One of the key skills an illustrator has to learn, it seems, isn’t about drawing at all; it’s about becoming comfortable with invisibility. For some reason, our culture still largely focusses on (and admires) words, “Do you also write or just illustrate?” is one of the most common questions I get from people who discover what I do. To be an author is something to aspire to. An illustrator? Not so much.
Pictures, we know, transfer information and feeling much faster than words to most people. Using pictures to communicate also doesn’t require the viewer to learn a language. I can write “smile” in English and I will reach an english-speaking audience. But to reach other audiences I need to translate that – Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili. Or I can draw a smile – 😊 – for everyone.
In commercial picture books, the pictures create a ‘visual identity’ for the book as it sits alongside all the other books on the shelf seeking a customer. A buyer doesn’t need to read a single word of the book to know whether it will be cute/fun, scary, serious, literary, or sad. Pictures do all of that heavy lifting on the cover, the best ones don’t just describe a mood, they tell a story.
Pictures work at such a natural and subconscious level that even authors and viewers don’t even recognise their effect sometimes. An illustrator will often be referred to by an author as ‘the person who drew the pictures for my book’. Most of the time, I’m OK with this, but sometimes, I’m not.
Part of the joy of drawing pictures for people in commercial picture books is to see a reaction, to feel that we’ve informed or entertained another human. It’s fundamentally about connection. But, unfortunately, the connection we make through pictures with eachother can often be one way – we send something out into the world, the receiver loves it, adores it, but doesn’t recognise the human behind it.
It’s easy to get a little bitter about this but there is another reaction: to channel how my 10-year-old self would have thought about the power of invisibility because he would’ve loved it!