[9] By April 1939, when he cleaned up the Mayfield Road Gang, Ness and Evaline McAndrew were an item in Cleveland, where she was a fashion illustrator at Higbee's department store.
[1] Back in the United States, Ness found no work in San Francisco, so returned to New York and "assignments doing fashion, advertising and editorial art".
[4][7] Her first illustrations for publication in a children's book were for Story of Ophelia by Mary J. Gibbons (Doubleday, April 1954) —using "charcoal, crayon, ink, pencil and tempera".
"[13] Although successful as a commercial artist, she focused on children's literature beginning with her second illustrated book, The Bridge by Charlton Ogburn (Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
[8] Saturday Review recommended it for teenagers and concluded, "Unusual drawings printed in sea green, gray, and black convey the same moods as the story and add a decorative note to a book which is beautiful in every way.
[3] According to Charles Bayless at the bookshop Through the Magic Door, the 1960s were a time of experiment in illustration for children, with some fashion for "drawings with sharp, angular figures, muted colors and representational or cartoon-like styles", which helped Ness to thrive.
[1] Her three Caldecott Honor Books were published 1963 to 1965: All in the Morning Early by Sorche Nic Leodhas, A Pocketful of Cricket by Rebecca Caudill, and Tom Tit Tot: An English Folk Tale retold by Virginia Haviland.
[1] According to that archive, [Ness] was noted for her ability to work in a variety of media and her innovative and unique illustrations that interweaved text and pictures to create a story that captured a young child's attention and imagination.
This talent is especially evident in her own written works with their girl protagonists and subtle stories that have a backdrop of 'feminism' and present 'real' characters learning about all of life's pleasures, problems, and pains.
"Evaline Ness Papers" at the Free Library of Philadelphia is a collection of work "for the books Coll and His White Pig, The Truthful Harp, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King, and Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog.
[19] According to that archive, This collection contains dummies, sketches, paste-ups, preliminary and finished artwork, and color separations for eight books illustrated by Evaline Ness.