Behind the Book: Meet Başak Notz, the Illustrator Who Made the Scones Feel Alive

The thing no one tells you about making a children’s book is that the words are only half of it.

Maybe less than half.

You can write the most carefully honest little rhyme in the world about a scone with big feelings, but if the scone on the page doesn’t feel like it also has big feelings — the whole thing collapses. Kids know. Instantly. They’ll flip past a beautiful line of text to get to a face.

So before TootieFoodie became anything, I was looking for the face.

The right kind of quiet

I spent a lot of nights scrolling through illustrator portfolios, and most of them were wonderful in a way that wasn’t quite right. Too sharp. Too polished. Too cartoon. Too serious. Too cute — in the way cute sometimes flattens a feeling instead of holding it.

I was looking for an illustrator who could draw a piece of food and make you feel something. Not in a clever way. In a quiet way.

When I found Başak Notz’s work, I stopped scrolling.

The first thing I noticed was that her illustrations weren’t trying to impress me. They were just observing. There was a slowness to them. A softness. And — this mattered more than I realized at the time — her handwritten words were woven into the pictures in a way that felt like she’d been thinking about each one.

That’s the thing I kept coming back to. She was thinking about each one.

Who Başak is

Başak is a Mediterranean visual storyteller based in Chicago. Her work sits at an unusual intersection — bi-continental, she calls it — and when you look at enough of it, you can feel both places in the line. The warmth of somewhere sunnier. The carefulness of somewhere colder. Both at once.

She’s illustrated for Penguin Random House, HarperOne, Meredith, Arts Midwest, Vogue, and a long list of others. That part I only learned later, by the way — after I’d already decided she was the one. Her work spoke before her resume did. Which is, quietly, exactly how I want everything at TootieFoodie to feel.

And maybe the reason our collaboration works: Başak loves food. Talks about it. Eats it. Draws it. You can see it in the body of her portfolio before TootieFoodie ever existed. Food isn’t a theme she took on because I asked. It’s a thing she was already paying attention to.

When I first reached out with “hi, I’m working on a children’s book about food, and I think it’s also about feelings,” she didn’t need me to explain the premise twice. She just said, essentially, oh — yes, this is going to be fun.

What she brought

I can tell you, now, a few years in, what Başak’s illustrations actually do for the books:

They slow kids down. Her pages don’t beg for attention. They invite it. A kid will linger on a spread for thirty seconds longer than they would on something brighter, because there’s more to find.

They make feelings feel survivable. A scone with a worried face, drawn softly, is somehow easier for a three-year-old to sit with than a scone with a worried face drawn loud. The tone she uses gives kids permission to acknowledge the feeling without being overwhelmed by it.

They trust the reader. This is the part I love most. Başak doesn’t over-explain. She leaves room. There’s always a small detail in the background — a handwritten scrap, a little pattern, a visual joke — that a kid will find on the eighth read-through and delight in like it’s a secret just for them.

That restraint, to me, is what makes a picture book reread-able. And reread-ability is, quietly, the whole business.

How we work

Our process isn’t fancy.

I send her a draft of the words. She reads them. She asks small, precise questions — not what should this look like, but what does this character feel like on a Thursday. Then she disappears for a while and comes back with something that makes me understand my own book better.

That has happened on every book. I don’t know exactly why it works, and I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. Some collaborators translate your idea. Başak translates the thing under your idea — the part you didn’t know you were trying to say — and hands it back to you as a drawing.

Why it matters for a brand like this

If TootieFoodie is going to be what I want it to be — a place where kids meet their own feelings sideways, through food and story and rhyme — then every single page has to do some of that work visually. You can’t smuggle emotional intelligence into a kid on words alone.

The illustrator is not a decorator. The illustrator is a co-author.

Başak is that. In every book we’ve made and every book we’re making next.

If you’ve read Keeping Up With the Scones-es and felt something you didn’t expect to feel about a scone — that’s her. If a kid you love has asked you to read it again, and again, and again — a lot of that is her, too.

So this is a small and overdue thank-you note, on a blog she’ll probably never see.

Başak — thank you for making the scones feel alive.

— Brittany