I’m on stuck a little bit so redoing old work helps me to get unstick and to stay in the process of making, trying, playing, testing. Here’s a redraw of an old character I made for my website, branding, all the things back in 2013. The original was based on a childhood photo and this was fun to redo.
The hand signal says I come in peace, but the spear says “dont start no shit”.
Here’s an old image of what my website used to look like (designed by my wife) w/ this same image.
Here’s a new picture book review of an oldie that I used to read to my son called “Dancing in the Wings” written by Debbie Allen and illustrated by Kadir Nelson.
What is this? I have been working as a picture book illustrator/ writer since 2013 officially and I’ve been reading picture books since I became a young dad in 2004. In that time I’ve read nearly 700 picture books. Some trash, some ok, but with these videos I’m sharing my favorites! Watch all of them here. My last book is Fresh Juice.
What’s this? This inspiration board is one of the ways I stay inspired and sane through all of life’s trials, and tribulations, work, etc. I’ve been making inspiration boards full of films, books, music, events, people, artists, movements, and more for over a decade. Do you have an inspiration board? Please share in the comments. Who am I? My name is Rob Liu-Trujillo and I’m an artist working in kid lit, public art, and other disciplines. Go to my website, or follow me on IG or YouTube. You can also cop my first art book here.
Hey fam, my organization the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair got a $5k grant and will be fundraising over the next 30 days to match it dollar for dollar. If you’re unfamiliar with the fair I invite you to check out….
Here are some photos taken by photographer Mark Rea from the 2025 fair. Wanna see more? Check out this Facebook page or our website.
Short Mission:Bruh, make a kids book fair that champions social justice kid lit. Also, champion Bipoc, Queer, Immigrant, and Social Justice creators and kid focused orgs.
Longer Mission & Vision: Our mission is to promote social justice through the power of children’s books. We support independent children’s book creators to conceive, develop, distribute, and champion social justice-themed children’s books. We do this through our signature event, the annual Social Justice Children’s Book Fair, and other ongoing projects and initiatives.
We envision a world where children’s book creators have the ability to conceive, develop, distribute, and champion a diversity of social justice-centered stories that need to be told as they look to reach all children, families, teachers, librarians, and book lovers.
My Why: I believe there are some amazing stories about culture, class, race, gender, identity, politics, history, etc that need to be shared with a wider audience and I get to help facilitate that as one of many organizers of this fair. I believe in representation, being able to see yourself in literature early, and I believe in literacy for liberation and fun.
Accomplishments:
2 years of co-curating Youth Lit Day for Bay Area Book Festival
Over 2k attendees
Thousands of kids books donated to Bay Area students
Ok, Its been over a decade since I worked for Rethinking Schools but I’m so happy to be back in the mix. In a day and age where books can be too long, and tik tok clips too short, and the internet filled with AI slop its nice to have a form of physical media that informs. About what you say? Read on….
Rethinking Schools MISSION and VISION:
Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. Our magazine, books, and other resources promote equity and racial justice in the classroom. We encourage grassroots efforts in our schools and communities to enhance the learning and well-being of our children and to build a broad democratic movement for social and environmental justice.
Our Zinn Education Project — coordinated with Teaching for Change — has more than 100,000 educators who have registered to access our “people’s history” materials.
Here’s a bit of process art to show my thinking when ingesting, sitting with, dissecting, and analyzing former principal Gilbert Juan Armenta’s piece about how school systems continuously target Black children by overly discipling them, singling them out, punishing them, and trying to track them into special education. I know this experience intimately after being suspended from my school for “talking” as a 3rd grader!!!!
The cool thing about this article and the magazine is that it talks about real issues that teachers, educators, and others are experiencing in the classroom. They talk about race, gender, identity, politics, class, racism, and how to address these issues in a way that is radical, sensitive to the age group, and respectful. This is what drew me to the magazine years ago. See my old piece here.
Here are some color directions for this piece.
Heres the final painting, done in ink and watercolor. Shout out to AD Nancy Zucker for the call!
Last Spring I began working with 826 Valencia to illustrate a book cover for the De Marillac Academy, a middle school in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. And I have a history with this organization as I read there when I was just beginning to work in kid lit and I took my son and his class on a field trip there over 12 years ago.
The thing I remember back then was that the folks who started the org had a sense of duty and wonder. Duty in that they were taking it seriously; the charge to encourage literacy and creative writing. And wonder, in that their organization was housed in a pirate ship! Imagine pirate jokes and 4th graders telling you that they are “published”.
And they still have that dedication as this book is one of several published anthologies of creative writing by middle school students. Here’s the synopsis:
“In these vibrant poems, students in grades 6-8th from De Marillac Academy explore their own potential and the comfort of the things they hold dear. They find refuge in the bounces of a basketball and uncover a quiet hero in a cherished eyelash curler. In these pages you’ll find heartfelt declarations of love to their beds and a tenderness towards the quiet world their headphones offer. Students imagine life through the delicate wings of a butterfly, the sharp mind of a beloved teacher, and even providing hope as a lawyer. No matter who holds the narrative today, in the future they are building, these students assert one thing is for sure, they’ll be the ones.
Here’s a bit of process art from the making of the cover.
Shout out to Amanda Boesen and Lucy Goseline-Ratliff who assisted me in narrowing down and refining the sketch until it was right.
You can see the line work here and the color directions. Ultimately it ended up being a combination of colors. The uniforms for the actual students are red and grey though so thats what we ended up using.
And heres the final cover illustration! My fav poem from the book was called “lies” and I loved all the pieces about their video games, favorite foods, etc.
About the organization that does this work and commissioned this art:
826 Valencia equips students with writing skills to create change.
We are a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students ages six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
Our services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with individualized attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.
And with chapters in:
Boston
Chicago
Washington DC
Los Angeles
Michigan
Minneapolis
New Orleans
NYC
and the founding chapter San Francisco(Bay Areaaaaaa) they are taking the task to the next level.
Dig this? Check out this book cover I did for Robert Alexander’s book “He Hit Me First” OR the cover of Libros Solidarios written by Luz Yadira Herrera and Carla España.
