Yikes!

Carly Martin

12 Dec 2025 — 4 min read

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This is a notice to all readers that you are eligible to receive a handmade, linocut holiday card from Nat and I. If you are interested in such a thing, pls text me your mailing address and we'll make it happen.

December Ins and Outs

The last ins and outs list of 2025! In honor of such an occasion, I have taken the liberty of sifting through previous editions of the newsletter to find the best of the best of ins and outs from the whole year. These are the winners:

ins

Writech 2-in-1 gel pens (nov)
this one striped t shirt i got from Old Navy like a week ago (may)
getting into grad school (this is the announcement lol. I'm going to UMass Boston for a M.Ed in Middle/Secondary Education starting in September.) (july)
Informing my financial advisor that I'm participating in the "take all my money out of the bank challenge" (april)

outs

losing your house key somewhere to the ether (june)
being oriented, as a concept (aug)
APA formatting (oct)
being informed (feb)

I Spy With My Little Eye

This week I saw some post about the I Spy books and fell down a rabbit hole of the artist who has been basically single-handedly creating the images for these books for over thirty years. Today, readers, you're gonna hear about all I have learned.

This guy's name is Walter Wick. He's a photographer and artist from Hartford, Connecticut who is responsible for such notable book series as Can You See What I See?, I Spy, Hey, Seymour!, and Walter Wick's Optical Tricks. He started his career in New York City as a commercial photographer, but quickly found his niche in creating photo-illustrations for books and magazines. He started collaborating with writer Jean Marzollo in the early 90s to produce the I Spy series.

What I found most interesting in reading about him, was his creative process before he switched to digital cameras in the mid 2000s. He describes in his blog that his early published works, that he "...labored for years using 'in-camera' techniques...". Meaning that early works had no digital retouching done to them and all illusions were set up practically and by-hand.

He goes on to walk through the process of setting up the "Yikes!" image from I Spy:

"Yikes!" began with an idea to make a dream-like image of gravity-defying toys. Wanting an appropriate ground for the geometric block components, I choose a checkerboard pattern, painted in "forced perspective" to create an illusion of depth greater than is actually in the scene. This had the added benefit of keeping the floor from extending too far away from the camera so everything could remain in focus. Next, to create the cartwheeling robot-like figures, I experimented with arranging blocks on a table, recording the designs with SX-70 Polaroids. With the figures worked out, I could begin to anchor them to a vertical sheet of clear glass using hot melt glue and adhesive putty. The three larger Polaroids were made using an adapter in the film camera. In this way I could "instantly" check what the camera was seeing as the composition progressed.

In the first few I Spy books, he used an 8x10 large format Toyo View film camera with Ektachrome T64 slide film to take photos in early I Spy books. However, since 2004 he has been using 50 megapixel medium format digital Hasselblad camera to take photos and uses photoshop to make composite images. He says that digital methods have allowed him to make much more complicated photos and he prefers being able to take photos and immediately adjust the set.

Wick is continuing to produce I Spy books to this day. I Spy: Love was released on November 12, 2024. The I Spy books as a series have over 75 million copies in print as of earlier this year and they continue to be popular with kids around the world. Personally, I Spy: Fantasy was my favorite of the series as a kid and below are my all-time favorite spreads.