanding job. Like any other, you have to fit the amount of work you need to get done inside of a day and you have deadlines and responsibilities. So it's not as easy as just drawing cartoons or whatnot, but it is fun because almost everything becomes part of your job. And while that kind of sounds like the opposite of fun, you start to look at everything in the world a little bit through the lens of drawing cartoons.

Then the whole world just becomes a little bit more interesting the way the light kind of hits leaves or the shadows cast on the ground, like things as simple as shadows and colors on mundane objects – they kind of become a little bit more interesting when you're in illustrator and that might be the biggest highlight of it, yeah, the whole world becomes just fun to observe at that point.

Ryan: What was your first impression of the Home Alone project and what was your first impression when you first saw some of the stories that you'd be illustrating for?

Jeremy: The first thing that came to mind was when you're a child, your whole house seems a lot bigger than it actually is. And then if you revisit rooms or places you've been as a child, everything seems a lot smaller, right? So when you're there as a child, the whole house seems so grand and big and expensive because for you it is, being that small. So it's fun to think about trying to capture the vastness of an empty house for a child.

Ryan: Could you tell us a little bit about your process of illustrating a story in the book?

Jeremy: As much as we can create as illustrators, oftentimes we can just look at reality, right? So take the story with the garage sale. The first thing I do is I don't think about, oh, what can I create? I just go look at household objects. I go look at photos and household objects. You really pull from reality most of the time and really go from there and then we try to construct the scene how we like it to get the right feeling, or if we wanted to look grand or all that sort of stuff. So then we start to think about the composition, how the composition can set the tone for the scale of things.

Ryan: This book has an intro. It has an outro, and then there are 15 stories that that customers will be able to choose from. Which one was your favorite illustrate?

Jeremy: Oh, there were a lot of fun ones. I do like the cooking show story because I always like illustrating and sketching food. Maybe it's just so vibrant and colorful. And when you look at it, it gives you a good feeling.

The grocery store was also a fun one. Just all the items on the shelves and kind of trying to come up with a vague design for each of the bags of chips or jars on the shelf. That's always a kind of a fun little task to do.

Ryan: Were any of the stories difficult to begin or difficult to depict?

Jeremy: Yeah, some of the ones that have a broader amount of elements in it. The Candy Detective page was a bit challenging just cause of the scope of trying to blend things that really stand out. And that kind of setting, trying to blend two worlds together.

It was a lot of fun, but it offered up some challenges. As well as the staying up all night, the sleepover page. Just the amount of characters that we had all kind of doing their own thing, but we wanted to make them feel like they're still all working in one kind of flow together, causing chaos. There's some challenges there.

Ryan: Most of the time when you sent us a new illustration, it was like, OK, yeah, he nailed it. Awesome. Occasionally though we did have to ask you to try something again. It happens to me. I'll write something and I think it's perfect. And then the others will say, wow, you know, that's not what we had in mind. So how is it on your end when you have something that you're pretty sure you've got and then we ask you to do it again?

Jeremy: So for me, with the whole illustration project, I don't mind the feedback or making corrections or doing the initial story. My least favorite part as an illustrator is that moment where you hit send on the thing that you've done for the day, and then you kind of sit and you're like alright, I hope they like it and then you just wait for the feedback. And then because at the end of the day, we wanna get what everybody had envisioned and of course there are people running the project like yourself who kind of have the broad control and the broad vision of what's going on. I'm just one of the tools that can help bring that vision together. So I really don't mind the feedback.

Ryan: I mentioned before and I mean it when I say that I think you're a master of these little elements, especially there's a ton of animals mixed in. There's really expressive pigeons and raccoons and squirrels, but you also have these two dinosaur skeletons. How do you decide aside from what has to be illustrated on these little things to add character and fill the space?

Jeremy: Uh, that's a good question. I live out in the country and I have bird feeders and bird baths and stuff like that on the property and the vegetable garden and things like that and the amount of wildlife that I actually see out my windows is actually quite a lot. I see everything from these massive owls just swooping through the yard to turtles and loads of squirrels and chipmunks and to see the kind of nonsense that they actually get up to like, especially the squirrels kind of bickering with the birds about who's getting into the bird feeder and all that kind of stuff. It kind of just puts it into your brain. The animals are kind of always there doing things even in places that they shouldn't be, you know.

Ryan: Do you listen to music when you work? Or do you prefer silence?

Jeremy: I actually have a little bit of an odd thing and my wife thinks it's super weird, but it helps me stay focused. I put on things like a Mario game being played in the background, like some sort of old platformer that maybe I used to play as a kid, because for me that almost becomes like my cafe ambience where you have a little bit of music, you have the jingle of the game, you have the sound effects too of the character walking or doing the action that he needs to do so it kind of just creates this white noise background ambience. Also maybe it helps that it's kind of cartoon ambience at the same time, so maybe it kind of puts you in the right headspace, but that's my thing.

Ryan: You’re talking YouTube playthroughs of these games then?

Jeremy: Yeah, without commentary, just the sounds of the game going on. Yeah, just that right level, because for me if I try something else like even if it's something hobby related or some sort of podcast where people are talking, I found that without knowing, it actually does kind of wear down your mental stamina. If it's something you're even slightly engaged with, it does wear down your mental stamina over the days, so I find it needs to be something interesting enough to kind of keep your mind elevated a little bit. But like almost completely disinterested at the same time, and for whatever reason, that's the one thing over all the years I've come across the hits that balance.

Ryan: Do you have any books from childhood or cartoons from childhood or illustrators that you really look up to that inspire you?

Jeremy: When looking back at what really inspired me as a child, I think a large part of it would have been like the old kind of Saturday morning cartoons, and then that would have been what got me drawing in the first place, like a big one would have been Scooby Doo with all the spooky settings and all that. And I just want to like get in there and draw the same types of things. Everything you consume as a child, you wanna recreate your own version of those fun characters. And then a lot of the old kind of cartoony platforming games from like, PlayStation one or the Nintendo 64, those sorts of things.

Ryan: So you have a 2-year-old son, Benjamin. Has he been left home alone yet?

Jeremy: We have left him to his own devices, like in his room while we've been in the other room and then you start to hear things go quiet for a little bit and then you're like, what is he up to?

Ryan: Has he got up to anything outrageous left to his own devices?

Jeremy: The biggest thing has been starting to climb. That's the thing we need to watch out for now. He's never been one to put anything in his mouth that he shouldn't, which is nice, but lately he's been wanting to climb on things to reach light switches because he loves seeing the light go on and off.

Ryan: Is there a story from this book that you could see Benny doing?

Jeremy: Yeah, the Olympics one. We have a kitchen and it has an island. And for whatever reason, he gets absolutely hyped to be in the kitchen and he just runs endless laps around the island like it's the most fun thing to do, and then sometimes it makes me nervous because even if I give him an apple for a snack, obviously at this age you have certain safety concerns with eating and he just wants to run laps while eating any snack and he doesn't want you to get in his way and get him to slow down a little bit.

Ryan: Is there anything that you're working on now that you're excited about? Anything that is coming your way that you're looking forward to getting into?

Jeremy: There are always more books and always more projects on the horizon and then you know there's always more paintings in the back of my head that I wanna get out there if I ever have time. The problem is sometimes at the end of a project, you've made a list of all these different personal painting ideas or personal project ideas, and then you almost have too much of a list and you almost get that decision paralysis at the end of a project because it sounds like I've all of this to do, but now you're kind of stuck because you don't even know which one to start on.

Ryan: Well, thank you so much for taking a little bit of time out of your busy schedule to talk about this book with me and I for one am super excited for it to be released into the wild and for people to the personalize it for their kid and then hopefully enjoy reading it together as a family.

Jeremy: A pleasure. Yeah, me as well. I'm definitely gonna be grabbing a Benjamin Is Home Alone book!

So there you have it, folks! Make sure you grab your own copy of our brand-new custom children’s book, Silas Is Home Alone! Don’t forget that a two-kid version also exists!