Sophie Blackall is an illustrator with a curious preoccupation, notes left for passing strangers. “Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly,” she explains on her blog. “I’m trying to pin a few of them down.” Ms Blackall does just that: she paints reactionary pieces based on posts in Craigslist’s “missed connections” section and collects them on Missed Connections NY. The Journal recently interviewed Ms Blackall about her work.

How long after you started reading the Missed Connections section did you start making illustrations? What prompted this change – from simply reading to reacting visually?

From the first Missed Connection I read, I saw them as potential paintings. The idea for the series percolated in the wee hours that night and for once I woke up and got on with it! The decision to make it a blog, rather than just accumulate the images for some undetermined project down the line, was purely to enforce self-discipline. I thought that if even one person was looking at the blog, I’d feel obliged to keep producing the work. As all freelancers know, it’s not easy to maintain a personal project alongside all your “actual” work, no matter how enthusiastic you are. I didn’t want this one to go the way of the unfinished novel in the drawer.

The fact that more than one person looked at the blog was, and continues to be, the most extraordinary bonus.

Do you remember the first missed connection you illustrated? What did you find intriguing?

That’s the other great thing about having a blog as opposed to a shifting pile of drawings in a cupboard…it neatly archives everything. I can therefore tell you with accuracy that the first Missed Connections I illustrated was “I Had a Blue Hat,” on March 9, 2009.

You had a guitar. I had a blue hat. We exchanged glances and smiles on the subway platform. I pretended to read my New Yorker but I couldn’t concentrate. You got on the Q and I stayed on to wait for the B. You were lovely.

It felt like the perfect introductory one; it is almost the missed connection formula right there: We saw each other, I look like this, you look like that, I thought you were lovely, I know it’s a long shot but I’d really like to see you again. It was fun and easy to simplify the two characters to their accessories, with subtle details…the hat’s feather inclining wistfully and the guitar’s arrow leaving the scene.

Are you keeping the sources local?

For now I’m just concentrating on New York. There’s a deep well of material here, as colorful and fascinating and surprising as the city itself…but I’d quite like to do some rural ones one day.

Have you ever been contacted by one of your subjects?

Yes! A couple of times. The man who “shared a bear suit at an apartment party” wrote to me and even sent a photo of himself taken that evening in the costume! That was fantastic. The “long, curly haired” woman wrote, as did the “floral jacket,” and many people wrote claiming the “girl with the scrabble tattoo” was their dear friend.

Have you ever listed a missed connection on a site or in the paper?

No. I was tempted once, but it wasn’t a romantic connection, more a misunderstanding I wanted to clear up. I was on a bus, watching a man from the window who was grappling with a very, very big, heavy Ikea box on a very, very small, flimsy luggage cart. I was staring with what I thought was obvious empathy but this guy looked up, saw me and gave me the finger. (He happened to be rather cute, but that is irrelevant to the story.) He took out his iPhone, held it up, snapped a picture of me, and furiously flipped me off again. By this time I was contorting my face into increasingly grotesque grimaces meant to convey sympathy rather than mockery. I may have flapped my hands inanely. I can’t help thinking he enlarged that photo, hung it above his assembled Ikea unit and now uses it as a dartboard. I considered posting a message to redeem myself, but realised he would be way too busy with all those pieces of birch veneer and the wrong sized allen key to be checking Craigslist.

You’ve been working on the Missed Connections project for a little over a year. How long do you plan to continue?

Until I feel like doing something new, I guess. For now, the possibilities still feel infinite.

Is a book still in the works?

Yes. It is to be called You Probably Won’t Read This: A Year of Missed Connections, and will be published by Workman in 2011.

What projects are you currently working on?

I have three picture books on my desk in various stages of completion, and they’re all overdue. (Shh, don’t tell my editors.) One particularly exciting one is Aldous Huxley’s The Crows of Pearblossom. It’s the only children’s book he ever wrote and it’s an honor and an enormous thrill to be illustrating it.