Jon Klassen: Hi. My name is Jon Klassen, and I wrote an illustrated I Want My Hat Back. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I came to write the book, and we're going to look at the spread and how it's made.

I Want My Hat Back was the first book I ever wrote, and I was very nervous writing it because I'd never written a book before. The language is very limited. The story came slowly at first, but then as soon as I decided to do it all in dialogue like a play, it came actually very quickly and the story just sort of fell out. I think it's conducive to dialogue the fact that we don't have a narrator explaining to us that there's a hat on the rabbit's head.

For the artwork itself, I used a lot of black silhouettes. I did it all in ink. All the animals were just black silhouettes, and then I went in later and gave it some color and a little bit more variation. The eyes, and the nose, and the ears and things, the smaller bits I did digitally with a rough edge on it. The eyes were so important, I needed them to be just right.

The spread I want to look at is after the spread where the bear confronts the rabbit and says, "You! You stole my hat." There's a wordless spread with the two of them looking at each other. The expressions on their faces were difficult to do. The silhouettes were fine, but when I got into the eyes, it took a long time, the rabbit especially. He has to look very particular. He can't look too cute. If the eyes get too wide, he looks too cute and he looks too afraid, and then you feel bad about the ending. I thought of him as indifferent. I don't think he relates it back to him having stolen the hat. He's not learning a lesson here, and I think that's when the bear realizes he's going to do what he's going to do.