So when I get a manuscript from a publisher by another author and I’m asked to illustrate it, I will read through it and the first thing I like to do is start to picture the characters so I want to think about what type of character it’s going to be, because some stories, some picture books need to be people characters, boys and girls.
But sometimes it can be an animal, it can be like a fox or a mouse or it can be, depending on the personality of the character you can choose a certain type of animal and it might work, which I do like to do whenever I can because if you choose an animal it kind of opens it up to the reader in terms of putting themselves within that character’s story.
And then I spend time just, I’ll read, I read through it several times and I’ll jot notes just on the man, you know printed it out on my printer and I’ll jot notes to the side of the story.
That this could be this picture and I’ll section it out into different pages because that’s another thing an illustrator needs to do is figure out what text goes on which page. So that’s how I begin doing it, and I don’t really even do much drawing for a while except little maybe little tiny sketches in the margins of the manuscript.
And then eventually once I have it sectioned out the pages, I’ll start to focus on each page or each spread and figure out more detail, you know more expanded sketches.