Look up the writer's and illustrator's websites and try to find out about how they work.
Try to think of other things you can say about the pictures, and think about how they work with the story. I notice in a lot of reviews of picture books, the reviewers will credit the entire story to the writer, only to add a sentence at the end (usually the same sentence): 'The bright and colourful pictures beautifully complement the text.' Particularly in picture books, the pictures can tell as much story as the text, and often more. People look out for 'Julia Donaldson books', and we need to get more people looking for 'Axel Scheffler books'.
#ILLUSTRATOR MEANING PROFESSIONAL#
So they need to build up their professional reputation to get more work, and that's usually based around their name. Illustrators usually work just like writers, in that their work comes to them picture by picture or book by book, and very few of them earn a regular salary. How can you help with this? Lots of ways, but here are seven: 1. So how do we keep these illustrated books coming - and not just illustrated, but WELL illustrated? We need to support our illustrators They'll tear through a book in a couple of hours and be hungry for more. Kids who love books with pictures will read A LOT of them. If parents and teachers can 'big up' illustrators to them, kids can realise drawing is something that professional grown-ups do, and many kids will find this inspiring. They see it's not a childish pastime and something worth putting time into. I've also seen that kids take drawing much more seriously when grown-ups are also drawing. Australian academic Misty Adoniou wrote a great article about her research on how drawing can improve kids' writing. But if they draw (or sew or sculpt) a character who looks back at them, immediately there's a connection.
#ILLUSTRATOR MEANING FULL#
Not all kids will get excited and feel full of ideas when you put a blank sheet of paper in front of them and tell them to write something. Teachers want writers to inspire kids, but pictures can inspire them just as much as writing, if not more. But I thought, "Hey, wait - in studying this book, these kids are actually missing out on an important part of their education". I wouldn't have thought too much longer about it if it had only been an ego issue - these things were happening all the time. The teacher had included only Claire's name in the display, with mine left off."WHY?", I wondered. Each child had drawn their own version of the main character I'd designed, and on the board, they created a version of the front cover I'd spent at least a week painting, but with one big difference. Once a teacher proudly tweeted a photo of a bulletin board she'd created with her class, featuring Superkid, my picture book with Claire Freedman.
An illustrated book would go up for an award and only the writer would get a mention in the listing. Writers would tweet the artwork for their book covers and fans would shower them with praise about it as if the writers had made it themselves. They'd write an ecstatic blog review, full of pictures, of a book that was mostly pictures, and forget to mention the illustrator's name. They were forgetting that every time there were pictures in a book, there was a person who had made those pictures. After all, it's a big part of what makes a great story.Īs a young illustrator, I noticed that people who love illustrated books were getting into a bad habit. The immensely talented and down right wonderful illustrator Sarah McIntyre, who's work includes Vern and Lettuce and The Legend of Kevin, became our fifteenth Writer in Residence back in 2017. In this blog Sarah celebrated illustration in children's books. Pictures Mean Business: 7 ways you can support illustrators