Fort Wayne – Outside of Fort Wayne, people recognize Lynn Rowe Reed’s work. They’ve read about it in the New York Times; seen it in the Wall Street Journal, on bookstore shelves and at the Museum of American Illustration in New York.

In children’s book circles, the local author and illustrator is famous. But in Fort Wayne, she’s still a well-kept secret.

“It’s not that I’m trying to be,” she says. “But it seems to have ended up that way.”

Tucked away in the Kachmann Building on Lafayette Street, Rowe Reed’s second-floor studio is filled with both fine art and illustrations from her children’s books (16 of them; both hers and ones by other authors). Her style is unmistakable – whimsical characters, a vibrant and bold color palette and a sense of creative abandon usually only captured by children clutching handfuls of crayons.

On display, an illustration of a big yellow airplane surrounded by puffy clouds and blue sky. The painting was also the cover of her 2004 book, “Punctuation Takes A Vacation,” authored by Robin Pulver and published by the New York-based Holiday House. The book is, by far, Rowe Reed’s most popular project to date.

“I’m amazed by the amount of people who tell me they have that book, or they use it in their classroom or that their children love it,” she says. “We had no idea how popular it was going to become.”

Rowe Reed calls the day she was asked to illustrate “Punctuation Takes a Vacation” the luckiest day of her life.

“There are thousands of illustrators out there trying to get that little sliver of pie,” she says. “In college, if someone had told me that being an illustrator rarely works out, I would have headed straight for the nursing school.”

Rowe Reed grew up in Garrett. As a teenager and a student at Garrett High School, she was known as a rebel, tooling around town on a Honda 100 motorcycle, leaving astonished looks on the faces of neighbors, teachers and fellow students.

“I was a quintessential rebellious teenager,” she says. “I didn’t think much about art then. I was more interested in getting out of Garrett.”

For Rowe Reed, art itself eventually became an act of rebellion. As a kid, she was not exposed to art. No visits to museums; no discussion of art history or the Mona Lisa. It wasn’t until she was an adult – and an art student at Texas A&M – that she visited her first museum.

“I didn’t even know what an illustrator was at that time,” she says. “When you’re a kid, you’re always interested in cartooning. I knew I was a decent caricature artist, but I had no idea how to find avenues for my art.”

Work began to trickle in. Christmas cards, newspaper and magazine illustrations and, finally, children’s books. Rowe Reed is now working on her 16th children’s book, a self-penned story called “Roscoe and the Pelican Rescue” about the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The story focuses on two children and a dog who rescue three oil-covered pelicans from a beach in Louisiana. Because of the timely nature of the subject, Rowe Reed and her publisher Holiday House are rushing to finish the book.

Instead of the traditional three months it takes Rowe Reed to create book illustrations, she has finished 20 illustrations for “Roscoe and the Pelican Rescue” in a little more than a month. The process has been “fast and furious” she says, with working days stretching into working nights (and sometimes working mornings).

“The tricky part is to take a difficult subject and turn it into something children will understand,” she says. “You have to say something compelling, convey emotion without getting sappy and show the disappointment of the child. But I’ve always liked the simplicity of children’s books – taking a topic and boiling it down to something concise and simple.”

In addition to “Roscoe and the Pelican Rescue,” Rowe Reed has two other children’s books hitting bookstores next spring. But she’s also branching out into the world of adult literature. An illustrated memoir about her battle with breast cancer is being shopped to publishers around New York.

The project was one of her biggest endeavors, she says. Exhausted and sick from chemotherapy, Rowe Reed was taken to the emergency room at least three times during her treatment. She was unable to work but began documenting the experience from the first moment she felt the lump in her breast, she says.

“It gave me purpose,” she says. “I wanted to document the pain and emotions so I wouldn’t forget them. I was so sick, keeping a journal was just about all I could do anyway.”

Given the subject matter, the book is a tough sell, she says. Rowe Reed’s artwork is usually associated with children’s books, her folk-art style filled with humor and childlike whimsy. Combine that with passages about lumpectomies and nausea and some publishers balk, she says.

“Publishers aren’t excited about diseases,” she says. “What they may not realize is that art can be very healing – that you can still have a sense of humor during the darkest moments of your life.”

Information about Rowe Reed’s books and original artwork is available at www.lynnrowereed.com.

edowns@jg.net