Her mom was diligent about keeping a very young Kaley McCabe supplied with computer paper. The budding artist would spend hours during her childhood making up stories and fashioning them into books she stapled together and created construction paper book covers for them.

“My parents always encouraged my drawings: My mom is an elementary school teacher, and she has a massive collection of children’s books. I think she always knew I would end up being an illustrator, and she and my dad were both supportive of my love of art. They still have a lot of my terrible drawings from when I was a kid,” she says.

It’s unlikely that anyone would describe her work as “terrible” today— a senior designer for children’s books at ReaderLink and a freelance illustrator, McCabe has also illustrated the “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: You’re My Little Nightmare” and “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Welcome to Halloween Town!” children’s books, and she’s one of the featured artists in this year’s San Diego Book Crawl, alongside illustrator Susie Ghahremani. The annual event celebrates Independent Bookstore Day (the last Saturday in April), and this year’s book crawl is April 26 to 28, with people encouraged to visit as many of the 14 participating locations as possible for a chance to earn prizes by making purchases (in person) and getting the event passport stamped at each location. As book crawl artists, McCabe created the main artwork featured in the marketing and merchandise, and Ghahremani designed and created the limited-edition collectible pins.

McCabe, 31, lives in Rancho Peñasquitos with her husband, Jake, and talked a bit about her process for creating some of her work, where she likes to go book hunting, and her favorite heavy metal bands.

Q: What do you think it was about visual art that you were initially drawn to (pun intended)?

A: I loved being able to create worlds and the characters that inhabited them. And even when I was drawing things from cartoons or other media, I would also make my own characters to be a part of the stories I loved so much.

Q: In what ways has your love of the art form evolved over the years?

A: As a kid I always loved children’s books and graphic novels, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve really come to appreciate how much work goes into each book. I oftentimes revisit children’s books I read a million times over as a child and will catch details or jokes I never noticed before. There’s so much heart that is put into books that I now understand after being part of the creation process.

What I love about Rancho Peñasquitos…

My neighborhood is very quiet, but it’s also close to the 15 highway, so it’s very easy to get anywhere in San Diego. I love that there is a park right down the street from me, which I often go to just to swing. My husband and I take a long walk every day around our neighborhood, and we have a lot of kind people we chit-chat with on our route. There’s also a lot of animals we see in people’s windows and yards that we’ve given our own names to. I especially love when we get to see Tuxedo, a small black-and-white cat who is often roaming the cul-de-sac. She’s a sweetheart!

Q: In your bio on the San Diego Book Crawl website, it mentions your work illustrating the “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: You’re My Little Nightmare” book. You also illustrated “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Welcome to Halloween Town!” The first is a board book and the latter features flaps, pull tabs, and other interactive elements based on the popular film. What was your relationship to the movie before working on these books?

A: I’m sure it comes as no shock, but I was obsessed with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as a kid. I remember taking my friends to the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood to see a 3D showing of the movie for my birthday one year. I replayed the DVD over and over again in my room while I drew in sketchbooks or played computer games. Tim Burton and his uniquely creepy point of view was a massive inspiration to me, and “Nightmare” was my favorite work of his. I wish I could go back to my younger self and tell her she would one day be working with Tim Burton and his team on books—she’d flip!

Q: Can you talk a bit about your creative process for illustrating books based on such well-known and beloved drawings?

A: My process for working on licensed books is a bit different than typical projects. Since these are established characters, often they come with specific rules: what you can show a character doing, what environments they can be in, etc. Keeping those guidelines in mind, I’ll start working on very loose sketches to lay out each page. I’ll do these very quick (often scribble) drawings for each page of the book, to get an idea of how the layouts will work together as a full book. Once I’m happy with the general direction, I’ll go in and do rough sketches of the characters and backgrounds to block everything out. The characters don’t need to be incredibly accurate at this point; I just need to get across what I’m thinking to the editors and the licensing team to get their feedback. After this, I go in and start working on tight sketches, which is where you home in on the details and make sure everything is on-model. This can take a long time, depending on how complex characters and backgrounds are. In the case of “Nightmare,” I often find myself scrubbing through the movie frame-by-frame to find specific references and small details.

Once the tight sketches are done, they are sent to the licensing team again to get their feedback. This is usually when the most changes are made. Often, licensing teams will supply you with bluelines or redlines, which are corrective overlays to your artwork that show you exactly how they’d like you to revise a pose. They’re usually images that just have your original sketch at half-opacity and then a red or blue drawing on top to show the corrections (hence the name).

Once that stage is over, you can start to work on colors. This is usually the longest stage, but to me this is the most fun part. Getting to bring the sketches to final render is satisfying, plus at this point I can usually sit back and just enjoy the process; the details and layout have all been figured out already, so I have a set blueprint to just add color to.

Q: What inspires you in your artwork, in the creative process?

A: This is a little meta, but seeing other creative people inspires me to be creative. I always get really inspired when I watch a great animated movie, play a great video game, or when I’m browsing through thrift stores and come across old, illustrated books or toys and dishware. Video games, especially, have been a creative inspiration for me-I recently played through the “Psychonaut” video games after finishing a large book project, and it really helped rejuvenate me.

Q: Do you have any local bookstores you frequent? Favorite local spots to go to when you want to read or draw?

A: My favorite place to browse books is actually my local library! The (Rancho Peñasquitos) library is very lovely and quiet. Especially right now, when federal funding is getting cut for libraries and book banning is on the rise, I want to give my library as much support as I can.

As for where I like to draw, I wish I had a cool, artsy answer for this, but I honestly love drawing most when I’m alone on my bed. In my head, I love the idea of going to a local coffee shop to draw, but I get anxious about drawing in public. I have a daydream of taking my iPad to the San Diego Zoo and drawing some of the animals, but I need to psyche myself up to do it. Maybe I’ll make that one of my goals for 2025!

Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

A: The best advice I’ve ever received is to just draw every single day. Even if I am completely burned out and have no desire to draw, I will at least scribble something out for 5 minutes. Doing this every day helps you maintain all the training you’ve put into your drawing hand and stops it from “getting rusty.”

Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?

A: If you just saw my artwork, you’d probably never guess that my favorite genre of music is heavy metal! I’ve loved metal for a long time, but the sub-genres I listen to frequently have changed over time. I started with loving symphonic metal (Nightwish, Delain, Within Temptation), but in recent years I’ve also gotten into metalcore, which is a mix of metal and hardcore music (aka, lots of harsh, angry vocals). My favorite bands are Spiritbox, The Devil Wears Prada, Motionless in White, Lacuna Coil, Architects, and The Birthday Massacre. There’s something cathartic about drawing cute unicorns while listening to loud angry music, haha.

Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.

A: My husband Jake and I have annual passes to the (San Diego) Zoo, so my ideal weekend in San Diego is to visit the zoo early in the morning—ideally when the red panda is out and about, he’s so cute! Then, I’d go visit a local goth clothing and accessory store called La Loupe Noir and probably spend way too much money. Then, we could stop and get some coffee at a local shop (Seven Seas Roasting Co. is right next door), before heading over to La Jolla to see the sea lions on the ocean cliffs. Then we could round out the day by going to Tokyo Central and Main to grab some snacks and their premade meals (the katsu chicken is delicious).

Originally Published: April 19, 2025 at 6:00 AM PDT