Mary Newell DePalma has illustrated more than twenty picture books, and is the author of seven. In her long and varied illustration career, Mary has drawn just about everything, including eyeballs, cans of shrimp, mice, matchsticks, and dogs in swimsuits! Her circuitous path to children's book illustration included stints as an interpreter for the deaf, an apprentice engrosser, and a hand knitter.

Early influences

A highlight of Mary’s childhood was the summer that she and her six siblings spent diligently digging holes in their backyard, eventually transforming it into a reasonable replica of the moon’s surface. This accomplishment hardly drew any attention from their neighbors—a pair of retired vaudeville dancers, a congregation of Hare Krishnas, a houseful of hippies, an ancient suffragette, a professor who commuted to class via unicycle, and a skydiver who taught Mary how to pack parachutes—but it demonstrated an early aptitude for persistence and landscape design.

An entrepreneurial teen, Mary lettered signs for neighborhood businesses, addressed envelopes for a local stationer, and knitted sweaters for a local designer. Her one foray into traditional employment was a disastrous six-week stint at Wendy’s where not one single customer got what they ordered.

Work

Mary endured several winters in upstate New York and received her BFA in Medical Illustration from RIT. After trying her hand at all genres of illustration—portraits, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, textbooks, advertisements, pharmaceutical sales training manuals, Mary unexpectedly found her niche in picture books!

Pictures were one thing, but writing picture books was a new challenge. It took persistence, as her early efforts were just plain terrible. Once she got the hang of it, she really enjoyed the puzzle of combining words and pictures. She's written nonsense rhyme, fable, allegory, nonfiction, wordless, and just plain silly picture books.

After a while, two dimensions seemed limiting, so Mary began to construct odd objects with hidden spaces that unfolded, blossomed, and/or lit up, aiming to surprise and delight.

Today

Works-in-progress include joyful, noisy picture books—one about a marching band, and another one about crossing the street—and also a very quiet picture book about the bizarre and beautiful undersea world. Wish me luck!

When not making art, Mary can be found volunteering at the Boston Ballet Costume Shop, leading tours at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, teaching illustration at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, knitting, or overseeing her Little Free Library. She’s also returned to landscape design in her own garden, but now all the holes she digs have plants sprouting out of them :-)

The best place to see what's new is my Instagram, although sometimes I’m too busy to post anything!