I am a medical illustrator by training, and my husband is a physicist. Our daughter, Lillian, born in 2008, in Toronto.

In 2014, when Lillian was six,

The “Creepy Clowns” project grew out of looking at Bernard Buffet, a 20th century French painter and lithographer.

Curious to know why Buffet chose to paint clowns with elongated, flat, white faces and thick, black, streaky outlines.

We guessed at how his clowns might feel – sad.

And we tried to articulate how we felt about them – creeped out.

Was it their sadness that made them seem creepy to us?

The week that we were exploring Bernard Buffet’s work was also the week that “The Boxtrolls” movie came out.

We saw it three times in the theater and were riveted each time. I was completely enchanted by the animation. What drew me in most was the rendering of the puppets. I had never seen anything like it. The faces of the marionettes had me at the edge of my seat the entire time. Their pasty white appearance, with what seemed like cheeks and noses powdered in variants of turquoise and pink, haunted and inspired me. They seemed distinctly Buffetian.

The combination of Buffet and the “The Boxtrolls” ignited something in me. In the two weeks that followed, I spent every available waking moment working on this project. I used multi-media paper, Sharpies, and White-Out only. I started with a freehand, 30-second pencil sketch, and then made decisions about the palette (on occasion deferring to Lillian’s suggestions). On some of the illustrations, we worked together, passing the artwork back and forth. While working, I tried to impart to Lillian that sometimes we should not think of illustrations as being about something; rather, we should view them as just being something. By actually painting the faces of the clowns with White-Out to imitate the application of make-up, the “Creepy Clowns” project was my case in point. I colored the skin with markers first (I had 140 Sharpies to choose from), and then applied White-Out over it as if it were foundation, before drawing another layer of detail with the Sharpies.

This was a labor of love in many respects. I loved the process – and could not stop working. In fact, I could not make the clowns fast enough to keep up with the flood of ideas. Some clowns were inspired by other artists: Pablo Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Frida Khalo. Others were inspired by my photos of Lillian in face-paint:

9. Flowr Skelatin and 10. Mime.

I made 76 clowns and culled them down

to 31 for this book.

In the end, after all of the good ideas seemed exhausted, Lillian got to name every clown, without prompting or help with spelling.