I don’t think about the pictures at all. I don’t think about the medium. I don’t think about anything but the story because I really believe that if you have two books and one book has a great story but the pictures are so-so and there’s another book that has beautiful pictures but the story isn’t very good, the book that has the better story and the so-so pictures is better always.
That’s how I feel. The better story always wins. I’ve got a bunch of books at home that I actually buy or have kept to prove that, you know. This story is so good, and these pictures help, but it’s not about the pictures for me. The story is more important. So I spend a lot of time messing with the story. When I finally get that in a place that I like, then I start just with the basic storyboard, all the pictures or all the pages on one piece of paper and you kind of go back and forth between text and pictures and try to figure out what can I take out of the words.
And I like taking out as many words as I can and letting the pictures do it. So there’s a lot of back and forth and then you just keep — the pictures get bigger and bigger and bigger. You add more details as you go and fine-tune it. That’s basically what happens. But when I write a story, I never think oh, this story has too many cars in it, and I don’t like to draw cars so I’m not going to do it.
I don’t think about that. I just hope that I can draw cars by the time I get around to illustrating it. So that’s kind of how I operate. The story first always.
