Art Directors Panel: Lauren Rille (Simon & Schuster)

Topic: The Changing Landscape In Children's Book Publishing For Illustrators

Such an inspiring Art Directors Panel with Karina Granda (Art Director, Little Brown Books for Young Readers), Miranda Paul (Agent, Erin Murphy Literary Agency), Lauren Rille - Art Director, Simon & Schuster), and Zejun Yao - (Agent, Yeon Agency).  The panel was moderated by TeMika Grooms. 

In this post, I'll be focusing on Lauren Rille. Do browse the Conference Blog for takeaways from the other panelists; click links in the above paragraph.

Lauren Rille is an Art Director at Simon & Schuster, where she works with the Beach Lane, Atheneum, and McElderry imprints. Before joining S&S, Lauren was a designer at Sterling and Harcourt Children’s Books. Books she’s designed include the most recent edition of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, cover illustration by Debbie Ridpath Ohi; In Every Life by Marla Frazee; The Antlered Ship by Dashka Slater, illustrated by the Fan Brothers; Scraps by Lois Ehlert; Best In Snow by April Pulley Sayre; and the best-selling Bear Series by Karma Wilson, illustrated by Jane Chapman. You can find out more info about Lauren at LaurenRille.com, Instagram, and Twitter.

Lauren has been an Art Director for 15 years, and says her sweet spot is picture books, but she also works with illustrated MG and YA. Lauren helped revamp the Judy Blume books for Atheneum/Simon & Schuster (note from Debbie: I was the illustrator, woohoo! Here is a blog post by Lauren and me about creating a new look for Judy Blume classics).

Where Lauren finds artists:

Lauren says she finds illustrators everywhere, that there's no one "right" place. She especially likes Instagram, where illustrators tend to post sketches and work in progress and aren't as "precious" about their work.

Tips for illustrators:

Go beyond just character studies/portraits in your portfolio. Have a narrative, show that you can convey a story with your art.

Even if you're not a writer, don't stress about coming up with your own story. Do your own take on an already established story, like Red Riding Hood - it will get across your sense of setting, point of view, shows that you can show a moment from a story.

It's ok to show multiple styles in your online portfolio, but show that you have a real command of whatever styles you're using. Avoid showing the same work over and over; when Lauren notices this over the years, she says it gives the impression you're not working on improving your craft. 

Lauren loves the collaboration process with the illustrator. She says she always encourages the illustrator ask questions or to ask for help if they need it. "It's more fun if we work together."

Fill your portfolio with art featuring the age of kids you want to illustrate for. She advises browsing children's clothing catalogs can help you come up with authentic clothing for your characters.

Even though it didn't come up during the session, I should also point out that Lauren Rille is a picture book creator herself:

I Feel Teal is written by Lauren Rille and illustrated by Aimée Sicuro, published by Simon & Schuster.

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If you want to view this session to hear the full content, along with the rest of the conference, register at https://www.scbwi.org/events/summer-conference-2023. Replays of the conferences will be available until September 10th, 2023. See the index to all 2023 SCBWI Summer Conference blog posts.

Also be sure to check out the Faculty Conference Bookshop and the Portfolio Showcase!

Lauren Rille – Getting Technical About Emotion

The first half of always awesome Lauren Rille of Simon & Schuster's afternoon session went over Bigger Picture Stuff for getting your picture book sketches and layout in good, overall shape before you move on to final art. But here are a few Smaller Picture Stuff details from the second half of her talk:

Once global pacing, tone, palette, etc., are established in your story art, then you can go through and focus on all of those big picture things again, but page by page.

Simon's New Bed by Christian Trimmer and illustrated by Melissa van der Paardt has a fantastic example of how you can push POV/perspective in just one spread to completely change the entire emotional tone of the story:

Lauren shares the initial sketch of the scene where dog Simon comes into the room ready to use his new dog bed for the first time... And cat Miss Adora Belle...

The editorial team likes this sketch very much, but they ask Melissa to push the drawing even farther, to visually interrupt what had been a light and breezy, happy day of anticipation for Simon in these two earlier spreads:

And "stop the music" as Lauren says in the spread in question. And Melissa comes back with this:

Environment is the same, characters are the same, but look at all you can achieve with just a shift in camera angle!

And even with the POV change, the editorial team wants things to go one step further. Since this scene is the big shifting moment in the story's emotional arc so far, changing up the lighting and palette compared to the earlier spread will help underscore the change in the story's tone even more.

So good!

Thanks to Lauren and S&S for letting us use these images from her actual slides!

Lauren Rille - How Designers Bring Your Book To Life

Lauren walks us through the making of SOPHIE PETERMAN TELLS THE TRUTH by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Robert Neubecker. SPTTT was the first book Lauren got to work on from start to finish at Simon & Schuster. I can't recommend this session enough. Totally eye-opening, Lauren's slide show made us feel like we were there with both the editorial team and the illustrator — like we were helping make the book.

Once the manuscript is approved, Lauren usually paginates the text out for the illustrator. As far as artistic direction is concerned, though they might say "keep it young" or mention they prefer one of your styles for the project, Lauren and her editor want illustrators to honor their talent and vision as they make the art and try to give the illustrator room and time to go wild.

Typically, Lauren actively works with an illustrator for about six months. In that time the illustrator will do sketches, revisions, and final art. For SPTTT, Robert Neubecker received the manuscript and did sketches for the book's spreads.

As soon as Lauren received these sketches (via emailed .pdf), she sent a copy to the editor. Both Lauren and the editor go through the pages. Lauren is looking for composition, character consistency, variety of layout, room for type, things falling into the gutter. The editor is looking for big picture issues.

A few slides of Robert's character design sheets are shown. Making sure the characters are consistent (especially if they age a few years within the book like in SSPTTT) is a big issue for any picture book. Lauren and editor will sit on character studies for a few days to a week, and then send back the studies with notes and sometimes photoshopped changes to help explain what they are looking for. If the work is all digital, it is often easier for Lauren to go in and tweak something than to write out the explanation.

Illustrators can ask for a galley, which is the final trim size and text placed by the designer on the page for you to work your art around. Once the characters are nailed down, and text is fairly set, Robert does a full sketch dummy. Lauren and editor go over every page of these dummy sketches with notes for the artist. Sometimes, changes are as simple as moving the eyebrows or moving feet around. The pink note is from Lauren on Robert's initial dummy sketch page.

Does the above feel intrusive? Lauren says, "It's not a gallery show, it's not just you putting your work up, you are working on a team." Plus, Lauren and her editor are RIGHT. All of the changes they requested, when viewing them in the before and after spreads in Lauren's slide show, are changes that helped clarify the tone of the book, or direct the eye, or better express a character's emotion.

Other notes for Robert included "More underwear, more underwear, kids love underwear."

After sketch revisions, the book goes to "first sketch check," the first step to routing (routing the work all the way to the printer in China.) All the pages get printed out and given to a copy editor.

Some things you don't think about when making an illustration: one of Robert's spreads included candy bars. Those candy bar names had to go to the S&S legal department to be vetted. I hope vetting includes sampling said candy bars.

Easter Egg! There's an homage to HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON in SPTTT.

Picking the cover has even more voices involved. Besides designer/editor/illustrator/copy editor, there's also sales teams, marketing teams, Barnes & Noble. Covers Meetings are 50 people in a room. Sometimes you hear weird things in cover meetings like, "Barnes and Noble isn't buying any white jackets."

Once the cover and final artwork are done, Robert sends everything to Lauren. Lauren's InDesign files with this final art and text are sent to China.

Three sets of first proofs of the book come back. The artist gets a copy to look for color, one set goes to author, and the editorial team goes through their set. This is the last chance for any changes to be made. And then it all gets sent to China.

Then F&Gs come back, and from there the book starts getting into the hands of buyers and reviewers and Lauren's work is mostly done. She opened the floor to questions at this point and showed us a few spreads from WHAT IS YOUR DOG DOING (which is ADORABLE, but I can't find any links to it.)