SUE C. SMITH, ILLUSTRATOR

If you'd told me last year at this time that I'd write a songwriting book for kids, I would have been pleased and excited, but not necessarily surprised. But if you'd said I would illustrate the book, I would've thought that notion was ridiculous (a word that my daughters say I use too much). 

Gina Boe and I were pretty far along in writing our songwriting book for kids, and we approached several people about illustrating it for us. Everyone said no for one reason or another. I decided I would at least try. I'm not an artist. But I am determined. 

Several things helped me, and I see God's hand in the way it all turned out. 

1. I've been using an iPad Pro for about year and I've gotten to where it's all I use for co-writes. Sometimes for short trips, I don't even take my laptop with me anymore. My iPad Pro is versatile and light, and it can do almost everything I need to do. 

2. I've started saving pretty much everything to Dropbox or I-Cloud. I have access to those files whatever device I happen to be using. . 

3. I bought an Apple Pencil, and I have to say, I love it. I've used styluses before and they are usually clunky and have a lag time. But the Apple Pencil is just like using a great pen or marker. 

4. After some early attempts with another app, I found one called Sketchbook Pro that I used for all the illustrations. It took a while to learn how to use it—my early efforts show that clearly—and once I'd gotten better at all it's little features and tricks, I had to go back and re-do my first illustrations. 

5. It turns out you can actually learn to do almost anything on You Tube. When I would get stuck, I'd just go there and look for something like "How to draw a cartoon hand holding a piece of paper." And some expert would show me how. 

6. The biggest factor was this: My husband John had surgery in February and then another surgery 10 weeks later. I couldn't travel to Nashville to write. I needed to stay with him. That meant I had tons of time to work. And I did spend tons of time. There's an illustration near the end of the book that took over 8 hours of work. 

7. Finally, I did a lot of praying that God would help me. There's no other way this could have happened. Sort of like my whole writing career.

​Now that the book is available to everyone, I have to admit it's a little scary. Sometimes I look at the drawings and think, "These aren't bad." And other times I just go, "What was I  thinking?" Mostly I hope people will extend grace. Because you see, I'm not an illustrator. Not really.