Collaborating on a dream

For as long as he can remember, Scott Alboum has carried around a sketchbook full of drawings and doodles of the people and places he sees every day. Growing up, he dreamed of becoming an illustrator, but as a college student in the early 2000s, Alboum chose to pursue another passion, filmmaking. Rider hired Alboum as its video technology coordinator in 2006, and though he has a fulfilling career teaching television production and digital media, he never gave up on his dreams of becoming an illustrator.

In 2013, Alboum decided to stop dreaming about books and start making them. Today, he has helped produce five self-published books as an illustrator, writer or designer, and has two more in the works, including a collaboration on a memoir by Loretta Long, better known as Susan from Sesame Street. In 2014, he published his first book for children, Don’t Dress Me up For Halloween, a send-up of putting pets in costumes. Another holiday tale, Don’t Give up on Thanksgiving, followed in 2015.

“I want to make something that’s lasting,” Alboum says. “My wife and I read books to our children that were written 40 years ago. Maybe someday someone will be reading my books to their kids.”

None of Alboum’s books state his name as the sole person behind it. He shares bylines with other writers, such as his wife, Stacey Alboum ’13, who studied reading/language arts at Rider, and illustrating credentials with other artists, embracing collaboration on the principle that two is stronger than one. This year, Alboum took a rhyming animal story by Dr. Jonathan Millen, Rider’s associate dean for the liberal arts, and turned it into Of All Of The Animals That You See.

“Collaboration is the way of the world,” says Alboum, who lives in Hamilton and, in addition to his teaching duties, advises the Rider University Network (R.U.N.), a student organization that produces television programs available online and on campus. “In television, you can’t do anything without a crew. I try to teach my students that they can do so much more if they work together than work alone.” Of All Of The Animals That You See also features illustrations by his former student Margaret Casperson ’13, whom he worked closely with on his first book. Together, they plunged into the process while suffering from a steep learning curve. Alboum was teaching himself to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and after more than six months of work with Casperson, he realized he had initially set the resolution of his illustrations too low for any of the work to be publishable. He made the painful decision to toss it all and start again from scratch.

Working in increments, between duties as a teacher, husband and father (Alboum has three young children), Alboum eventually honed his process, learning to sketch on paper, scan the drawings and import them into Illustrator and Photoshop for fine-tuning. Casperson, who studied web design, relished working with Alboum and used the experience to her advantage. “It was a great opportunity and I’m proud of the work we did together,” she says. “It was my first freelance project and it gave me an extra piece in my portfolio.”

The books have received favorable local press coverage, and Alboum has appeared at festivals and schools to share his work with the public. “Who knows where they will end up or where they will take me,” he says, “but the bottom line is that I’m going to keep doing it.”