When I go into schools and I’m talking to students about creativity, one thing I like to emphasize is the connection between what writers do and what artists do because I write picture books and I have art to show to the students, and I very often hold up a slide of this spread from my book What Happens on Wednesdays, which is illustrated by Lauren Castillo.
And I point out that artists always have control over what their viewers will notice, what their viewers will think is important, and that every time anybody makes a picture, that person is controlling how other people are going to see the world. This is my Brooklyn neighborhood, and Castillo went to the neighborhood and made the pictures while looking at the neighborhood.
You see the father and daughter one, two, three times in this picture. They are the brightest thing in the picture and they happen three times. So you can tell that it’s them and their walk that is important. Everything else is kind of washed out. And if you walked around this neighborhood in Brooklyn, there would be cars on the street blocking the people on the sidewalk.
The street is actually a lot wider and there are cars on both sides. Castillo put cars in, but they’re just black and white so — and they don’t go all the way around the street at all. So, she decided to leave the cars out so that you could focus on the people and to wash the colors out and make the people bright so that you can follow them.
They are red. They have a lot of red in them. They’re going to this red bagel store. So, it’s easy to show and to see what Castillo was doing and how much control she had over what she left out and what she highlighted. And then I talk about the way that writers do the same thing. We leave things out and we brighten things up so that we are controlling the reading experience for our readers.