An exciting journey!

Making an illustrated children's book is a journey - a most exciting one, assuming you have put your heart in it!

It involves releasing the creativity of both the story teller and the illustrationist in a collaborative manner, through a number of repetitions, until all the aspects of the book are balanced for every page.

You start each page with a text, which you have to balance in terms of its overall scope and proportion within its place in the book. It has to be like a little chapter. It must advance the story, but at the right pace. And it must have a centre, a focal point around which the action concentrates and moves the story forward.

Then you start visualising that focal point and various illustrative options emerge. Pencilling is now taking the lead and some partial painting may also take place to help drive the choice. For every page, there are many angles from which to tell this part of the story visually, and you generate options. And then necessity kicks in. Your book designer joins in, as you have to balance the image and the text, so you start adjusting both, in a three-way collaboration, until you come to a point that both the text and the images can harmonically co-exist.

So it can be a rather long process and creativity may not always be at the tip of your fingers when you need it. Patience, is the required virtue in these moments! And the mutual respect and support of each member of the critical triad involved in this process (writer, illustrationist and book designer). And then, the page finally emerges. Out of nothing but words and imagination, through lines and colour, a complete world emerges!

And every time you achieve that, there is an immense sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. So yes, the journey may be long, but there are so many joyful points on the way, that at the end I think it's more than worth it!

Chris Rebel