Occasionally there’s some early preferences from a publisher but I think for the most part they want to see what I’m going to come up with or what any illustrator is going to do, what they’re going to bring to it. So sometimes an author may even write you know, little art notes here and there and the editor may take those out before they give them to me or whatever illustrator.
Because they really want to, they don’t want to you know box anyone in if there might be a better idea or if there might be some other way to do it that comes from the illustrator. And, but in some cases there needs to be some clarification. I did a book called Lost Found and the only words in the book are lost and found.
And it’s about a bear who has a scarf and this bear loses the scarf and then it goes, some other animals find it and they fight over it and they lose it, so it kind of goes in this cycle of losing the scarf and finding the scarf. And with, if I had only seen the words lost and found then it wouldn’t have been the author’s vision at all, if I just, you know what I mean.
There’s no way I could have, and in that case there needed to be some art direction in a sense from the author at least to tell me what’s happening because when you only have, it was very, it was almost like a wordless book in that it was only the word lost and found in every, the pictures were really driving and telling the story. And so in some cases there needs to be some level of explanation and art direction from the author or the editor on the project.