In children’s publishing, a lot of care and attention goes into every book. Everyone I’ve ever worked with, on each and every book, wants that book to be the best it can possibly be. One of the many criteria it needs to fulfill to reach for this target is, “Does it make sense to the reader?” and “Is it clear.”
But, there’s a fine line to tread because by making something ‘as clear as possible’, we close doors to the reader. If clarity goes too far, we end up with a book that has no space for the reader to co-create as they read. That space is, in fact, the magic of books.
Just as poetry or painting invites a reader to make their own meaning, so too do good picture books. There are many ways to do this – in the words, in the pictures, and more interestingly, the combination of them.
Words, pictures, and the combination of them
Words have an advantage – they are abstract by nature. I could write the word “Yellow” and, chances are, five different readers will conjure a a different shade in their mind. I could ‘clarify’ this word… perhaps use the words “Lemon Yellow”, and those 5 readers might picture a more similar shade of yellow. I could add another descriptor – “Light Lemon Yellow” – and the image would be further refined.
This doesn’t work with pictures. The yellow I paint is the yellow a reader will see. The same yellow – for everyone. There’s no room for the imagination to breathe like there is with ‘yellow’ as a word only.
The challenge for me, as an illustrator, is to build my illustrative vocabulary (line, colour, shape, tone, pattern etc) and learn how to use those things to invite a reader into the pictures – to not prescribe but suggest. This may be something as simple as not completely closing line work, or using how colours, lines, shapes, tones, patterns etc feel so that they provide the conditions for a reader to have their own, unique emotional reaction to a drawing. It may also be recognising that if the sentence I’m illustrating uses the word ‘yellow’, then perhaps the illustration doesn’t need to tell the reader exactly which shade and instead, let the reader in – to co-create the images in their minds rather than being told exactly what to see.