New HeatSpring Art, Inspired by the Work of Richard Scarry

You’re going to start noticing new artwork on HeatSpring – a caterpillar in a hard hat tightening a bolt, an owl troubleshooting a BESS, a lamb and a possum building solar racking. The artwork is new, but the idea behind it isn’t. It’s inspired by a children’s book illustrator who spent his career doing exactly what we try to do every day: explain how the world works in a way that is simple and memorable.

That illustrator is Richard Scarry, and if you grew up with “What Do People Do All Day?” or “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go,” you already know his work. We commissioned our new artwork with his style directly in mind – the busy, cutaway scenes, the good-natured animal workers, the way a genuinely complicated process turns into something you can follow.

An Unlikely Training Ground

Before Scarry was drawing pigs running bakeries and foxes fixing cars, he was a U.S. Army officer in World War II — and the job he was given turned out to be surprisingly close to the job he’d spend the rest of his life doing.

According to a biography published by the American Legion and written by Scarry’s son, Huck, Richard Scarry was sent to Allied Headquarters in Algiers as an art director, with orders to keep American troops informed and connected to news from home. He had no formal training for it and no real starting point. His solution was to have copies of TIME magazine delivered to his office each week, then rewrite the news in simpler language, shorten it, and add his own illustrations and maps before sending it out to soldiers stationed across North Africa.

That job – translating dense, adult information into something a tired soldier could read and actually understand in a few minutes – turned out to be the blueprint for everything that came after. This wartime habit of explaining things simply was likely the seed of what he became, an illustrator who could take on genuinely complex subjects for a young audience.

The Same Job, Different Subject

Scarry didn’t dumb things down. His books walked kids through how a power plant burns coal to boil water, how steam spins a turbine, and how a turbine drives a generator – all without losing our attention along the way. He just found the right way to show it: a cross-section, a friendly character doing the work, a few honest labels.

Solar, safety, and electrical training is our version of that same challenge. Our training is technical – code requirements, system design, equipment installation – and the people learning it need to actually understand it. So we asked illustrator Kelly Wills of Brainflower Designs to keep that in mind while using Scarry’s work as a reference.

Serious Work, Playful Spirit

Richard Scarry books were made for kids, but our training is made for adults doing serious, technical work. That difference shows up in the details. Look closely at any HeatSpring character and you’ll notice hard hats, safety vests, gloves, and boots — every animal is properly outfitted, every job done the right way. That’s not an accident. Our audience is working professionals building real skills for real jobs, and no amount of charm is worth cutting corners on workplace safety or technical excellence. The characters can be playful. The standards they’re held to are not.

But taking work seriously doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun. And we should never lose sight of why we’re doing it. That’s part of why the artwork doesn’t stop at hard hats and wrenches — it’s also full of butterflies, sunshine, rabbits, and flowers. Our world is a genuinely fun, beautiful place, and every solar panel installed or electrical system brought up to code is a small investment in keeping it that way. We liked that Scarry’s world always had room for both the work and the wonder. We wanted ours to as well.

That’s the real inspiration behind the new artwork: not just a style, but a philosophy. Amazing technologies exist. Take a minute to learn how they work. Get hyped. Let’s go build a bunch of clean energy projects.