This story begins, as many of the best tales do, with the arrival of a dog.
Early in the pandemic, Loren Long and his wife, Tracy, rescued Charlie, a tricolor hound with baleful eyes and a foghorn howl. He had energy to burn, so Long started running with him on a stretch of the Little Miami Scenic Trail, which meanders nearly 78 miles from Springfield, Ohio, to Cincinnati.
Along their daily route, the pair passed an abandoned, rusted-out school bus moldering at the far end of a field. The faded yellow blended into a dense camouflage of trunks and leaves, but something about the bus caught Long’s eye.
He took a closer look. “I thought, Hm. That doesn’t belong there,” he said.
He returned the next day. And the day after that.
“I’m running along, and I’m like, Somehow that bus seems happy,” Long said. “I thought, How is she happy? She’s not supposed to be abandoned in a paddock, sinking into mud, with rust all over her and goats climbing in and out.”
Long has illustrated best-selling children’s books by Barack Obama, Madonna and Amanda Gorman. He created Otis, the plucky red tractor who starred in six widely-read picture books and a show on Apple TV+. He’s been struck by bolts of inspiration before, but this one landed differently.
“The ground around us all seemed to be a little bit shaky,” Long said. Covid was raging. “Tracy and I moved her fragile father in with us for most of that year. Pleasant as could be, but a bit of a change.” The Longs’ sons were off on their own, their absence palpable in the art-filled midcentury house with a pool table by its front door. And of course, there was Charlie, steadfast if occasionally chaotic, a harbinger of a new phase.
Long kept running, and he kept wondering about that bus. “Surely it started out bright and shiny, doing one of the most important jobs,” he said. “What a grand life she must have had!”
Eventually, Long grabbed a battered Moleskine and started writing. The words flowed; the voice came easily.
In his telling, the bus goes through five incarnations. First it delivers children to school. Then it transports the elderly to the library. Later, parked in a quiet corner of a city, the bus becomes a shelter for people with nowhere else to go. Eventually the bus gets towed to a field near a river and the goats move in.
The ending is a surprise. No matter who or what comes into contact with the bus, her response is the same: “And they filled her with joy.” This refrain repeats five times.
It’s a simple story — the biography of a familiar part of ordinary life. But its creation became an all-consuming process unlike any he’s written or illustrated over the past two decades.
“I didn’t realize how this one would turn back onto me,” Long said. “It took me on plot twists I didn’t expect.”
In August 2022, Roaring Brook acquired “The Yellow Bus” based on the story and one painting. Then Long had to tackle the rest of the pictures.
“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” Long said. “Just do one sketch a day. If you do it quickly, do two. What you don’t want to do is no sketches in three days because you’re so afraid. It’s like writing. It’s terrible when you first start.”
To ease this process — and to help himself visualize the bus’s world — Long decided to build a three-dimensional model of the valley where the book takes place. He thought this would take a week, maybe 10 days. It took two months. He thought the project would fit on a card table. Instead it sprawled to 10 feet, displacing a couch and claiming half of Long’s studio.
When his sons visited, they took in the rangy landscape dotted with miniature houses, handmade hay bales and toy vehicles leftover from their childhood. Their verdict was swift: “Dad, you’re crazy.”
Long recalled this moment fondly, on a breezy morning at his home in Madeira, Ohio. Wearing paint splattered pants and a T-shirt that said “The Luckiest” in loopy script, he bounded around his studio, Tigger-like, navigating art supplies, lamps, a power strip, a step stool and a ladder as he described the intense creative journey behind the book.
Long’s studio is a sunny, many-windowed addition perched atop his home like a wheelhouse on a boat. Ascending a red spiral staircase from the front hallway, a number of signs come into focus: “Remember, You’ll Be Dead Soon.” “The More I Get to Know Some People the More I Like Dogs. “Passion Follows Mastery.”
The model appears, stretching the length of the room — a colorful diorama dotted with houses, cows, fences, a river, a graveyard and even the wood frame of a building under construction.
The scope is impressive, the detail more so: Store windows have awnings. Trees have leaves. But it’s clear that the model is a working prototype, constructed in a frenzy of creativity, with found objects and zero preciousness.
“This is cardboard, this is floral foam, this is Sculpey clay,” Long said, pointing to rock faces, hills and various tiny elements that would make a dollhouse enthusiast swoon.
As he labored over his miniature universe in 10-hour stretches, Long had some doubts: “Am I just spinning my wheels? Am I wasting my time?”
Until this point, Lincoln Logs were the extent of Long’s experience as a hobbyist in the construction realm. He’d never been a big Lego guy. And most illustrators create their work digitally these days. They hardly use pencils, let alone Exacto knives.
Once the landmarks were in place, Long moved onto the painting stage, which was more arduous than it sounds because he’s colorblind. “It’s just an obstacle and an annoyance,” Long said, shrugging off any suggestion of adversity. He arranges paints in a certain order on his palette so he knows where to find each shade; no big deal.
The all-consuming enterprise turned out to be, as Long put it, “the most fun I’ve had practically since junior high school.” It gave him something to focus on, and helped him envision the bus’s route through a valley that changes with time, technology and weather.
It was also a family affair: Tracy Long located the toy vehicles, the model railroad supplies and a few additional school buses. If she was baffled by her husband’s efforts, she didn’t let on.
“She could probably sense that I was excited I was doing something different,” Long said. (He dedicated “The Yellow Bus” to her.)
The team at Roaring Brook was mostly in the dark about the progression of the model until Long turned his screen around during a Zoom call to show it to them.
His editor, Kate Meltzer, said, “All of a sudden, in the space behind him, there was this massive town.”
Elizabeth H. Clark, the book’s designer said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe that he had made this thing.”
While he was drawing, Long circled the model to study it from different angles. He climbed the ladder for an aerial perspective. He snapped pictures on his phone so he could go back to his desk and draw a close-up view. He opened and closed the blinds so he could get the light just right.
Long invited Brian Steege, a photographer, to document the process.
“Loren would add and subtract buildings and fauna and move the bus around,” Steege said. “We talked about point of view and lighting, what that looks like — sunset and sunrise and high noon.” He showed Long how to use a continuous source LED light so he could create shadows with the flick of a switch.
Before Long got to work on the actual pictures that appear in the book, he made an important decision. “It was a gut thing,” he said. “The book should be black and white, with the iconic yellow of the bus bouncing off that.”
So much for the painting and repainting of the model. With one the exception of one spread — the “emotional valley” of the book, as Clark described it — the landscape is in charcoal, shadowy and monochromatic.
The only color comes from the bus and its riders or visitors. If a person is in contact with the bus, that person appears in color.
Clark said, “We kept going back to that line, ‘They filled her with joy.’ Everything inside the bus or touching the bus would feel her service and her warmth.”
That warmth appears in the full spectrum of the rainbow. Every now and then, Tracy Long weighed in on the shades of the aging bus — mostly yellow ocher, cadmium yellow medium and purple.
“If you want shadow, throw in a little of its complementary color,” Loren Long said.
“You can flip through the book without reading the text at all and still get the story from visual cues,” Clark said.
With shades of “The Giving Tree” — its sweep and bittersweetness, but none of the greed — “The Yellow Bus” emphasizes service over self sacrifice. It functions as a sweet and speedy bedtime story, but a peek under the hood reveals a powerful engine.
“It’s about purpose in life, the passage of time and the simple human feeling we get from doing something for others,” Long said. “That resonated with me.”
This message resonated with readers too. “The Yellow Bus” came out on June 25 and quickly made its way to the No. 1 spot on the children and young adult best-seller list.
After reading “The Yellow Bus” to a school group last spring, Long asked students why the bus was happy, even as her life changed for the worse. Hands shot up. Answers varied: She had friends. She was yellow. Finally, one girl said, “She likes to be used.”
Long understood what she meant. He said, “The bus likes to be useful.”
Who doesn’t?
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