About

About The Open Spread

Hi, I’m Ginnie.

I’m an illustrator, a writer, a professor, a flower farmer, and an avid gardener.
I’ve illustrated picture books and spent years teaching students how to see, draw, and pay attention. When I’m not in the studio or the classroom, I’m often in the field planting, observing, working with my hands.

I made this space because I needed one.
A place to think slowly.
To look more closely at how stories move and how drawings breathe.
To sit with the parts of creative life that are messy, rhythmic, and alive.

It’s where I gather what the page and the garden are both trying to teach me.

That’s why this blog is called The Open Spread.

What You’ll Find Here

I write about things that aren’t always easy to categorize.

Sometimes it’s about pacing in picture books, or how a single gesture can shift a scene.
Sometimes it’s about drawing when the work feels stiff.
Sometimes it’s something I noticed in the field—how a seed waits, how light changes a bloom, how silence can hold a story.

This space holds sketches, stories, small observations, and half-formed thoughts.
It’s for process. For pause.
For letting things unfold in their own time.

What This Is (and Isn’t)

The Open Spread isn’t a portfolio. You can find my portfolio here.
It’s not a how-to site or a place for perfect process shots.
And it’s definitely not polished or fast.

It’s a rhythm space.
A creative log.
A quiet archive of what it means to keep making—across seasons, across disciplines.

This is where I let the drawing go off course.
This is where I write like I draw.

A Letter, If You’d Like One

Once a month, I send out a letter called Beyond the Gutter
It’s part sketch, part reflection, part seasonal fragment—a quiet dispatch from the slower side of creative work.
You can read or subscribe here.

Thanks for being here.
I hope something you find lands softly like a page turn you didn’t expect, or a bloom you didn’t plant on purpose.

Ginnie