yeah so when you're doing like a non-comics illustration like a children's book how do you choose which scenes of the book to draw or does the author dictate that how does that work

Ah, that's where all the mystery is, right? No, the author, if the author is dictating to you what to draw, then you are in a terrible spot and you need to get a new author because that's not what they're supposed to do.

Usually for a picture book, you're given a script.

And this is just for me, maybe.

I don't know if other artists do this, but if I ever get art notes, I get rid of them right away.

The worst thing in the world is to try to figure out what someone wants you to draw because... you'll never be able to see inside that person's head.

So usually I'll get a script and I'll run it through like a movie in my head and I'll do a bunch of sort of rough sketches of it to see where the feeling of it is for me.

But were these supposed to be different levels of reality, these different color combinations?

So can you talk a little bit about kind of how this comes to be? Like, how did you and Jennifer kind of work together on this? Did she come in saying, I want to do a graphic novel? And yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

It's an interesting process, actually, doing graphic novels.

I haven't done a whole lot of them.

I mean, okay, I do a lot of books.

I've done over 140 books.

So when I say I haven't done a whole lot of them, I think I'm still doing more than the average person.

But considering how many picture books I've done, I really haven't done as many graphic novels.

Yeah,

So can you talk a little bit about kind of how this comes to be? Like, how did you and Jennifer kind of work together on this? Did she come in saying, I want to do a graphic novel? And yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

It's an interesting process, actually, doing graphic novels.

I haven't done a whole lot of them.

I mean, okay, I do a lot of books.

I've done over 140 books.

So when I say I haven't done a whole lot of them, I think I'm still doing more than the average person.

But considering how many picture books I've done, I really haven't done as many graphic novels.

Yeah,

So can you talk a little bit about kind of how this comes to be? Like, how did you and Jennifer kind of work together on this? Did she come in saying, I want to do a graphic novel? And yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

It's an interesting process, actually, doing graphic novels.

I haven't done a whole lot of them.

I mean, okay, I do a lot of books.

I've done over 140 books.

So when I say I haven't done a whole lot of them, I think I'm still doing more than the average person.

But considering how many picture books I've done, I really haven't done as many graphic novels.

Like, are you mapping that out ahead of time? Are you just kind of, yeah, can you, all of this?

Mm-hmm.

That's where the dev pe- visual development people go, um, people who are designing the look of the movie, people who are designing the characters, people who are writing the storyboards.

All of those guys are in the art department.

And, um, what happens is the art department designs the look of the entire movie, they pass it off to the storyboard artists who break down the movie into beats.

That's what we technically do as children's book people and graphic novelists.

And then those storyboards are broken down into scenes, um, into, into, um, into scenes, and then each scene is sent off, a singular scene is sent off to the layout department.

And in the layout department, they take what's been thought about and dreamed and imagined in the art world, and they put it into real world positioning, which is why you have to know perspective.

Mm.