The Author – Illustrator partnership in picture books

A few months ago I said I’d think about the author-illustrator relationship in picture books – well, I’ve thought about it a lot, and now am finally ready to write about it. Of course I’m talking about how it’s worked in picture books I’ve wrtitten, and am especially thinking about the Princess and her Panther, simply because we’ve only just finished it, but I imagine this is roughly true for most picture book creators.

Picture books are different from even highly illustrated chapter books, because even though I create the story and write it with my own vision of the pictures that will fill each page, I rarely give instructions as to what I envisage, unless there’s something pivotal to the story that I don’t want to say in the text. In Arabella, I asked that we not see Matthew’s wheelchair until the last page. Kim Gamble, rethought this with an artist’s eye, and placed the wheelchair in nearly every picture, in such a way that readers almost never see it, or if they do see it, refuse to see it as the child’s. What I suggested could have been, in the wrong hands, a surprise trick; Kim’s art delivers the surprise, but subtly points out how far our preconceptions have led us in reading the text: infinitely better.

One of the main points about a picture book is in its name: it’s the pictures that we see first, and that hold a child’s attention. The illustrator is an artist in their own right, so they need to enter into the story and bring something of themselves to it: that’s what we respond to in art!

So when the editor first showed me Lauren Stringer’s art for the Princess and her Panther, in which the panther had become a younger sister instead of the cat I had imagined, I was thrilled. It’s brought a whole new layer of richness and depth to the story; I can still see the simple little story that was in my head, twenty years ago (!) when I started drafting this story, but I’d be very disappointed if it were the book that’s coming out now.

And – although this text didn’t need it – would I change words if they didn’t fit with the pictures? Yes, if the pictures were telling the story and the words no longer matched. More often, once the art is done, some of the text may become redundant. It’s not easy letting favourite phrases go, all those lovely words that I’ve played with, replaced and rehearsed…. but if they don’t add to the story, they need to go. Let the pictures do their work.