Two heads are better than one: The benefits of early author-illustrator collaboration

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

I mentioned in a post earlier this year that, although people often assume that picture book authors and illustrators work closely together, it’s not unusual for the author and illustrator to have no direct contact, with the book’s creation being co-ordinated via the publisher.

One of my Dutch publishers told me that Dutch authors and illustrators regularly get together with the publisher during a picture book’s production to discuss how the project is progressing. However, if my own experience is anything to go by, regular meetings like this are not the norm in the UK. I’d been writing picture books for ten years before a publisher, Puffin, invited me to get together with illustrator Steve Cox to look at some of Steve’s initial concept sketches for our picture book Pigs Might Fly and discuss how it might be illustrated. Before then, I’d only met two illustrators I’d done a book with and spoken to a couple more on the phone, and this was always after the project was completed.

One reason for this lack of direct contact is that many picture book publishers like to moderate all communication between a book's author and illustrator. In the conventional UK set-up, an author gives any comments or ideas they might have regarding the illustrations to an editor, who then (if they agree with them) passes them on to the illustrator (sometimes via the book's designer). This is obviously a rather slow method of communication and and misinterpretations can occur as the message is passed along the chain. Another disadvantage of the conventional set-up is that while the author has some influence over how the book is illustrated, the illustrator has relatively little influence over how the book is written, the story having been largely hammered out before they are on board.

The line of communication between author and illustrator is often indirect.
(Image taken from my "How a book is Made" school presentations)

When I first started creating picture books I'd intended to both write and illustrate and was in the habit of developing ideas simultaneously in both text and illustration. Although my illustration has largely fallen by the wayside, I still think of stories visually as much as verbally. I'll often get a story idea from looking at an image or conceive a story outline as a series of illustrations. So I've always thought that the conventional set-up, with its lack of direct interaction between author and illustrator, is less than ideal. Fortunately, I've been able to team up with several sympathetic illustrators who have been happy to exchange ideas at an early stage and several of my more recent picture books have been developed in a far more collaborative way.

After Mark Oliver had illustrated my text for Tom’s Clockwork Dragon, he and I were both keen to do another picture book together. So rather than leave it to chance, I asked Mark if there was anything he’d particularly like to illustrate. Mark sent me a list of ideas, one of which – a mechanical monster manual – became Monsters: An Owner’s Guide. We developed the idea between us and when we had a draft of the text and some concept art that we were both happy with, we offered it as a joint project to publishers. Thankfully, Macmillan accepted it and subsequently took Aliens: An Owner’s Guide as a follow-up.

Some of Mark Oliver's early concept art for Monsters: An Owner's Guide

Since then, I’ve worked on several stories where the illustrator has been involved from the initial concept stage and has often provided the initial inspiration. The Treasure of Captain Claw was written in answer to Steve Cox’s wish to illustrate a submarine story and my latest picture book, The Silver Serpent Cup, was written in response to a set of outlandish vehicle models that Ed Eaves had offered as a possible source of inspiration. 

The Silver Serpent Cup and some of the outlandish vehicle models, made by Ed Eaves, that inspired it.

Not all of the author-illustrator collaborations I’ve worked on have made it into print – I wrote two unpublished stories with the late Vanessa Cabban – but I’ve always enjoyed working with the illustrator to create them. And I suspect that, having helped shape the initial concept, the illustrators I’ve created these books with have felt a little more attached to these projects and may have been prepared to lavish a little extra care and attention on them.

Some of Vanessa Cabban's "Clara and Bertie" character sketches from an unpublished project we developed together.

There’s a synergy when text and illustration work well together in a picture book. This happens naturally when the same person is both writing and illustrating, but if the author and illustrator are two different people, such a synergy can be a lot easier to achieve if they get together early on to exchange ideas. I’d certainly recommend it!

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My latest collaborative picture book is The Silver Serpent Cup illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press.

MARVELLOUS MACHINES: Technology in picture book illustration

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

Understanding how it all fits together is no mean feat.
One of David Parkins's techtastic illustrations for Eileen Browne's story, No Problem.

I’m a bit of a technophile and several of my picture books, such as Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit and Tom’s Clockwork Dragon have a technological theme. I’d like to think that my enthusiasm for technology comes across in my writing, but the writing only tells half the story in a picture book, the other half being told by the illustrations.

Some of the fundamentally flawed bicycle
drawings from Rebecca Lawson’s study

To draw a machine or mechanism well, an illustrator has to understand how it’s put together and operates. This cognitive skill doesn’t always go hand in hand with artistic ability and is relatively uncommon, not just among illustrators, but among the population as a whole.

Cognitive psychologist Rebecca Lawson demonstrated this last point with a series of experiments in which subjects were asked to either draw or complete a drawing of a bicycle. The bicycle is a simple machine that most people will have been familiar with from an early age and even non-cyclists encounter them regularly. While many people may think that they understand how a bicycle is put together, Lawson’s experiments (which she later published as a paper) show that relatively few people are able to draw one from memory without making fundamental errors.

Having established how rare this ability is, here are 10 techtastic picture book illustrators who excel at drawing machines.


You can see every nut, bolt and washer in David Parkins’s wonderful illustrations for No Problem, written by Eileen Browne. This book is one of my all-time favourite picture books about technology and was a huge bedtime favourite of my son’s.

The extraordinary Chris Riddell seems to excel at drawing everything and technology is no exception. The robots that inhabit Wendel’s Workshop demonstrate how technically detailed illustrations can also be brimming with character.

Mark Oliver, who created Monster’s - An Owner’s Guide with me, cites his engineer father as an inspiration for much of his work. Mark once told me that the key to illustrating technology well is that, “it has to look like it could actually work.”

Jonny Duddle’s The King of Space is full of superbly drawn spaceships and robots. Rex, the book’s anti-hero, lives on a farm which may be why the huge “warbot” he constructs looks like it’s made from tractor parts.

Ted Dewan’s re-telling of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice replaces magic with technology, and the work-shy human apprentice with an equally work-shy robot.

Although some of Callum’s creations in Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit are huge, Ben Mantle’s brilliantly detailed illustrations make it clear that they are constructed from pieces that a child could handle and assemble on his own.

William Bee’s illustrations for And the Train Goes are packed with the sort of wonderful technical detail that’s rarely found in picture books for the very young.

While cross sections are more commonly found in non-fiction, Steve Cox’s design for the crocodile submarine in our picture book The Treasure of Captain Claw was so stunning that publisher Orchard gave Steve this huge gatefold to show it off. Click here to see a much larger version in Steve's Flickr album.

No list of techtastic illustrators is complete, without the grandaddy of them all, Heath Robinson. This illustration is from Railway Ribaldry, published for the centenary of the Great Western Railway in 1935.

And finally, I couldn’t resist sneaking in an illustration from The Clockwork Dragon (a reworking of Tom’s Clockwork Dragon), my forthcoming picture book with Elys Dolan. Elys is a self-confessed armour nut, and this certainly shows in her splendid illustrations of the eponymous dragon, which is made from recycled arms and armour.

Do you have a favourite picture book featuring marvellous machinery that I haven’t mentioned? If so, tell me about it in the comment box below.

“MONSTERS - An Owner’s Guide” PRIZE COMPETITION

I’m always sad to see one of my books go out of print, but I was particularly sorry when MONSTERS - An Owner’s Guide, the picture book created by myself and illustrator Mark Oliver, went out of print a couple of years ago as the book had proved very popular on school visits and had quickly become one of my most borrowed books from UK libraries.

So I was delighted when publisher Macmillan told me that they were giving the book a second chance by publishing it as part of their Let’s Read mini-picture book series. Although written in rhyme, the book is set out like a user’s manual, so it’s well suited to Let’s Read’s smaller handbook-like format.

Some important Dos and Don’ts to remember when using your monster.

To celebrate the book coming back into print, I’m running a PRIZE COMPETITION! Shambles, the mechanical monster featured in the book is just one of a range produced by the Monstermatic Company. Here they all are.

The full range of Monstermatic Monsters (click image to enlarge).

To have a chance of winning a signed copy of the new edition, send me your own sketch of a new Monstermatic Monster – and don't forget to give it a name! The competition is open to all ages, so get your little monsters drawing too!

I’ll post all the entries on this blog and pick two winners, who’ll each receive a copy of the book. One copy will go to the creator of my favourite monster sketch and the other will be chosen at random. You can send me your monsters in the following ways:

• Twitter: Tweet your monster picture to @ScribbleStreet including the hashtag #Monstermatic

• Email: Send your monster picture to monstermatic@scribblestreet.co.uk

• Monstermatic Transfer: Draw your picture on a sheet of paper and then feed it into the mouth of any Monstermatic Monster while shouting my name repeatedly into the monster's ear / auditory orifice.*

The competition will close on Sunday 26th January 2014 and the winners will be announced shortly after.

Find out more about the book at my web site

*Please note that I accept no liability should an entrant come to any harm as a result of attempting this.

BRINGING DOWN THE MOON tops my library loans chart!

Bringing Down the Moon
is my most borrowed book

I've just received last year's UK library loans figures for my books, courtesy of the Public Lending Right (PLR) organisation.

I'm always interested to see which of my books are most popular in libraries and the loans figures are often surprisingly different from my sales figures.

For the last seven years my kite-flying picture book Someone Bigger has topped my loans chart by a considerable margin, but it's finally been knocked off the top spot by the first Mole and Friends picture book, Bringing Down the Moon. 

Farmyard frolic, The Pig's Knickers makes its first appearance in the top 5 at number 3, but a surprising new entry at number 5 is Monsters: An Owners Guide. This book came out in 2010 but went out of print less than two years later due to low sales.  However it's obviously been far more popular in libraries.

Out of print picture book
Monsters: An Owner's Guide is a
surprise entry in the top 5

Here are my top 5 most borrowed books.

Position	Book Title	Nº of Loans
1	Bringing Down the Moon	20,013	↑
2	Someone Bigger	17,070	↓
3	The Pig’s Knickers	13,449	↑
4	Diamond in the Snow	12,419	↓
5	Monsters: An Owner’s Guide	12,051	↑

  

The PLR organisation also publishes a list of the UK's Most Borrowed Authors and I've crept up another 12 places in this to 180th place. The most borrowed author was once again US crime writer James Patterson, with children's "author" Daisy Meadows in second place again. "Daisy Meadows" is the pseudonym used by a collection of authors who write the Rainbow Magic series, so the highest ranking individual children's author was picture book maestro Julia Donaldson in third place.

4th US award nomination for The Princess and the Pig!

I've known since last year that The Princess and the Pig, one of the picture books I've done with illustrator Poly Bernatene, is shortlisted for three different book awards in the US states of North Carolina, Washington and Maryland. The winners for these will be announced in the next couple of months. And now I've just been told that the book has also been shortlisted for the Georgia Children's Book Awards 2013-2014, the winners of which will be announced next year.

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UPDATE 4/1/14:
I'm delighted to announce that Monsters: An Owners Guide is now BACK IN PRINT in a Let's Read mini-paperback edition.

Geekzine Interview and Twitter news

If you’ve ever met me and made the mistake of mentioning the subject of “boys not liking books”, I’ll probably have subjected you to my sermon on how many of the key ingredients that appeal to boys are excluded from most picture books and how this results in boys turning to other mediums such as comics, TV and video games where these key ingredients are enthusiastically embraced. I’ll spare you the full sermon here (or I’ll be typing all night), but one of the things I’ve realised since I’ve started writing boy-friendly picture books that include these missing ingredients is that many girls also find them appealing. 

Nevertheless, I was still surprised to see a two-year-old girl and her parents (with no older brother) at my Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit event at Edinburgh last month. The event was advertised for ages five to eight and nearly all of the children attending were boys. At the signing afterwards I discovered she was there because her favourite book was Monsters: An Owner's Guide (again, not the sort of book you'd expect a two-year-old girl to be fond of) which she’d brought along for me to sign.

It turned out that her dad, Andy, was the editor of Geekzine, the Edinburgh based website and fanzine, which went a long way to explaining his daughter’s unconventional taste in picture books!

I’ve since done an interview with Geekzine, which you can find here.

On an unrelated note, I’ve just joined Twitter. You can follow me on @ScribbleStreet or find my profile page here. Among other things, I’ll be tweeting to say when I’ve added a new entry to this blog.

Book Awards Hat Trick

One of the reasons I’ve start blogging is so that I can share news as it happens, instead of months afterwards when my newsletter comes out. I had a terrific run of good news just before Christmas when three of my books won three different regional book awards — all in the space of a three weeks!

Mark and I receiving the Stockport Award

The first win was for Monsters: An Owner’s Guide, which won the Key Stage 1 category (ages 5-7 years) of the Stockport Schools Book Awards. The ceremony, at Stockport’s Plaza Theatre, was a very glam affair with the authors and illustrators requested to wear formal dress to pick up their awards. It’s been years since I’ve worn a suit and when I tried the one I still own on I was surprised to find that the waistline had mysteriously shrunk in the wardrobe, so I had to invest in a new one.

The award came in the

form of a framed picture.

The award was voted for by school children from the Stockport area, a few hundred of whom made up the enthusiastic audience. Both myself and the book’s illustrator Mark Oliver went on stage to pick up the award and Emily Ford, our editor from Macmillan, also came along to bask in the book's glory — and put up with a bit of ribbing on stage from Mark and myself. A lot of publishing is done by phone and email these days, so although Mark and I worked together on the book from the beginning, it was only the second time we’d met face to face and only the third time I’d met Emily — and it was the first time all three of us had got together.

As well as reading all the shortlisted books, the children from the participating schools had produced drawings and paintings inspired by their favourite books, a selection of which were on display in an exhibition at Stockport Art Gallery. The award itself took the form of one of these illustrations, which had been framed and was presented to me by the artist, Patsy Cooke of Cheadle Catholic Infant School.

My thanks to everyone at Stockport Schools Library Service for looking after me so well and putting on such a great event.

Here's me accepting the Sheffield Picture Book Award.

You'll have to take my word that I'm wearing the knickers.

Less than two weeks later, my wife and I were at the City Hall in Sheffield for the Sheffield Children’s Book Award. The Pig’s Knickers had been nominated in the Picture Book category, but unfortunately the book’s Illustrator, Vanessa Cabban, was unable to attend.

With most children’s book awards, you’re told in advance whether or not your book has won and generally it’s only the authors and illustrators of the winning books that are invited to the ceremony. However the Sheffield Award is one of the few where everyone on the shortlist is invited and you don’t find out who the winners are until they’re announced on stage. Once again, the award was voted for by school children (this time it was over 6,000 from the Sheffield area) a few hundred of which were attending the ceremony. I could tell from the huge cheer that went up when The Pig’s Knickers was read from the shortlist that it was in with a good chance. Nevertheless I was still very surprised to find it had won!

Here I am after the ceremony in all my

polka-dotted glory.

I approached the stage with a mixture of delight and trepidation — delight because the book had won the award and trepidation because I’d promised myself that if it did I would do something memorable — and rather silly — to mark my acceptance and I wasn’t sure how well it would be received. The book is about a pig who’s feeling rather dejected until he finds a pair of red polka dot knickers that work wonders for his self-esteem. So on receiving the award I mumbled (apparently a little too incoherently) into the microphone about wishing I’d made more of an effort with my appearance, before taking out an identical pair of red polka dot knickers and putting them on on stage. Fortunately the kids thought it was hilarious (their mental age is about the same as mine) and I was able to leave the stage to warm applause rather than cold silence.

But it didn’t end there …

One of the nice things about being a picture book author is that picture book awards tend to be given out first at book award ceremonies, so once you’ve picked it up you can generally relax and enjoy the rest of the presentations without worrying about what you are going to say on stage. However this was not the case at Sheffield, where the book that receives the most votes across all the categories is given the overall book award. So I sat there pleased, but fretting slightly for the rest of the ceremony, wondering if I might have to go through it all again.

The winners in the older categories were Billionaire Boy by David Williams and Boys Don’t Cry by Malorie Blackman. Terry Deary also picked up the Teachers’ Favourite Book Award for his second world war novel Put out the Light, which received the most votes from teachers in the 255 participating schools. Terry stunned the audience by telling us that although this was his 200th book it was the first time he had ever won a book award. Given the phenomenal popularity of Terry’s Horrible History books, I can only think this is because there are shamefully few awards that recognise excellence in children’s non-fiction.

I'd thought the Sheffield award might be cast in

Sheffield steel, but it turned out to be carved from wood. 

When The Pig’s Knickers was eventually announced as the overall winner I was stunned. I hadn’t given any thought to what to say in the event of a second acceptance (it felt presumptuous giving any thought to the first), but I managed to resist donning the knickers for a second time — much to the disappointment of the kids.

After the ceremony the organisers told me that The Pig’s Knickers had been a runaway winner, with far more votes than any of the other books. Apparently the only other time this has happened was with Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses in 2002.

Once again, my thanks to everyone at Sheffield Schools Library Service for organising such a wonderful event.

The Sheffield Award was in the last week of November and I didn’t think there was any possibility that one of my books would win another award that year as — as far as I knew — none of my books were shortlisted for any more awards. So it came as a total surprise when I discovered, two days after Sheffield, that not only had The Santa Trap been shortlisted for the Hampshire Illustrated Book Award, but that it had won! The award is for the best picture book for older readers and was voted for by over 5,000 year 5 children from 130 Hampshire schools. Apparently The Santa Trap was another runaway winner and got nearly half the total vote — that's almost as much as the other five shortlisted books combined!

It’s always lovely when one of my books receives an award but I am especially thrilled that The Santa Trap has won one for a number of reasons. If you’ve read the author’s note on my web site, you’ll know that it’s quite a personal book. It took three years to find a suitable illustrator and I think the illustrations that Poly Bernatene produced for it are stunning and among the finest from any of my books. Having been first published in 2009, I’d long given up on the book ever being shortlisted for a book award, let alone winning one!

Although the winner was announced last year, the Hampshire presentation ceremony is not until March, so I will try to do another post when I’ve received the award.