Papilio is an enthusiastic and adventurous caterpillar. Then she's a blob of goo, hanging out in her chrysalis. Her main goal in life? Metamorphose into a butterfly and learn to fly!
Papilio is a children's story told in three parts, about three stages of a butterfly's life, written and illustrated by three friends: Ben Clanton, Corey R. Tabor, and Andy Chou Musser.
"We wanted to do the project because it would just be a fun thing to do between the three of us," explains Tabor. "But we thought that there needed to be some kind of a reason for three authors and illustrators to work together on a project."
A story about three stages of a butterfly's life (OK, OK, there's really four stages, but the egg phase isn't all that interesting) felt like a perfect way to justify the collaboration and show off their voices and illustration styles at the same time.
Clanton took on the caterpillar phase. "I was inspired by my youngest son and just this unstoppable wonder and curiosity he had. And I put a lot of that into Papilio's character as she's just entering this world," he says. Clanton's illustrations tend toward cartoony — he used watercolors, ink, leaf pressings, stamps, markers and colored pencils. Really anything he could get his hands on, he says.
While the three author-illustrators used a cohesive color palette — soft, spring-like pastel tones — they intentionally did not illustrate their sections in the same style. "At each stage of life, she sees the world a little bit differently. So it makes sense that the illustrations would change a little bit with her," says Tabor, who illustrated the chrysalis section, which the friends agree was the most challenging.
"The character can't really do anything," explains Tabor. "She's just stuck inside of her chrysalis all the time." So they decided that, while Papilio dissolves into goo and works on reconstituting her body, a bird would pick up her chrysalis and fly off with it — sending the chrysalis on a crazy adventure. Tabor used colored pencils and watercolor to illustrate his portion. "I wanted it to have kind of like a loose, wild feel to it," he says. "To kind of match the adventure that the chrysalis goes on."
When it came to the butterfly section, Chou Musser says he was initially stuck. He knew what he wanted Papilio to look like — a black, swallowtail butterfly — but not how her story would end. Then he learned that butterflies don't start life knowing how to fly. "That really informed how I wrote my section," Chou Musser says. "I think Papilio learns that it's OK to fail and that practice is really important and that being tenacious and trying something over and over again pays off."
At its heart, Papilio is a story about change, transformation and growing up. And one thing you learn as you grow up is that it's OK to ask for help. Andy Chou Musser, Ben Clanton and Corey Tabor say they hope their children's book encourages kids to collaborate and work together to make something new. Because while they probably could have written and illustrated Papilio on their own, it was much more fun to do it with friends.
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