I relate to animals. I talk to them, they talk back.
I know their personalities very well.
I can draw them from memory because I observe
them so heartily. Cows are very funny.
They are very dignified, and it must be very difficult to
be dignified with these coat hanger hips and udders and
all this other stuff lurking forth.
The way I really like to draw is out of my head,
and I like to do this very loose brush or
felt tip pen kind of drawing and then with color overlays.
The color is less important to me than the drawing.
Because my drawing is so quick and spontaneous,
a lot of times if I have to do that drawing over
several times, it loses some of that spontaneity.
So I discovered that if I do the drawings on tracing paper,
and if I don't like a particular gesture,
I can tear that out and put another one in.
My final drawings wind up looking like a sewed-together
Frankenstein monster. It's all taped together.
And I have this Xeroxed, so now I have
a black-and-white Xeroxed drawing,
and then I just do my watercolor on that.
DUMPY LA RUE. I love pigs. Pigs are hysterical.
This is an example of the process I use when
I make several finished drawings on a Xerox machine,
so that I can paint them in different ways.
Originally, I did this painting for the book.
I had another copy of the black-and-white drawing and
I simply repainted it with a daylight, sunny daylight scene.
I like the drawings in CLICK, CLACK, MOO. The cows have
just left a note on the door that is infuriating the farmer.
I want the children to see the cow's expressions.
I want them to see the note. And I certainly want
them to see Farmer Brown's reaction.
How am I going to do that? I did many, many sketches and
wound up using that shadow and, it was just a bonus that
the straw hat looked like Farmer Brown's hair standing on end,
which showed his rage even more. A lot of my inspiration,
I am sure, came from the cartoons I saw as
a child in movies. You know, the gesture of Farmer Brown
with his leg up in the air and shaking his fists.
It is pure cartoon.
What appealed to me about Barbara Joosse's book
Everybody together at Grandma's house for Christmas,
with two dogs and a cat,
and a snowstorm and then they all get to sleep there.
I mean, I can't imagine a more appealing story for a child.
When you illustrate a story like that where there are
specific characters, you have to give those characters a face.
And that is always a challenge for me,
and I love that challenge. I read the manuscript and
then I do rough sketches. I develop the character first.
Do many, many drawings until I get them looking the
way I want and I am sure that I can draw that character in
any pose, from any angle, with any expression on their face.
I draw and draw before I even get to illustrating the book.
I like this page very much because
this is the first you see of Granny's family.
I was so excited to start doing these characterizations.
"At last they came--
Chatty Aunt Fanny and her sister, Clarisse.
Uncle Bert, the fireman, and his brave firedog, Walter.
Great-aunt Ruby, who smelled like wild cherry cough drops.
Annie, Michael, and little Otto.
Aunt Ivy and her noisy boys--Freddie, Dennie,
and Kennie. And Lambert, who had a soft warm lap."
So now I have the whole family here to illustrate.
Edgar the dog had to be a big floppy sort of
Golden Retriever kind of animal and the children had to be
boisterous, so, I had to have one smashing a snowball
on top of the other one's head inside Granny's house
so the mother could be very upset about it.
And bland Uncle Lambert, who comes in last, waving.
I love to end picture books--my own or
other people's picture books. I like it to be just a drawing if
I can work it out that way, without text.
Because in that drawing, I like to bring something to
the story that wasn't told.
you don't know whether or not the ducks get
their diving board in the text. I decided to show
the reader that the duck did get the diving board simply by
having him dive off of it into the water.
He got his diving board. I think I say in pictures what
I don't say as easily in words.