“It’s fascinating so far to see people say ‘Oh, I love cat books!’ ” says Brian Lies about his latest book, Cat Nap. “It never dawned on me that it’s a cat book, even though it’s about a cat. For me, the chase and the adventure are bigger than a book about a cat.” That’s something of an understatement: Cat Nap is a romp through art history, as a gray kitten pursues a mouse by magically jumping into a poster for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and centuries of sculpture, painting, stained glass, and illuminated manuscripts come to three-dimensional life. Caldecott Honoree Lies spoke with PW from his home and studio south of Boston about making new art from the history of art and how attempting the impossible—without resorting to AI—proved to be creative catnip.

Is this the most visually complex book you’ve worked on? How did that come about?

It’s absolutely the most complicated visually, because normally I’ve only worked in two-dimensional painting. I decided to go out on a limb and do 3D illustration.

It’s hard to say how long it took—a friend of ours said she had heard me talking about the story 15 years ago, and I thought it had been only 10. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since one of our cats disappeared and returned later with cobwebs on his whiskers. We had looked for him and couldn’t find him, so we thought he must have found a wormhole in time and space.

And as we joked about that, more and more stuff starts to stick to the idea. It’s like watching someone make cotton candy and seeing the fluff accumulate on the paper cone. We decided he had gone back to Egypt where people had revered cats and he had a noble adventure. And then I realized that sounded like a story I wanted to tackle. I went back to it over the years, and then figured out focusing on Egypt alone was too limited. The idea of doing things in three dimension was in from the beginning—you think of Egypt art as made in stone and wood and paintings on papyrus—but I wanted to branch out. I decided to open it up to a wider range of cultures and materials. But it was a grand challenge and one I didn’t dare commit myself to because it seemed so overwhelming.

So, a long creative gestation—how did much time did it actually take you?

My wife Laurel and I were talking about this—the best thing to say is nine months last year. I visit a lot of elementary schools and spring is very busy, so my work week is interrupted by visiting schools. By April I was going seven days a week [on the book] and had only four days off until mid-October. Every single day I was up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. It was obsessive but I was fully engaged. Writers talk about being in the zone, and I did have those days with this, which was just amazing.

It was a creative playground—although my wife might argue it was a creative junkyard, because there were so many pieces. I might be making a mold one day, or sculpting. I ended up doing what we called crab walking, working on a half dozen things at the same time. I had stuff in my studio, on the dining room table, and in my woodshop in the basement. It all seemed to shuffle together.

How did you go about selecting which specific artworks to feature in the book?

I went back and forth on how I would choose the artworks to emulate. I was thinking of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I went every day at lunchtime when I was in art school. And then I went back to my childhood reading and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg—that was one of my favorite books as a kid, and I thought let’s take a field trip to the Met. So eight or nine years ago I wandered through the halls of the Met looking for pieces that would fit in a children’s book and thinking, “could I make that?” I came back with a list and that was the foundation of the various things I would make. Since then, I made other trips to get more reference photos for the pieces.

Were there works of art you considered but didn’t make the cut?

Degas’s statue of the dancer with a cloth skirt (The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer). I figured I’d have to sculpt her several times, with a kitten rubbing against her leg, with her stroking the kitten and then with the two of them interacting. If I’m going to do this in bronze, and I’d never done bronze casting before—well, that seemed over the top.

But I also thought if you just use the greatest hits from the museum, what you’re doing is essentially parody. I wanted to select pieces that people wouldn’t know at all, so that would raise questions by young people and adults looking at the book and might be a doorway to exploration on their own.

What did your editor, Virginia Duncan, and your agent, Erin Murphy, think of the idea?

I know I originally told Virginia about it in 2018. I told my agent about it much earlier. I had put this book on the back burner, and I was working on another story that had been accepted by Virginia. But it was turning out to be less and less of a follow-up to The Rough Patch [for which he won a Caldecott Honor in 2018] and I had this epiphany: this is not the book I should be doing. I should be doing Cat Nap.

I contacted Erin and in a timorous way I asked, “What do you think Virginia would say if I did Cat Nap instead of this one?” and she replied, “I was hoping you’d say that!” Virginia and I had a phone call and she said, “Can you do it?” Of course that was the challenge: learning new skills and trying to stretch in how I created images.

There’s a great sense of pride when you’ve done something you thought was impossible to do. It seems kind of boring to come up with one idea and milk it for the rest of your career. I’d much rather experiment with new things.

In your acknowledgments you also thank your art director, Paul Zakris, and 3D photographer Rob Goldsborough, among others. Was there an unusual amount of collaboration involved for you?

Paul is such a creative guy and I loved all his suggestions. We’d be looking at something and he’d say, “What if we do this?” It might be moving a line down two inches and it makes your eye go in a different track and leads readers through the story so much better.

If you’re doing two-dimensional art, either the illustrator will provide scans to the art director or send the artwork and it gets photographed and scanned in house, and then they manipulate the images on the page. But in this case we were dealing with three-dimensional artwork and so many elements that needed to get put together—a lot more was asked of Paul than is usually asked of people. I’m eternally grateful.

With the photography, I thought Greenwillow would do it but I was told, “This is not something we do in-house.” I don’t know any photographers personally and this was a real challenge. I thought about people who work in three-dimensional things, and there’s a wonderful fabric illustrator, Salley Mavor, who has illustrated and written books in three-dimensional fabric, and I thought I’d call her up and see who photographs her stuff and she said, “Oh, my husband.” And it turns out that her husband, Rob Goldsborough, has a basement studio and was willing to take on the photography of the pieces.

Rob wanted to shoot the artwork without me looking over his shoulder—which was probably a good thing. I wrote out descriptions of what I was hoping for each piece, and he lit things and sent me proofs. There was a lot of “let’s see how things turn out.”

There’s a spread at the end showing you working on the images at your studio. What’s the backstory behind this back matter?

That was Virginia’s suggestion. She said, “We really have to have back matter that talks about the creation of this. Otherwise everyone will think you did this on a computer.”

And it would have been so much easier to take reference photos and Photoshop a kitten into them, but there’s no challenge in that. And there are plenty of people out there with far better computer skills than me.

I liken it to a magician, even if the magician is on television. You know they’re bending the rules of reality, but there’s a very human hand in it. Think about if we were watching an AI-generated magician show—we wouldn’t care, because we know that nothing about the rules of reality was involved. It wouldn’t even be an act of camera trickery.

Why was it important to you that your readers know the effort involved?

The reason for kids to hear that things are handmade is that it’s empowering. When I was a boy I liked making things, but nothing I made felt good enough. I was not the best artist in my class but I loved making stuff. I think a lot of kids are self-critical. I hear kids say, “I could never do that.”

When I’m visiting schools, my big mantra is nobody gets it right the first time. Especially these days with AI and videos, it looks easy, like someone was born with this amazing talent and all they’re doing is working that talent.

I don’t like the phrase “you need to find your passion” because it implies it’s in the middle of a pathway in the mountains and you come across it one day. To me a passion is built the same way you build a campfire. You start with curiosity—being curious enough to make you try and do it badly. And then you think, “That was kind of fun to do.” Interest builds interest, which gradually builds skills, and at some point it clicks with you and that’s what I’m passionate about. Maybe this book will get kids to the museum and say, “There’s cool stuff there—I thought it was just dead people in frames.” Maybe they’ll explore and maybe that will involve creating some art of their own.

After working on a book this elaborate and intense, was there a big letdown?

There is a sense of a letdown because it’s going to be about a year before people see it. You have to be patient and have to get back to work on the next thing you have lined up. There was a lot of production work as Paul was putting pages together, so it wasn’t like sending off a FedEx package of art and getting back a UPS box of books a year later.

Now I’m a month out from publication, and the excitement is about the book tour and the events. We want to entertain people as much as possible. We’ve noticed that when people look at the book, they reach out and touch the pages. We’re going to be bringing some of the original artwork with us, but we have to ask people not to touch it, the same way you ask people not to touch the artwork in a museum. So we’re going to build a sensory board so you can see what the gold leaf and clay and fired glass feels like.

What’s next for you?

I’m on the last painting right now for a book that will be coming out in 2026, from Christy Ottaviano Books.

It’s about how our brains can’t help looking for patterns and stories. It’s about my version of an anglerfish and what happens to him when a dictionary floats down from the surface to his deep-sea home. He sees these little drawings in the margins and can’t figure out what they are. Then he has a Rosetta Stone moment, when a chambered nautilus floats by just as he sees an illustration of the chambered nautilus in the book. He connects the pictures with the objects and starts making up stories. And suddenly the deep dark ocean is full of stories and shared experiences.

Cat Nap by Brian Lies. Greenwillow, $19.99 Sept. 30 ISBN 978-0-06-267128-8