Marie Hablitzel is my mother. My oldest child was five-years-old in 1991. She wanted to draw with her grandmother like her cousins did, but Grandma lives in California and we live in the state of Washington. It was impossible for the two to draw together on a regular basis.

I tried to fill in and got a book with basic drawing lessons. My daughter loved the lessons, but due to time restraints, I rarely had time to prepare a lesson. What I wanted was something basic so that I could simply sit and draw with my daughter like my mother had with me. Even though I had observed Marie give the lessons many times, I lacked the tools to get started.

Marie understood my frustration and began mailing a lesson to us each week. Up to that point, her lessons consisted of a drawing, four sentences and helpful suggestions pulled from decades of classroom experience. For the first time in all the years she had given the lessons, she wrote instructions for someone else to follow.

Each week, a new lesson arrived in our mailbox. After we completed a lesson, I added it to our growing stack of lessons. One day, I picked up the stack of papers - it felt like a book. At that moment I thought of the step-by-step drawing books I had seen, and realized that a 1, 2, 3 approach could be used to demonstrate Marie's lessons.

Several years prior to this, Marie had redrawn her lesson drawings onto 9" x 12" paper. We showed these and her original classroom charts to a friend, Carolyn Hurst, who worked in the publishing industry. We laid the drawings on the dining room table, counters, couch, beds, and even the floor. Over 180 colorful drawings covered my house! Carolyn, expecting to see a few dozen drawings, was amazed when she walked in the door. Comprehending the fullness of the work, she eagerly became involved in our effort to publish the lessons. This led to Carolyn and her husband starting their own company, Barker Creek Publishing, and the creation of the Draw Write Now series.

Marie draws the lesson drawings and many of the illustrations, while Kim draws the step-by-step instructions, covers, and many of the illustrations. Marie lives in Northern California and Kim lives in the Puget Sound region of Washington, requiring their working relationship to be long-distance. Since 2000, the two women have been able to get together almost once a month to visit, draw, research, and write.

Kim and her husband, Randy, have two children and make their home in Poulsbo, Washington.