Hi there, I'm Samantha Cotterill, a picture book, author, and illustrator, and I wanted to invite you into something I really love.

It's a workshop called Paper Stories, and it's all about building your illustrations by hand, layer by layer, and then lighting and photographing them like tiny worlds.

If you've ever felt like your artwork might be wanting a little more depth

or atmosphere or even just a bit more play, this may be a lovely fit. We'll be working together

over three weeks, starting June 6 at School of Visual Storytelling, building a small theater stage,

and creating a magical scene

together. It's simple materials, paper, foam core, paint, light, but the results can feel

surprisingly alive. There are also live sessions and a class space where we can all share and figure out things as we go.

So it really feels like being in a studio together.

If that sounds like something you've been quietly looking for, I'd love to have you join us.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Three-point perspective, a podcast about illustration, how to do it,

how to make a living at it, and how to make an impact in the world with your art, and how to learn about the history of it. I'm Jake Parker. I'm Samantha Cauderell, and let's jump into it.

All right. Today we are interviewing D.B. Dowd, or Doug Dowd. He is an illustration historian. He's an illustrator, and he's a professor of design at the American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

And he's the faculty director of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive.

He is maybe the smartest illustrator I've ever met.

Oof, yes.

He is such a good vocabulary.

But the reason we're interviewing today is he has a book that

just came out. It's called Reading Pictures. This is a thick, this is like a textbook type of book,

all about the history of illustration. And we wanted to talk to him about it. I, Sam and I both read through this book.

Honestly, we haven't finished it yet because it's dense, but it was a good chance to talk to this

illustrator and historian and really kind of break down where we were at with illustration,

...