The thing about thumbprints....

One of the many and exciting services I offer is children’s book illustration, when I find someone willing and able to pay the huge amount of money it takes to do so. It’s no joke - the biggest obstacle to people seeing their children’s book dreams brought to life, is that they rarely understand just how much work going into illustrating those dreams - and by work, I don’t just mean by me.

The work I do lay claim to, starts because I can’t as yet see into other people’s heads. An author may give me what they think is a fulsome description of the characters as they see them, but there is often a massive gap between when they think a ‘small brown dog with curly hair’ should look like, and what I do.  Even if they have a specific dog in mind, and supply a photograph, inevitably said photo is a brown blur of nose and eyes, which is surprisingly hard to capture in ink. All of this means that it can take several hours to get to a point where the author is happy with the main character, and that’s before we’ve worked out all the other characters, settings, landscape, accessories and overall style of the book, which is all before we get into creating the storyboard, editing the text and beta reading the rhythm, which also has to happen before a single line on an actual page can be drawn.

People who have never used digital art tools, seem to think that it will be a bit like the holo-deck on the starship Enterprise; I will utter a few choice commands and an entire universe will be created. Digital art may speed up a lot of lengthy processes, but it is not a magic wand, there still needs to be hours of, well, drawing, before you have anything that resembles an image.

Ah-ha, people say, what about AI? Surely, that’s a great way to create picture books, and you are now redundant? Well, I’ve seen Ai generated children’s books, and they are a nightmarish vision of mutant hands and inconsistencies. You see, Ai cannot as yet keep your characters consistent throughout a book, even if you ask it to. I heard an interview with a, well, creative (I guess?) who said they had created an art book using Ai. When asked further about it, they revealed it took them over nine months of working on the prompts and re-editing what the Ai produced, to get enough consistency to produce an entire book. As you might imagine, by this point I’m shouting at the radio I could have done it in half the time, and she wouldn’t have had to spend days on end poking at a frustratingly unresponsive machine, when she could simple have bombarded me with correction requests, at least some of I would have done.

(I would also add here, that I believe children deserve out time, care and effort in creating stories for them, as often these stories and the memory of being told them last a lifetime, and they also deserve better than Ai image generation to do so.)

I do get that a large number of authors will never have the budget to pay me or anyone to create the images for their children’s book, but here’s the thing about illustration - it’s not about being good, it’s about being clever. When a great many authors think about illustrating their books, they imagine those high gloss, full colour books created by big publishing houses, that Disney Pixar vibe, or long established classics where a highly skilled illustrator was invested in to do a brilliant job, exactly what they can’t afford to do. 

However, I teach children’s book illustration and honestly, the most successful books I see being developed, are never the ones who have the more professional looking illustrations, but the ones where the students find away through all their limitations to a voice with which they can speak.

So much about art is the confidence, and some might say the ‘chutzpah’, to believe in what you’re doing - indeed, I’d say there’s almost nothing more important, but the  best way to have that confidence comes from two things - enough practice so that you become fluent in your chosen media, or an idea so killer that nothing will stop it. If the Gods are aligned on your side, you have both. 

Here’s my example - 

If you don’t know this book, go look it up. It is an interactive book without any story and without any real interaction, but go experience it and you will be rocked back on your heels by its sheer brilliance. But what you won’t be knocked back by, or even notice, are its illustrations, other than they are in complete service to the idea of the book - but in themselves they are literal blobs of colour on paper. This is my point though - this book gives children hours of fun and laughs, because the idea is so strong and all about not what the author wanted to write about, but what they want to give their reader. This loops me back to why so many amateur authors crave the hyper realism of Disney, because they haven’t thought enough around their idea and what their reader - the child - could get from their reading experience. You can tell a good story with different coloured thumb prints on a page, annotated with stick figure hands and legs - I know, I get my students to do just this. You can tell a good story if you line up some tea-cups, draw faces on them with sharpie pens and photograph them against different backdrops. But what you can’t do, however shiny your illustrations are, is make a dull story interesting. 

And yes, of course, stunning illustrations enrich and support a story; they are the orchestra that lifts the singer to even greater heights and yes, I am a bloody good illustrator, with a symphony of tricks and ideas up my sleeve to go to work for you, which is why it will cost you three to four months of my time to do it - but you know what? If your story can’t be told with thumb prints on a page, then it needs work before it will be worth the time spent and you’ll see any returns on your investment. 

If you would like to see more about my children’s book illustration process, take a look here -