Earlier this year I was thinking about illustrations in children’s books, so I thought it fitting to sketch out some thoughts on illustrating and share several of the illustrators I enjoy with my family.
My Appreciation for Illustration
My ability to draw is limited to rudimentary doodles, a skill that I developed in Algebra but is now rusty (no more Algebra). Even so, I’ve always appreciated well-done illustrations. This is in no small part to my mom.
It’s interesting to reflect on how I viewed the world around me when I was young. Things that once enamored me with wonder I take for granted now.
Take, for example, the fact that my mom was a missionary to Liberia. In recent years I had forgotten that, but when I was in first grade, I took her to show-and-tell.
I had also nearly forgotten how gifted of an artist my mom is. She can art just about anything. These days she does more in the category of crafting, but when I was growing up she was focused on drawing. This included, but definitely was not limited to, the Wit-n-Wisdom comics she made for the newspaper each week.
I can’t remember a time when our house didn’t have an art room. There was always a space completely dedicated to Mom’s art. I was fascinated by all of the different pencils, colored pencils, blending stumps, markers, and more. It was novel and fun to use the tracing table she made from a pane of glass, a drawer, and a fluorescent light. I remember wondering how anybody drew anything good if they weren’t tracing something else.
All this to simply say that I appreciate illustrators. Their primary tools may have changed from what I watched my mom use (even she sometimes draws on an iPad now), but that has not changed my high regard for them.
Thoughts on Illustration
While I'm far from an expert in this area, I do want to contribute a few reflections on illustration before moving on to my list of illustrators.
I've long thought that between the author and the illustrator, the illustrator has the more difficult job. (This may be because I’m much more of a writer than an illustrator. If I could just draw a decent knight fighting a dragon, I would be content.) Which is why it's always puzzled me to so often see illustrators listed almost as an afterthought on the books they illustrate. There’s a paradox here: All too often the illustrator is overlooked even though their work is anything but. I would even go so far as to say that their work makes or breaks the book. (This is where I unabashedly admit that I judge books by their covers, especially in the children's section of the library. If you want to participate in some friendly, verbal jousting about this, I invite you to get in touch.)
Aside from a few exceptions, authors get most of the credit. Even when it seems like the author simply slapped some words on the page (e.g. When a celebrity decides to write a children’s book.), and even when it's obvious that the illustrator did the heavy lifting (I recognize that there’s much variation to the division of labor. There is no even or consistent split between the two. It just depends on the book.). This is likely because writing is the foundation that illustration builds upon. Story is king after all. The author turns ideas into words, and the illustrator turns those words into pictures. There’s a case to be made that the illustrator has more to work with than the author.
In a way, illustrators are interpreters. They serve the reader by putting flesh on bone and fleshing out the world. Their goal isn’t to merely repeat what the author wrote but to faithfully add to it. Great illustrators know and do this. They add surprising and delightful details not found in the text but which still remain true to the story. Legendary illustrators, like E. H. Shepard or Quentin Blake (more on them below), make the authors they illustrate for famous.
Ultimately, any children's book will only be as good as the author's writing, and it will only be as good as the illustrator's pictures. A simple quality test is to see if each can stand alone and still tell the story (This still applies even when the author and illustrator are the same person.). While this is a start, it's not enough. The author’s writing and the illustrator’s pictures also need to harmonize when they're brought together. If the author and the illustrator are able to accomplish harmonious storytelling with their combined work, the result is something special. True co-creations between author and illustrator make it difficult to think of one without also thinking of the other.
Below, I’ve listed several of my current favorite illustrators. I’ll start with three honorable mentions, add three more to watch, and close with three hall-of-famers. My mom is not in the list, but that simply means she holds an extra-special place. She’s unlistable.
Honorable Mentions
Emma Randall
Emma's illustrations are full of color and activity. Yet she knows when the activity on a page should be focused, and she demonstrates this in the Training Young Hearts series. It was these books that earned her a spot on this list.
She’s done excellently with these. This series is so instructive, and it always connects to Jesus. It's an added bonus and extra fun that they are lift-the-flap books! We've already seen fruit from reading these to Martha (3 yrs).
Recommended book: What Are Hands For? Catalina Echeverri Friendly, and fun—Catalina illustrates true stories in childlike ways. I especially like that she hasn't just illustrated well-known Bible stories, like Daniel in the lion's den, but is bringing color to other ones too, like God rescuing Paul and Silas from prison with an earthquake.
Tales that Tell the Truth is a series worth looking into, and a big reason I like it is because Catalina's illustrations provides consistency across various authors. Recommended book: The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross: The true story of why Jesus died and rose again Oliver Jeffers The hugely popular The Day the Crayons Quit was illustrated by Oliver. This book, along with the others in this series, are very entertaining. You can't quite tell whether a child or an artist made each illustration. I suspect this is difficult to do well, but Oliver sticks the landing.
It turns out that while Oliver makes picture books for children, he also makes fine art for adults. (He has a very creative and interesting website.) But of course it’s his children’s book that I most appreciate.
When it comes to children's books, Oliver hasn't just illustrated them, he's also written them. These range from silly stories to reflections on the meaning of life. The latter fall flat simply because Oliver lacks a biblical worldview. You can’t write about the meaning of life when you believe that it's meaningless. That said, I do enjoy his silly stories. This is probably because they are suffused with British humour. Which makes sense. While he's not English, he is Northern Irish. That's still part of the United Kingdom, so it counts.
While I'm of the firm conviction that dragons should be fought and not befriended, I really enjoy Christopher's book, Knight Owl, which he wrote and illustrated. It says something when the story is clever, but the illustrations even more so. I recently read the second in this series, Knight Owl and Early Bird, and it was a worthy sequel.
I've only briefly glanced over some of Christopher's other works on his website, but I like what I see. His illustrations are filled with life and a welcoming warmth.
All I know about Aleksander Jasinski is that he's the illustrator behind my family’s favorite storybook Bible: The Kingdom of God Storybook Bible. He's worked with Tyler Van Halteren at Lithos Kids to make the Old Testament, the New Testament, The Parables of Jesus, and The Wisdom of God. That's a lot of to illustrate! And how many storybook Bibles do you know that include the wisdom literature: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job!? I'm a fan—so much so that I would happily read these to myself for edification and encouragement.
In these Bibles, Aleksander‘s excellence as an artist really shines through. Literally. In each of his pictures, he uses light and dark to clearly distinguish good and evil. His illustrations are inviting and enjoyable to look through. He isn't heavy-handed, yet he doesn't pull any punches. You'll see Job covered in sores, Saul falling on his sword, Pharisees whispering to one another, and Jesus being scourged. Aleksander simply places the reality of God’s Word before us, and we've appreciated his intentionality.
These Bibles have given us many opportunities for spiritual conversations with Martha (she’s always asking us to read more), and as a result she's better equipped to see the mercy of King Jesus in the midst of our sin. He's redeeming His Kingdom.
Whenever I come across a podcast interview featuring Forrest, I’m quick to listen and learn from him. Here’s a quote from his interview on The Right Stuff that explains what good illustrators do:
“You’re taking what God did and crafting it into a poem. Look, God gets the sun and the physical work and smells and touch and taste, and we have to take colored dirt and scrub it on a canvas and try to represent the experience we had out there. All color is ultimately a poetic take on what it was that you saw.
Crispin's Rainy Day may be my favorite book on this list. If stories are soul food, it’s a hearty meal filled with the spirit of adventure and the comfort of home. It’s a solid story with echoes of the gospel throughout. It also stays true to God’s design for men and women. The beauty of this is that Rose is the strongest character in the story simply by embracing the feminine glory God gave her.
If you would like a behind-the-scenes look at Forrest’s creative process for writing and illustrating this book, check out this documentary: MAKERS Ep. 1 | Forrest Dickison.
A prolific illustrator if there ever was one, Blake is one of the greats. If you’ve ever seen a book written by Roald Dahl (e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and Matilda), you’ve seen Blake's work. Roald Dahl’s stories are well-known, with many adapted to movies, yet Blake's illustrations remain the best way to visually capture each one. In fact, Blake's illustrations were a big part of why Roald Dahl’s stories became popular.
Blake's work comes in abundance and his style is energetic, exuberant, and unique. He's made a comfortable place for himself in his industry after illustrating over 300 books, and he's won the highest honors and awards while doing it. (He was the very first British Children's Laureate.) I would love to get my hands on more of his children’s books.
My mom introduced me to Bill Peet when I was a boy. It was only recently, as I’ve looked for books to read to Martha, that I’ve revisited his work. Out of all the illustrators on this list, I’ve known and admired his work the longest.
Whether you know his name or not, I’m sure you would recognize Peet’s work. He was at Disney for 27 years, and left his mark on movies like One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. (The latter is one of my personal favorites.) In fact, he made the storyboards for both of these animated feature films by himself, and he is the only storyman in the history of Disney to do so.
Eventually Peet left Disney to go create his own children’s books full-time. He wrote and illustrated many books, some of which even tell their stories in rhyme. While some of his stories are definitely better than others, I always enjoy his illustrations. They are infused with his rural upbringing in the Midwest and remind me of romps I had as a boy. He drew what he knew, and he comes back to these themes again and again.
While Peet is no longer living, you can still visit his website. It’s a treasure trove. They don't make them like this anymore.
It would be a mistake not to include E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, somewhere on this list. There is no doubt that he is one of the all-time greats. His illustrations have seen a few generations at this point. Yet these days, many wouldn’t know it. We think of the Disneyfied versions of Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, or Roo, but I much prefer Shepard’s. They’re winsome, quaint, and classic.
Shepard was very close with his granddaughter, Minette Shepard. In the foreword to The Art of Winnie-the-Pooh: How E. H. Shepard Illustrated an Icon by James Campbell, she describes how her grandfather’s work changed the way authors and publishers thought about illustration and the value it contributed. We take this for granted today.
The Winnie-the-Pooh books were, unusually for that time, very much a joint venture between Milne and my grandfather. At that time it was usual practice for a publisher to commission an illustrator once a book was written, and the illustrations would be inserted in sections through the book, not necessarily adjacent to relevant text. However, after the great success of When We Were Very Young, both Alan Milne and my grandfather realized that they could achieve much more by working closely together to create a seamless experience for the reader. Establishing a joint creative process, they would meet regularly, often weekly, and discuss their respective contributions, making suggestions, proposing alterations and amendments, and often considering the look of the layouts on the printed page, which was extremely unusual. Therefore these books were amongst the first where the illustrations were not an afterthought and distributed randomly through the text, but were an integral part of the story.
Shepard was known to carry around a small sketchbook. Each day he would add a sketch of something he encountered. If he liked it, he would take it back to his home to sketch onto a bigger page. There is no doubt that these sketches from life influenced his other works by and made them come to life.
Shepard’s illustrations are easily mimicked but not easily mastered. A mark of true mastery is making it look simple. Even after he and his work became famous, his granddaughter says, “He retained an essential humor, honesty, and truthfulness in his artistic work that characterized his approach to life as well as to work.”
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