PRE-SEPARATED ART: Illustrating My Book THE BIGGEST LIVING THING

 

Black plate illustration for pages 6-7 The Biggest Living Thing (Carolrhoda, 1983) Pencil drawing by Caroline Arnold

Today's children’s books are printed with beautiful full color illustrations created with a vast array of artistic techniques—painting, drawing, collage, photography, mixed-media--basically anything that can be digitally color scanned. Those scans are then used to make the printing plates for the book. Typically there are four plates: black, cyan, magenta, yellow. (These are the same colors in the ink cartridges of your home printer.) On the printed page the colors merge to create a full range of hues.

Pages 20-21 of my book Five Nests (E.P. Dutton, 1980). Illustration by Ruth Sanderson.

But in 1980, when I first started publishing books for children, many were illustrated with black-and-white art, especially if they were nonfiction books, like mine. Digital scanning had not yet been invented and the cost of separating colors photographically to make each of the colored printing plates was so high that only the most established artists worked in full color. Many books were printed with black plus in some cases one or two colors. Five Nests, illustrated by Ruth Sanderson, was my first published book.The art was black, plus one color--green.

For most children’s books in those days, the artist was required to make a separate drawing for each printed color. Thus the art was “pre-separated” not needing expensive photographic separation. It was a technical process, converting the intensity of each color to shades of grey and then calculating how the colors would appear when overlapped on the printed page.

Cover of Sun Fun, an activity book.

My first opportunity to illustrate one of my books was Sun Fun (Franklin Watts, 1982) a book of simple projects about the sun and solar energy. It was a two color book. Obviously, I chose yellow for one of the colors. The other color I chose was red. As they overlapped in the printing I could achieve a range of colors from pink and orange to brown and grey.

Proof sheet for page 39. Squirrels help spread Sequoia seeds.

The second book I illustrated was my book about giant sequoia trees, The Biggest Living Thing (Carolrhoda, 1983.) This also was a two color book. I chose brown and green.

Black pencil drawing for pages 23-24. Space at top is left open for text. This Sequoia stump was so big it could be used as a dance floor.

The primary illustrations for the book were done in black pencil. Then working on a light table I created the pages for the two colors being careful to line up the registration marks to make sure that they would be in the correct places when the pages were printed.

Page 22. Two color art. Black plus green and brown.

The Biggest Living Thing was a 48 page book. I began by doing the black-and-white drawings—24 double-page spreads. With the additional drawings for the two colors I did a total of 72 drawings plus a full color painting for the jacket. It was a lot of work--for not a lot of money. After finishing the project I decided to focus my energy on writing books rather than illustrating them.

Jacket of The Biggest Living Thing. Watercolor painting.

Twenty years later the world had changed. Digital separation made it possible to illustrate without pre-separating. I began to illustrate again, this time using a cut-paper collage technique. But that is another story.

Note: The original art for The Biggest Living Thing is archived in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota.

Tip for the Day, filmed by Tina Nichols Coury

My friend Tina Nichols Coury, author of Hanging Off Jefferson's Nose, did a series of short videos of children's book authors and illustrators giving advice based on their own experience. She interviewed me several years ago at the annual Breakfast With the Authors in Santa Barbara. My tip for the day boiled down to this:
If you are an writer/illustrator and illustrating your own book, make sure you don’t write something that you can’t illustrate. In other words, think of the actions that move the story forward as you write. The beauty of being an author/illustrator is that if you discover a section that doesn't work with the illustrations, you have the option of rewriting the text to improve the flow.
You can see the whole video by clicking here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoGAcBDVA0g

Illustrator Ethan Long's "Hand Birds"

Last week I had the opportunity to meet Ethan Long, the talented illustrator of Ann Paul’s Iguana books (Tortuga in Trouble, Count on Culebra, Fiesta Fiasco, Manana Iguana) and many others.  It was fun to compare notes about today’s children’s book world and hear about his many projects.  Ethan lives in Florida but was spending several weeks in Los Angeles, working and promoting his new books.  When I visited his website I discovered the report of his visit to Pages Books in Manhatten Beach and the simple but brilliant art project he did there with the kids, turning outlines of their hands into lively birds.  The thumb became the bird’s head and the splayed out fingers the wings and tail. 

How Do We Get Ideas?

How do we get ideas? On occasion, they come full blown in a sudden flash of insight. More often, though, they evolve a little bit at a time. My recent book, Global Warming and the Dinosaurs: Fossil Discoveries at the Poles, was a project that developed slowly. At first, all I had were random bits of information. These facts, fascinating though they were, did not make a book. I did not have enough and I still needed an organizing principle. But by keeping all those interesting bits floating around in my mind, over time, an idea for a book on polar dinosaurs began to gel.

This is the opening paragraph of my article Evolution of a Book Idea: From Percolation to Publication published in the Spring 2011 issue of Kite Tales, the newsletter of SCBWI-Los Angeles. In the article I discuss how the book grew out of my natural interests in fossils and dinosaurs, how conversations with librarians gave me valuable new material, how other book research added to what I already knew, how experts in the field helped answer questions, and finally, how a chance encounter propelled me to start writing and finishing the book. Click here to read the full article on page 31.

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs is illustrated with beautiful watercolor paintings by Laurie Caple. Laurie has illustrated five other books of mine about prehistoric animals and has done a fantastic job on all of them. Her naturalistic style is perfect for these books. She does as much research as I do to make sure that everything she draws is as scientifically accurate as possible. This is a challenge when most of what she draws has been extinct for millions of years. By creating whole environments for the animals, she truly brings them to life.

I am often asked, why don’t I illustrate all my own books? After all, I’m trained as an artist. The truth is that I don’t want to illustrate all my books. My style does not necessarily always suit the subject matter I write about. I am delighted that artists like Laurie Caple can illustrate my books. It takes just as much time to illustrate a book as it does to write it. If I did all my own illustrations, I wouldn’t have as much time to write. I enjoy illustrating my own books, but only when the concept of the writing and the art work together for me.