Phil Stead and I were friends before we made books together and we really both liked each other’s sensibilities as artists and as storytellers. He was working with an editor who’s work I really admired as a picture book editor, Neil Porter is his name, and so I thought it would be just a really fun way to make a picture book with, you know I knew Neil already too and to just basically have three people with you know, all three of have I feel dif, similar approaches to making books and similar senses of humor.
And so that’s how that came together sort of organically and then it was a very different experience, in most cases if I’m illustrating another person’s book, the author is not involved. The editor or the art director is the point person for me, and even if the author has ideas or comments at any time it’s filtered through the editor or art director.
But in the case of the books I did with Phil, Special Delivery and The Only Fish in the Sea, those were very collaborative books of, I would send, you know I would get Phil’s text and then do a sketch dummy of all the text and send it in to Neil and to Phil. They would both get it, and then we would all get on the phone and just walk through it.
And we would be on the phone sometimes for an hour or two kind of talking about what’s working and what’s not working and it was really exciting you know, it was, you know, I don’t know it was, I kind of liken it to like a session of like free jazz or something where these three people are getting together and just making music and it just, it was, by the end of the phone conversation we all just felt really energized about the book and the project and that we were doing something that we all loved.
So yeah, it doesn’t happen like that all the time, I think it really has to be special circumstances when either you’re friends already or you know that you have very strong bond in some way but I can definitely see the reason behind keeping authors and illustrators apart, at least from a publisher’s standpoint in terms of artistic integrity from both sides and having too many opinions on a project, so. But in those cases it worked really well.