Monthly Bonus: Artist Introduction

Hello! I’m Jen Gubicza (rhymes with pizza)

Thanks to all of the new subscribers who joined after seeing the kidlit resources post I wrote last month. I’ve decided that this year is a year of play for me, so look forward to fun activities that combine my love of games, writing, illustrating, list making, crafting and join me while I try to stop taking myself too seriously and just have fun.

This month, the Illoguild are doing introductions. I’ve enjoyed discovering cool new things about all of my friends by reading their posts, so follow this page and they’ll be gathered there on Monday. Also, we’ll be doing a free live this Monday, January 8 at 3pm EST. It’s going to be all about goals, and you can sign up here.

If you’d like to listen to a recent podcast interview I gave with the Craft Industry Alliance, it covers a lot of my backstory. This post gets long, so:

TL;DR: I’ve always been an artist, but I also love to learn new things. I have a degree in graphic design and used to be a creative director specializing in design for kids. Currently I run a handmade stuffed animal faux taxidermy business that’s been going strong for 15 years. Now, I’m entering the picture book industry as a kidlit author-illustrator.

Here’s the longer version:

I’m the cute one in the lion bathingsuit on the left.
On the right, I show how much I’ve always loved reading by climbing on top of my sleeping older sister.

I’m the youngest of four children, and we grew up Somerville, a city right outside of Boston that used to be nicknamed “Slummerville” but suddenly became so cool I couldn’t afford to move back as an adult.

As a kid, I remember holding a clamshell VHS tape of Fantasia and declaring I wanted to be a Disney animator. I think I was five. My mom likes to tell the story of how I used to draw all over the walls and my little desk and then she would help me clean off the drawings, making sure I understood that it was hard work to make it clean, but I would just then see a clean surface and draw all over them again. She eventually gave up and then some mystery adult gave us a giant chalkboard and I could draw and erase to my heart’s content.

I grew up in the 80s, playing kickball in the streets with the neighbor kids until the lights came on and we had to go home. Nintendo was a huge fixture in the neighborhood, and because I liked to draw, I had the “job” of making coloring sheets of all the characters for neighborhood kids. I could look at the small character in the booklet and draw it huge on poster size paper so other kids could color it in. I also had a painted rock “business” and a greeting card “business” at some point too.

In High School, I was lucky enough to attend a small college prep academy and I played Varsity Basketball and Field Hockey and managed the Varsity Baseball Team. Girls were still not allowed to play baseball at that school (quadruple eyeroll) but I took my manager job seriously and even went to opposing teams’ games to make player hitting charts so I could advise the coach. I remember going into my junior year and having a talk with the art teacher where he said something like, “So, you want to go to art school, but you’re signed up for AP calculus, English and Spanish, physics, biology and three sports. You have to make time for art. You can’t do it all. You need to be in the art room.” So, I had to drop a few things.

I withdrew from the science classes, but I still went to class occasionally so I could draw the specimens. I turned down the offer of a college field hockey scholarship, and for my high school internship I chose to intern at the graphic design firm Big Blue Dot. This firm was started by children’s illustrator Scott Nash, who had designed the Nickelodeon logo. The focus was purely on design for kids, and the office was decorated like a toy store exploded. I was given a golden ticket to the Wonka Factory and I was hooked.

Fun fact about my other high school job: I worked at a stationery store in Cambridge, MA and sometimes they even let me drive the delivery van! As a teenager! I even delivered stationery to Julia Child once.

After the month long internship at Big Blue Dot, I enrolled in Maryland Institute, College of Art in their graphic design program. I arrived the same year that design legend Ellen Lupton started teaching there and I had the pleasure of learning from her and other notable guest lecturers including Chip Kidd and Christoph Niemann. During college, I made extravagant group Halloween Costumes for myself and my friends (The Muppets, The Beatles in all their Sgt. Pepper glory) and won costume contests. I loved hand-binding books for typography classes. I worked part-time as campus security on the overnight shift. And, every summer, and occasionally during the school year I would freelance for Big Blue Dot.

After I graduated in 2001, there wasn’t full time design work available, so I split my time between Big Blue Dot, The Boston Children’s Museum and other freelance design work. After a couple of years I was hired full time as a graphic designer, then eventually became a creative director. I was lucky enough to work on projects for Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, National Geographic, MoMA, VIZ Media, PBS Kids and more. I also started teaching graphic design at night as an adjunct professor at New England School of Art and Design.

As a hobby, to get myself off the computer screen, I was making little handmade toys that I gave to friends. Then, Etsy started in 2005. This was also the year I got married. But more importantly I opened an Etsy shop, and those toys started selling. Because it was the early days of Etsy, and the founders used to hang out in the forums, I became friends with them. When I went to NYC on business, we would get together for dinner sometimes, or I would go to parties at the Etsy headquarters. I helped write a how to guide for their new Treasury feature. Esty sponsored a booth at the first craft fair I ever did. My toys were selling well on the site, and in 2008, with the encouragement of one Etsy founder in particular (he offered me studio space in Brooklyn), I quit my fantastic design and teaching jobs and my illustrator husband and I moved to Brooklyn for two years to see if I could really get this handmade toy business going. We changed the name to Zooguu, bought a url and learned a lot about business in those first two years. It just seems so wild to me now that we did that.

Fifteen years later, that handmade toy business is now a handmade faux taxidermy business. So, that’s what I do with most of my time these days: design and sew adorable stuffed animals. We sell them online, at craft shows and conventions and wholesale to five shops in the US. I’m super lucky to rent art studio space in Nahant, which is just off the coast of Boston and very pretty. Seaside views, every day.

Here’s what my studio looks like when it’s clean!

Over the years, I’ve also been hired to create custom toys for Facebook employees, done freelance work for Hasbro, my husband and I were hired to design and create installations in rooms at Etsy’s Headquarters, I designed and fabricated the Lockheed the Dragon puppet for the feature film X-Men the New Mutants, made window displays for my favorite fabric store, and sold my work at RuPaul’s Drag Con. I even got to dance on the pink carpet while RuPaul spun records. I talk in more detail about some of the cool projects I’ve worked on in this previous substack post about making money as an artist. There’s also this page on my website.

Here I am becoming BFFs with Acid Betty. At the end of the show when we were packing up, I said, “I’m so happy I got to do this. I’m a huge fan of the show.” She hugged me and said, “You’re a part of it now.” She even sent me the sweetest care package after the show after I sent her the custom whale she ordered.

But, in 2020, when covid canceled all shows, and shops closed their doors temporarily, I became a face mask maker. I sewed over 3000 masks and scrub caps in the first few months of the pandemic, and after I burnt out, I remembered that Lilla Rogers had a children’s book course, and thought that it would be great to take that course. I’ve always wanted to make a 3D stop-motion dioramma book (why do I never choose something easy? lol) so I thought learning about children’s publishing would be a nice break from all of the sewing.

On the left: stop motion puppets built. On the right: final page showing puppet in set.

Then, I was hooked. I signed up for the full year of art school, I signed up for Storyteller Academy to learn how to write for kids, I became a voracious reader again, I met the members of Illoguild and joined a few critique groups, went to multiple retreats and even to Italy to the Bologna Book Faire! When I do things, I go all in. I’m also in a small business meetup group, and another group for creative accountability filled with professional puppeteers.

A more recent photo of me in our Zooguu booth at another craft show. No lion bathing suit, but I am rocking a giant lion necklace!

This year I’m starting a mentorship with Executive Editor Melissa Manlove from Chronicle Books (I applied through Storyteller Academy) and I’m exited to put together a pitch package for a new project with her expert guidance. And like I said, I’m excited to PLAY more.

I’m going to start the year off with a new list of my 100 favorite things. I first heard about this from agent Chad Beckerman. I keep my list on a giant whiteboard in my studio that I see every day. It really helps when you’re stuck on something to draw or write about, and combining two or more things helps with story generation. I’ll talk more about this in my next post, but for now, join me in making a list of 100 favorite things. Let’s play and have fun!

If you read this entire thing: Thank you! I hope you got to know me a little bit better through all of that. If you have your own introduction post, I’d love to read it! Please drop it in the comments. Hope to see you at our Free Illoguild Live on Monday, Jan 8!