Interview with illustrator Chris Sickles

Anyone around youngsters knows that among the many benefits is reading children’s books—to your child or to yourself.

Children’s literature offers stories and pictures that we all need to enjoy—not just kids. One of the best examples of that is some of the work done by Chris Sickles of the Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind., just a stone’s throw from where Wilbur Wright was born.

Sickles, 50, is a freelance illustrator whose credits include the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as producing The Look Book and Build along with illustrating Elvis is King and Here Comes the Garbage Barge by Jonah Winter, The Beginner’s Guide to Running Away from Home by Jennifer Huget, and The Secret Subway by Shana Covey.

Described as the mastermind of Red Nose Studio, Sickels creates three-dimensional characters and scenes that serve as illustrations for children's books and other projects. You have to see his work to really appreciate it. In his 2022 effort Build, he created “wonky versions” of toy bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes 

Sickles may say wonky but another way to describe his work is wondrous. There’s imagination at work here that makes you understand why he’s identified as “insanely talented” in one of the accounts of his work online.

His creations come from old pieces of wood, typewriter keys, whatever the artist can glom onto to fire his sculptural artistry. He grew up on a small family farm where things always had to be fixed with what was around. That continues to serve as his approach to art, Sickles said. 

“As an illustrator, my job is to create an image that hopefully makes a viewer or reader stop and pursue content further, whether that’s a book cover or an image in a magazine,” Sickels explained when his work was exhibited at the University of Indianapolis in 2018.

When Sickles did the art for Secret Subway, a story about Eli Beach’s effort to build a pneumatic subway in New York City in 1870, he produced some 20 characters including Beach, himself, Boss Tweed (the mayor who ran New York who opposed Beach’s effort) as well as construction workers, passengers, and New York residents, all in 1870 attire. “I probably got into it more than I should have,” he laughed.

Incidentally, Beach’s block-long subway was demonstrated successfully with much fanfare but unfortunately never went anywhere. With Tweed and the established railway in opposition, once Beach’s effort was discovered, the secret subway was entombed and forgotten. It wasn’t until 1904 that New York finally got its subway.

Sickles said one of the things that appealed to him about the story was that Beach had to deceive city officials to build what he initially described as a way to deliver mail. Pneumatic tubes still serve that function in some places. They’re also still very much in use at drive-in banks. That’s a lesson for kids, the artist said—not to be mischievous—but not to get too hung up with all the rules so often laid down by adults.