As an exercise in conceptual thinking, I’ve been practicing editorial illustration by illustrating my journal. I decided to start at the latest one and work my backwards through everything I’ve written whilst adding an image to every new entry. It started as an experiment but has now turned into a hobby.
The strange thing is that as I’m finding pictures to represent the ideas in my writing I’m finding that I want to change my writing – mostly because the title doesn’t really capture the idea of the article (but it seemed to be fine at the time I was writing).
I’ve long gone on about the relationship between words and pictures – especially in picture books where the relationship is at its strongest. Words create and change pictures and pictures create and change words.
It’s easy (and probably common?) to think that writing and drawing are two separate activities but it seems that I get better clarity of thought if I do both. Perhaps a better way to work is write some words, draw some pictures, then re-write the words. Pictures, it seems, help to clarify my thinking in a way that working in only words does not.