Q & A | Illustrator Mike Lowery

Atlanta-based illustrator Mike Lowery can’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawing. From a young age, Lowery’s family encouraged and fostered his love of art and music, and his childhood habit of keeping sketchbooks has followed him throughout his life and career. His Instagram account (with a sizable following of more than 29,000) is full of lighthearted drawings that depict daily life, travel, and charming portraits of friends and family.

After attending art school, Lowery began working as a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and artist. He currently resides in Atlanta where he is a professor at the local campus of Savannah College of Art and Design and a co-founder of Paper Ghost Studio in Candler Park, along with his wife, Katrin Wiehle. The subjects of his illustrations are a humorous blend of clever observation and insightful trivia with a style that mixes simple lines, bold colors and detailed lettering. Lowery’s work has published in several books, and his work has appeared on greeting cards, in Nick Jr. Magazine and in various gallery shows from Candler Park to Beijing, China.

CommonCreativ talked with Mike about Richard Scarry, how to dress children in Iceland and where to get the best Indian food in ATL.

CommonCreativ: Many of your illustrations focus on tangible, day-to-day objects, animals and people. When you’re creating something, what sparks your interest?

Mike Lowery: I don’t schedule when to draw, I just draw all the time when I’m not doing something else. I keep a sketchbook with me and draw at the DMV or wherever. I try not to get sucked into my phone too much, so I can keep filling up sketchbooks. As far as themes go, if it’s just for me, I try to just draw stuff that I like to draw. Stuff that makes me happy in real life—like synthesizers, stuff from my day, funny stuff, weird stuff. I just like to draw.

One of my favorite things is to keep sketched out notes from trips that we take. I’m lucky that I get really long summers off from teaching, and my illustration work can be done anywhere, so my wife, daughter and I like to travel. I love sitting on a train and keeping a record of things that we ate in Vietnam, or something stupid I accidentally said in Japan to a ramen shop owner, or diagrams of the insane amounts of clothes my daughter had to wear in Iceland.

CC: Who has influenced you? There’s something about your work that made me think of Wes Anderson’s movies. How did you develop your style?

ML: I’m a huge fan of some book illustrators like Ed Emberly, Richard Scarry and Edward Gorey. I also get to share my home and studio with my favorite illustrator, Katrin. This is hugely influential because she pushes me to make my work better—we draw together, travel together, and we share a lot of the same joy in making art and looking at art.

CC: You’ve collaborated with record-breaking game show contestant Ken Jennings on his Junior Genius book series and app. What personal interest did you have in this project?

ML: I make picture books about farts and slimy space slugs and other stuff for a living, so of course I’m a life-long nerd. I watched almost every episode of Jennings’ run on Jeopardy, and it was pretty amazing to get asked to draw books with him years later.

Illustrator Mike Lowery (middle) with the Paper Ghost Studio crew.

CC: Your illustration style seems to lend itself to children’s media, but you’ve also done things like your delightfully inappropriate greeting cards with Marian Heath. Do you enjoy creating art for one type of audience over another?

ML: Kids and adults like a lot of the same thing sometimes, so I just draw stuff that both would like… but sometimes the platform (greeting card, children’s book) is definitely more specific to one over the other. And sometimes the jokes are for a little bit of an older audience. When I started writing kids books, for example, I tried shooting for a really young audience (ages 0 to 3), and then realized that my writing just works better for older kids (8-12 and up) because I like making puns and word jokes, that sort of thing.

CC: In addition to Paper Ghost Studio in Candler Park, you’ve done work for the Indie Craft Festival and have at least one artistic piece dedicated to Atlanta (shout out to Pho 24!). In your humble, what makes Atlanta a great place to be?

ML: Atlanta was meant to be a stopover, I think, for some of us; an in-between spot while we waited for work to kick in or until we found a job somewhere else. And then we just sort of slowly fell in love with it.

I ended up here because I got a job teaching at SCAD. I moved down from the DC area and expected to be down here for a few years tops. Well, I found a nice German lady (who I later married), ended up getting to know artists and musicians in town, and bought a small house with an awesome backyard.

Atlanta is humble and full of stuff to do—great comedy, touring bands, amazing food on Buford Highway (or any other part of town for that matter). Have you tried all of the Indian restaurants in Decatur? Have you been to the little Chinese restaurant with an Indian twist in the Patel Brothers shopping center? I love this town.

You can see more of Mike Lowery’s work on his portfolio.