I love picture books, words and pictures in perfect harmony. But they’re deceptively simple; the finished book doesn’t show the hours of work it took to achieve that seemly effortless perfection…

First there’s the spark of inspiration, a character or a situation, a story that has to be told. But these ideas can be illusive, they’ll jump out and grab my attention, only to run and hide in the far recesses of the mind. But is this the time to grab a pen or a computer, or does this fragile new idea need time to run free for a while, maybe to bump into other ideas, find their voice… Of course ideas love to surface when I’m busy with something else, appearing more exciting than the work in progress, especially if that work in progress is currently putting up a fight!

The process

I’ve come at stories from different angles, and probably the most efficient is to write the story and then draw the illustrations. But even then I find the words need some adjusting to fit around the pictures. Starting a story in a sketchbook seems to work for me, where I write in pencil in a sketchbook, making rough sketches as I go along. But I do tend to get carried away; most recently I’ve filled several sketchbooks with puppies before, they spilled over into a multimedia book, via the paint box. Then they ran through the scanner into digital files, ready to form an orderly story.

When I told my dog, in admittedly an excited voice, that I’d finished the first draft of his book; he pricked up his ears and looked around to see what I was excited about, and whether it was something to eat, chase or play with, or maybe a visitor to greet… I told him that he can help me to promote the book, and he looked at me with his head on one side… So as you can see, the main character of my new book is a very real character, the main problem with that being what to put in the story, and what to leave out. Which brings me back to where I started, picture books are deceptively simple…