Our illustrator for To Change a Planet is Rahele Jomepour Bell, and she, I am, was a huge fan of hers before we knew that she was going to be able to work on it. And, like so often happens when you’re making a picture book, we really did not collaborate, not in the way that I think of co-creating, but there’s a collaboration that takes place just because she’s taking my text and I’m trusting her with bringing it to life. There is some part in the process where my editor and I see sketches and we give feedback, but it’s never about how she’s portraying the text. Like it just, whenever I saw her sketches was just blown away by this world that she creates on the page and how colorful it is, how vivid it is, and just this real sense of … that you get the sense that she loves the planet when she, you’re looking at these images and so I never had any art notes for her whatsoever. Just tiny little things just so that the science was conveyed properly. That’s really it.
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