Working with a multicolored, scented ballpoint pen that he found in the family art stash, Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell creates a picture book fantasy about George, a boy who is home sick from school and finds himself taking a mysterious journey in his own house later that night. In the book, titled 102, George meets a young mouse who’s also sick in bed and learns that he can help the creature by releasing his father—the very mouse he confined to an old terrarium earlier in the day. In a departure for Cordell, the tale features undercurrents of dreamy enigma. A talking cricket takes a mouse-sized George into a miniature world, familiar objects are found in strange places, and the number 102 keeps popping up: as a house number, as a fever, as a number on a coin, and more. The book’s illustrations, too, break new ground. PW spoke with Cordell from his home outside Chicago about rescuing small animals, pushing beyond predictability, and covering pages with layers of color.

Before we begin, how are you saying the title of the book? Is it “One-oh-two”?

I haven’t said it very much! I’ve only written it and drawn the numbers. But now that I’m actually having to say it for the first time... I think I’ve always called it “one-oh-two.”

Was it a fantasy from the beginning, or was there a real-life experience behind it?

I was thinking back about what planted the seed for 102, where the main part of the story is about a boy who needs to help a trapped animal. There was this time when I was working in my studio, which was in the basement then. I was working and something was moving out there; a frog had gotten into the window well. I don’t know how it got in there, because there are sealed covers on top of these things. And I thought, I have to get it out of there. I was going to be picking up my son from elementary school and I thought, I’m going to wait until he’s here and we’re going to get this frog out together.

How did you do it?

We devised this, like, bucket on a rope, and we bumped him into the bucket with a long broom. We saved it together.

Hooray! How did the story grow from there?

I started pulling at it from different directions and trying to make it more surreal and unusual, finding ways to make it more outlandish while keeping it grounded in the theme of empathy, of seeing something vulnerable in need.

Did the artwork undergo a similar process of pulling and stretching?

This is probably the most dramatically different book for me so far. I think, as a commercial artist, there are these self-imposed restrictions we put on ourselves where we feel like we owe our audience this sort of sameness. It wasn’t an overnight thing, but I got to where I felt: there are so many things in the world to see, to talk about, to have different ways to express. It seems so limiting to return to the same problem-solving over and over.

And I started working in a sketchbook more, which is where a lot of these new things happen. I was kind of hesitant to approach publishers about this. I felt if they didn’t want me to do it, then it would be time wasted. But I’ve found that all my publishers are very open to experimenting.

How did you start working with this scented, multicolored ballpoint pen?

I love to draw in ink—that’s kind of been my thing for years and years—but I never thought about drawing with a ballpoint pen. I like pens that have a line that’s very thick or thin, that has more character. A ballpoint pen has a very uniform line. My family had some of these pens lying around and I was playing around with them and layering stuff. And I was like, Oh, this is a lot of fun! It has this different kind of energy to it—and this particular brand has sweet-smelling inks.

What did they smell like? Were they really overpowering?

It’s all candy-smelling. Cotton candy, and raspberry, and bubble gum, and chocolate, and stuff like that. The smell goes away pretty quickly. But if you’re putting down a whole big stretch of color, it wafts up, you know? So that made it fun, too.

It’s a more laborious, time-consuming way of making art. I never really thought I would use it in, like, a 40-page book. I was too intimidated. But I was posting my sketchbook drawings, and several people said, “You should do a whole book like this.”

Your expressive line has been your trademark, hasn’t it? What was it like to transition to this kind of drawing, with the modeling and volume and cross-hatching?

Well, I’ve been building up to this, book by book. Not the last book, but one of my recent books, Evergreen, it had a lot of cross-hatching and modeling with line.

But this one is enormous. The main character is drawn very realistically throughout. It took me a long time to do. I kept having to ask for more time. It was driving me kind of crazy, knowing that I still had a lot left to do with not a lot of time.

But if I had all the time in the world to draw like this, it wouldn’t stress me out. There’s something almost like Zen-like about just moving your pen back and forth across the paper.

Were you worried you weren’t going to make it?

The good thing about publishing is that everyone is working together. It’s not like you’re going to get lashed if you don’t meet your deadline. But for anyone who has other projects lined up, it’s going to throw everything else off. It was inching dangerously close to that territory.

What kinds of suggestions did your editor [Mary-Kate Gaudet] make?

She and I see eye to eye on so many things—not just about books, but about music and art—and I was kind of bouncing ideas off her directly. She’s very good at encouraging me to take bigger risks with storytelling.

And then once our once our designer Angie [art director Angelie Yap] got involved, she had really perceptive suggestions. She’s an artist herself, and she’s a great designer with a keen eye. I would be layering one color over the next, and she would say, “I feel like it needs more orange.” And I was like, Really? I don’t think so. But she was right.

She also has an eye for the proportions of things. I would draw a face and Angie would say—in a kind way—“You know... I think the nose shape looks a little different on this page.” And I would go back and look and say, She’s right.

Aside from getting the characters to look the same from page to page, were there any other rough spots with the artwork?

Yeah, to get the consistency was a new challenge for me. But the ones that were more maddening were ones like this [image of a cricket against a dark night sky]. No one is going to look at it and think it was time-consuming, but this is six colors layered on top of each other. It’s complete coverage of the whole page.

Anytime there’s a dark background like this, it’s a drawing that takes forever. It’s all labor and no glory. I could have drawn this once and copied it. But it feels like cheating. I like to be where’s there no “undo.” And there’s something more satisfying about making a concrete object. I feel like I’m better on the other end.

Were you listening to music when you drew?

Oh, yeah. I have to have music all the time. The only time I can’t listen to music is when I’m writing. But when I’m drawing, I don’t need silence. I listened to a lot of David Bowie, actually. Because one of his signatures was experimenting with different types of sounds. My next book is about him. It’s called Starman [Holiday House/Porter, Sept. 1]. It’s kind of an unorthodox picture book biography.

What’s unorthodox about it?

He’s this interstellar traveler, almost like the Little Prince. And as he finds new planets and lands in those places, he develops new sounds. We’ve got 102 in the spring and Starman in the fall. So, it’s a fun year!

102 by Matthew Cordell. Little, Brown $18.99, Apr. 13 ISBN 978-0-316-58095-3