A children’s picture book shows the potential within a blank canvas

Richard Brehm still remembers struggling in the first grade. His rather unhelpful teacher had written him off and told Brehm’s parents that he would never catch up. “I just couldn’t get a grip on reading,” he says. “I [didn’t] know what was happening, but it made me fixate on learning language.” That fixation led the young Brehm to carry around a yellow pad of paper, sketching out his own ideas for what a children’s book should look like. He doesn’t remember if he ever finished one back then, but those early dreams were certainly on his mind recently while working on You Be You, his debut children’s picture book, released in December 2020.

Contrary to what his teacher predicted, Brehm became a top student and went on to study at Princeton. Writing was always in the background, even as his interests shifted from acting to animation, then eventually to film. Currently based in Los Angeles, Brehm spent 30 years of his career in the industry as a producer, screenwriter, studio executive, and development executive. “I kept being put into ‘creative’ jobs, but they were never really that creative,” he says.

Wanting to pursue something different, Brehm switched to documentaries in 2004. Since then, he has produced a wide variety of content for various television channels, such as a documentary on Disney for the History Channel, a television special on James Cameron’s Titanic, and a behind-the-scenes series on the Harry Potter films. It was in 2016, however, that Brehm was approached by a potential client for something exciting that was an even closer match to his own creative talents: a children’s book to accompany a TED Talk about staying true to oneself and overcoming adversity.

With only a weekend to come up with the structure of the book, Brehm pictured the way that his kids would read books in a circle when they were in preschool. “I just started spinning rhymes in my head…you be you, you be you...but [the story] was empty. There was no narrative to it.” Trying to take his mind off the tight deadline, Brehm watched the Disney-Pixar animated short film La Luna and found himself very moved by the story’s use of the moon and shooting stars as emotional metaphors. “About two o’clock in the morning, I woke up with my own version, which is the great canvas of life.”

Although Brehm got the basic structure of the book together rather quickly, various unforeseen issues delayed the planned TED Talk, and the overall project was put on hold. Realizing that the story reflected his own values as much as those of the client who’d originally had the idea, Brehm asked to finish the book on his own. And after several years of reflection, that first breakthrough idea of the great canvas of life remains a key element in the published picture book.

In it, a young girl is led into a mysterious mansion where the figure Master Paint brusquely puts her in a room with a blank canvas for her to fill: 

As the girl struggles with how to proceed, she is confronted by trolls, wolves, and even her own alter ego, all of which represent anxiety and self-doubt trying to sabotage her painting in what Kirkus Reviews calls “an uplifting, eye-filling adventure encouraging children to realize their innate creativity and individuality.”

Once Brehm had decided to finish the project on his own, he first had to find an illustrator. “I’ll be honest,” he says. “In my head, the characters were going to look like Calvin and Hobbes. A kind of whimsical approach.” He eventually chose to work with renowned Brazilian illustrator Rogério Coelho, who was more known for his esoteric designs and creating worlds with rich characters. “That changed my life,” Brehm says.

Over two years, Brehm and Coelho collaborated over the internet, with Coelho tapping into the dark and unknowable side of Brehm’s story. Through emails and messages, the two exchanged ideas over charcoal sketches before Coelho would start to add color and light, paying particular attention to giving the book a cinematic feel through a landscape 10-by-8-inch format. “He’s an extraordinary artist. He got the book to a deeper place,” Brehm says of Coelho’s worldbuilding, which went far beyond what Brehm had imagined. “I wrote [the story], but that was how I discovered so much about what [it] really was.”

The story, coupled with Coelho’s rich contribution, has seen strong reactions from readers of all ages. The first young children he showed the book to were immediately drawn into its intricate haunted-house world, while one of the first adult colleagues that Brehm shared it with was moved to tears. He intentionally crafted the metaphor of the canvas to work for a wide age range and to be evocative of the anxieties we all face—an idea that is also reflected in the book’s language, which Brehm writes entirely in the second person. (The young protagonist is only ever referred to as you, leading any reader to feel that the book speaks directly to them.)

“I don’t know when it happens, but there is a point where you start judging yourself as not good enough,” Brehm says, reflecting on those memories he still has from his early difficulties with reading. He hopes that the book’s blank canvas speaks to anyone who feels judged or feels that they have trouble drawing within the lines, no matter how old they are. “It’s really about discovering yourself. How do you stay true to who you are when the forces around you are telling you to do something differently?”