She received a Caldecott Honor in 2015 for illustrating Barb Rosenstock's The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art.

GrandPré, who creates her artwork with paint and pastels, has illustrated more than twenty books and has appeared in gallery exhibitions and periodicals such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal.

By age ten, she was imitating Salvador Dalí, experimenting with stretched objects painted with oils, before graduating to copying black-and-white photos from the encyclopedia.

[6] A DreamWorks executive who enjoyed her work called to invite her to participate as an illustrator for their movie Antz, for which GrandPré was involved with creating some of the landscapes.

She then created various sketches as ideas for the cover and chapter art before sending her favorites to the editors to decide which should appear in the final publication.

[7] Her artwork for the final novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was created using pastels on toned printmaking paper, while the chapter headings were black-and-white charcoal drawings.

[8][9] In addition to the Harry Potter series, she has illustrated picture books including Pockets, The Noisy Paint Box, Chin Yu Min and the Ginger Cat, Vegetables Go to Bed, The Thread of Life, Swing Around the Sun, The Sea Chest, and Sweep Dreams.

GrandPré has also been featured in the book How Jane Won, which examines fifty women who have been successful in their chosen career and in their personal lives.

[4][7] In a June 2007 St. Paul Pioneer Press article, GrandPré revealed that six months prior, she and her husband went to China, where they adopted a little girl.