When I sit down to do a book, I usually get the idea in my mind as to the general plot. And then I start thinking what can happen, and I go through, and I do the drawings first. I do very quick, very rough pencil drawings that are just to show to the editor. And I do them very quickly. They’re tight enough that she can tell what’s happening on this page, this page. And I put them in a little book, a dummy, and I send it to the editor.
And if she approves of it, she will return it to me. And I take those very rough pencil drawings, and I slip them under a sheet of white drawing paper that I can see through, and I take a black ballpoint pen, and I do a very careful ink drawing. I change things as I’m going along. I’ll shift things around, or make his head rounder, or his paws bigger. And I do an ink drawing for every page of the book. This takes about ten days for me to do the black drawings.
Then these drawings are photographed and copied in blue line on watercolor paper, and another artist does the color of the books. I give him a tissue paper overlay with colored pencil indications of what I’d like the colors to be, and then he goes ahead and does anything he wants. No, he’s got a good sense of color. He will follow my indications pretty closely.
