Author Panel: Birth of a Picture Book — Corinna Luyken

Corinna Luyken

Corinna Luyken is the award-winning author and illustrator of some absolutely beautiful picture books, including My Heart and The Book of Mistakes. 

When she was a kid, she used to draw at the living room table. Now, she works in a studio.

In her own space, she gets to make a mess. "Also," she said, "my process is messy."

She calls it a process of making mistakes, and of using improvisation and experimentation to move her work forward. "This is how I arrive at solutions."

In Adrian Simcox Does Not Have a Horse, the story is about a child who may or may not have a horse. So she had to figure out a way to convey that. She used negative space (you can see it on the book cover, pictured on the right--the horse continues to the back of the jacket).

Adrian Simcox Does
NOT Have a Horse

Her process involves making many dummies (at least 12 for The Book of Mistakes). And it can be emotionally hard ... her family reports that she gets grumpy when her experimentation isn't going well.

All of her books begin with emptiness ... she needs to get out of her own way, a concept that Kate DiCamillo expressed well. And then there is attention. Books exist between that sweet spot of emptiness and attention.

She also balances fear and love.

"You can make a choice. Which one are you going to allow to guide you? Fear is a very real part of the process ... All we can hope is that we will not succumb to that.... I do try to remember that every day, the job of the artist is to be sharpened and honed by this uncertainty."

What questions do you ask yourself during the work of book making? 

My Heart

"I try to have a conversation with the story and ask it what the heart of the story is, the feeling, the most important thing I'm trying to convey." That can inform Corinna's decisions.

How do you choose touches that are unique to the book that you are working on? 

You have to be interested and excited by the world of each new book. Corinna changes up materials when she starts a new book. "What does this world feel like? What art materials need to be used? what's speaking to me?"

She's used brown Kraft paper, a red, white, and blue color palette. She wanted white to be a character in a book with a little white dog. And there have been moments of doubt during the process—"what was I thinking?" But she gets to a point where she's invested, where the materials have spoken to her, and how their limits help guide and constrain the work in a helpful way.

The Book of Mistakes

Sometimes she's drawing away, and then she gets this charged feeling that lets her know it's important, even if it might not be visible to other people. She doesn't keep her finished art around, but she does keep those pieces that feel like "seeds" that got her going.

Author Panel: Birth of a Picture Book - Suzanne Kaufman

Suzanne Kaufman

Suzanne Kaufman is an author-illustrator of Confiscated. She has also illustrated several other picture books, including the New York Times bestselling picture book, All Are Welcome and the recently released Take Your Pet to School Day.

She shared that her creation process is complete and utter failure and displays a slide with a stack of sketchbooks several feet high, which she would "rather call play." Suzanne also considers her work to be therapy. When she's sad about the world, she creates art.

Working on nonfiction picture books gives her so much freedom, citing her work on 100 Bugs: A Counting Book. She also shared that she looks for real people—that unique, authentic self—to portray.

Her most recent release

How do you choose touches that are unique to the book you are working on?
When asked what touches are unique to books you work on, Suzanne shared, "It's subversive. The librarian in All Are Welcome is Maya Angelou. I put as much as I can in each illustration. Basquiat is my biggest inspiration."

For more information about Suzanne and her work, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Author Panel: The Birth of a Picture Book: Juana Martinez-Neal

Juana Martinez-Neal is the recipient of the 2018 Pura Belpré Medal for Illustration for La Princesa and the Pea and the Caldecott Honor for Alma and How She Got Her Name, among others.

"A line is dot that went for a walk" - Paul Klee

This is how Juana's sees her process. Or more like a squiggly line with lots of starts and stops. She says no one wants to follow it because it's chaos.

By the time ALMA was published it had been 8 years since she had the idea. The essence remained the same, inspired by her own name. "How your name changes you and makes you who you are stayed with me."

Juana started with character sketches, these changed many times over the years. Until one day she drew "this" while working on something else.

"Fear is my best friend in my creative process. There's fear and the only thing you can do is act. Only with action you can face your fear. You keep working and working and working."

A quote from Juana's good friend Molly Idle

"All you can control is the action."

Tammi Sauer: Picture Book Panel at #LA17SCBWI

Tammi Sauer is a full time children's book author has sold twenty-nine picture books to major publishing houses including Disney*Hyperion, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Sterling. In addition to winning awards and garnering starred reviews, Tammi's books have gone on to do great things. Chicken Dance has been made into a musical and is currently on a national tour, Nugget & Fang was a featured book at the 2015 Scholastic Book Fair, and Your Alien, an NPR Best Book of 2015, was recently released in Italian, Spanish, Korean, and French which makes her feel extra fancy. Visit www.tammisauer.com.

During the Picture Book Panel (brilliantly moderated by Laurent Linn), Tammi Sauer shared her formula for creating characters her readers will care about: ARF

• Active: her character is doing something!
• Relatable: she wants readers to be able to empathize and think "I know what that feels like"
• Flawed: Nobody wants to read about Little Miss Perfect

When asked how she maintains freshness and spontaneity in her writing through all the drafts and revisions, Tammi suggested: 

• Show it to someone who has never seen it before.
• Consider using a different font just to see your words differently.
• Try working in a new location (Tammi shouts out to Panera Bread!)

Comment below and let us know what you do to keep your work from becoming overworked!      

Raul Colon: Picture Book Panel

Raul Colón was born in New York City, went to school for art in Puerto Rico, has illustrated over 30 children's books as well as done public art for New York and his work has appeared in numerous illustrious editorial publications.

Laurent Linn calls him a LEGEND, and if you know his work, you know you can spot his pieces out of any crowd. Laurent had the pleasure of art directing DRAW! (among other luminous titles) for Raul.

Raul jokingly says the original text for the DRAW! dummy was so good, that his editor Paula Wiseman said to cut it. Truly, the images stand alone without text, so they did decide to turn it into a wordless picture book. Raul says many teachers and librarians use the book as a creative writing exercise, asking students to write stories to accompany the images (and Raul thinks sometimes those are even better than what he had written!)

Laurent asks what a typical day is like:

"I get up early in the morning, have to have coffee, toast, take my time, hear NPR for a little bit (which hasn't been good news for the last six months...) and then I go to my studio, which has papers and books everywhere...

I sit there at my desk and the way I approach the book, after I've read the manuscript, I have to come up with the sketches. When I see a manuscript and I say yes to it, before that, during the first reading, I've got to have visions for the book come to me as I start reading, otherwise I can't say yes to it.

Then I turn on some music. Could be rock 'n' roll, could be Rachmaninoff. Doesn't matter, I get lost, especially when I get into the color/painting time. Many times I don't do more than three sketches per illustration. Usually I start with thumbnails, and then I make the larger sketch..."

Laurent asks how does Raul start an idea?

Gregory Colbert photos

DRAW! came about after Raul went to a Gregory Colbert photography exhibit of big, beautiful prints of animals. The exhibit included videos of Colbert in action. It blew Raul away. He'd been illustrating a lot of biographies, but Raul really wanted his next book to have animals in it. As a kid, Raul was very sick and indoors a lot drawing, so he put all of those elements together for DRAW!

Laurent asks what is Raul's revision/working process like?

Raul does NOT like to do color sketches before he gets to the final art, he wants to keep everything loose until the final. Because when he starts to do final art he wants to be free to change things, which keeps the energy up and the art fresh and allows him to go in the directions that best serve the art and book.