ILLUSTRATIONS PART 1

Hello everybody, Drew here with another blog this time talking about book illustrations. When I first started writing I gave a great deal of thought as to whether my book needed to be illustrated or not. Children’s book usually greatly benefit from being illustrated, so that somewhat daunted me as sadly I don’t have the talent to write and draw, and good illustrators to my mind were out there somewhere, but I really didn’t know where to look. At least those were my first thoughts. So, I continued writing and concentrated on the manuscript. As the stories evolved, and the proof reading started I soon realized that I would have to somehow illustrate the book, as some of the story lines would greatly benefit by being illustrated.
It was here that my eldest daughter again came to my rescue. Knowing that I needed help she enquired whether I had considered speaking to Dave, who I have known for twenty plus years. I had seen some of his work in the past, so we decided to meet up and agreed to work together. That was a good call.
Although the manuscript was completed and sent out without illustrations the stories must have carried the book over the line as Austin Macauley decided to publish it. That was an amazing moment, especially to a first-time author. Dave produced an example of his work for the book, and it was agreed by all that it too was of an acceptable quality.
The book, The adventures of Harry Alliss (and friends) has seventy-one illustrations, including the front cover. That takes a considerable amount of time to first choreograph the pictures within the stories, then have a sketch made of each image, agree on the content then firm it up or ink it in, I think is the technical term. As you can imagine none of this is particularly straightforward, and for me was very much a learning curve.
When my wife gave one of our books to Sebastian (aged 10) he looked at the book, flicked the pages over and said, ‘Good, I’m glad it has got pictures in this book, I like books with pictures in them, it makes them more interesting.’ We knew that after all the hard work we had made the right decision.
What I have learnt is that the process of writing a book takes a lot longer than one may think it does. The writing bit is fairly easy as it’s all under your control. However, if you are going to end up illustrating a book, you have to be at one with the illustrator to make the book feel as you want it to be but give the illustrator enough scope for them to craft the image to their satisfaction. As I said before, I’ve learnt a lot since I took up writing, but it’s a joy even with its ups and downs.
That’s it for now. Next time we’ll talk about the actual characters and how they appear in the illustrations. I hope you have your favorites. Till then take care and stay safe. Drew.

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