‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling

From The Twits to the Gruffalo… Quentin Blake, Cressida Cowell, Axel Sheffler, Lauren Child and more reveal how they bring children’s books to life

Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.

Eventually the centre will become home to Blake’s own enormous archive: 40,000 drawings created by one of the UK’s best-known and most immediately recognisable artists. Now 93, Blake has spent three-quarters of a century bringing the words of some of our most beloved authors to life. Roald Dahl is the big one, of course – it’s impossible to think of Dahl without seeing Blake’s energetic, dip-pen pictures – but the list also includes Michael Rosen, John Yeoman, Sylvia Plath and Voltaire, as well as Blake’s own books. In other words, it’s difficult to find anyone with the same authority.

“More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,” Blake explains. “What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.”

For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you think of The Twits, the likelihood is that you think of Blake’s wild, scratchy depictions. To imagine Funnybones is to see Janet Ahlberg’s deceptively simplistic pictures before Allan Ahlberg’s words. Go on any of Forestry England’s Gruffalo walks and it will be Axel Scheffler’s designs (rather than Julia Donaldson’s text) that loom out at you from between the trees.

“We are a bit in the shadow,” says Scheffler. “Our books are called picture books, so we are an important part of the process. It’s a very underestimated art form, the author and illustrator creating something together. It’s hard to separate.”

“The shortest time I’ve ever spent writing a picture book was an hour, typing it into my phone on an aeroplane,” says author-illustrator Sarah McIntyre, “but they always take at least three or four months of intensive work to illustrate, nine or more hours a day, six days a week.”

McIntyre has done more than most to highlight how badly illustrators are overlooked. A decade ago she launched the Pictures Mean Business campaign, to push for illustrators to receive proper credit for their work. In doing so, she helped to resolve a misunderstanding of what a picture book actually is.

Having written them myself, I know how completely specific they are. Almost always 32 pages long, and almost always read to a child by a caregiver before they can read themselves, most picture books exist at the precise point where the text and illustration meet. Remove either component and the whole thing falls apart.

“I think illustrating a story is one of the primal human instincts,” says Huw Aaron, whose book Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob won the Waterstones children’s book prize this year. “We don’t know if people were dancing or singing 40,000 years ago, but we do know they were making comics about people chasing cows, because they’re all over cave walls.”

The things an illustrator can do to a text are as varied as they are wonderful. Jim Field, illustrator of Kes Gray’s Oi Frog! and Rachel Bright’s The Lion Inside, sees illustration as an extra layer. “I’m not trying to do exactly what the words are saying,” he says. “I’m trying to weave in sort of extra subplots or let the reader learn more about the character.”

Matty Long, creator of Super Happy Magic Forest – a series that has crossed from picture books to chapter books to television – puts it even more bluntly. “If the words are just describing the picture, then why have you got the words?” he says. “I want the images to do the bulk of the storytelling.”

But sometimes an illustrator can go even further than this. In I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen performs the magic trick of telling two different stories at once. Read without images, the book is simply the tale of a bear fruitlessly inquiring after his lost headwear. But the illustrations provide a context that runs slightly counter to this. The bear, so polite written down, is actually fuelled by murderous revenge.

“It seems to be where the truth of the thing should live,” says Klassen of the tension between words and pictures. “I usually end up putting a half truth in the words, or leaving a lot of things out. I think that helps with kids because, when the text is outright incorrect, they can see that the pictures are telling the truth.”

Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. “I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,” explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. “He asked some children what ‘indignant’ meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just ‘angry’ or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.”

For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to “proper” books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that “you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.”

“Children have got the most sophisticated little minds,” says Lauren Child, creator of Charlie and Lola. “They might be tiny, but they’re really big thinkers. They’re so visually smart in ways that adults aren’t. We use visual cues and aesthetics our whole life, but we lose that edge that we have when we first arrive.”

A picture book might be the first time a child is able to identify and name a big emotion they are experiencing. Nadia Shireen’s book Barbara Throws a Wobbler uses bright and colourful images to depict feelings outside the written word. “We have a period in the book where Barbara actually talks to the Wobbler, and it all got very metaphysical,” she says. “I had to say to my editor: ‘Is this mad? Are we expecting three-year-olds to go on a psychological journey?’”

Sometimes, illustration can even help a book become a tool for storytelling, allowing children to become co-authors. In Jon Burgerman’s Splat!, for example, readers get to blast the protagonist in the face with various new and disgusting objects with every page turn. “I wanted to make a book that could only be a book,” says Burgerman. “I really celebrated the form of a picture book, and I wanted to make something that couldn’t be realised in any other form.”

Meanwhile, Is This a Plum? by Dan Ojari and his son Finn makes clever use of cutouts to hide objects in plain sight. “Someone sent me a video of their kid, who can’t read, and they are telling the story to their parents because the words are so simple,” Ojari says. “It has that feeling of ‘I know more than my parent, and I’m going to trick them.’”If all this makes picture book illustration sound rather grand, the process itself often begins in the least grand way imaginable: with a doodle. “The drawing has to come first,” says Long, holding up an early sketch of a Super Happy Magic Forest character that, even in its nascent stage, still manages to contain all the elements of the character’s core personality. “I have to convince myself that there’s an idea there worth pursuing, and I do that through the drawing.”

Sue Hendra does the same, showing me her first sketch of the character Supertato, which she created with Paul Linnet and spun off into a mini empire consisting of 15 books and counting. Her sketch depicts a potato flying above a city. Unsure of writing a book about what appears to be an apocalyptically large spud, the sketch taught them that they needed to reframe Supertato’s world. “Paul suggested a supermarket, because it’s a city in miniature with products from all over the world coming in. It just created this lovely boundary, which felt really safe and secure.”

“If I had my notebook I’d show you the first picture of Hiccup that I drew 30 years ago,” says Cressida Cowell, author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series. “It was of this little Viking trying to live up to his father. That was the very first germ of something that spawned 12 books, a movie series and a theme park. Just a little pencil drawing!”

Characters are also everything for Jamie Smart, whose Bunny vs Monkey books sit at the heart of the current comic book boom in publishing. Their appeal is vast, and much of this is to do with how replicable the characters are. “When I do workshops for kids, I always start at the very beginning. I go: ‘Draw a square and draw a circle, and now you can pretty much draw any character in Bunny vs Monkey,’” he says. “For a child, telling stories can be quite intimidating, because you have to know all the words that you’re going to need. But if you can tell a story with a couple of lines and a smiley face, what a gift.”

Arguably nobody knows this better than Rob Biddulph, whose Draw With Rob videos – teaching children step by step to replicate his artwork – elevated him to national treasure status during lockdown. “I think it’s the thing I’m proudest of in my career,” he says. “Sure, it was on a screen, but you can use that screen to do something practical and physical. Kids were watching me on YouTube, but they were actually doing something on a piece of paper that they could then stick up on the fridge.”

If picture books ask a lot of children, they also often demand an unusual act of trust from the adults who create them. “I think an author and an illustrator need to share a similar sense of things, a sense of humour, a sense of drama,” says Blake. “But it is better if their views of things are not exactly the same; one needs to complement the other.”

When illustrating someone else’s work, the first thing Blake does is scrutinise the manuscript. “First of all, I need to get to know the characters as well as possible and imagine what they look like,” he says. “After that, it’s a question of finding suitable moments that will attract the reader but not anticipate the writer. For instance, there is one dramatic moment in Roald Dahl’s Matilda where the dreadful Miss Trunchbull hits Bruce Bogtrotter over the head with a plate. I showed her raising the plate in the air over the unfortunate boy, leaving the dramatic conclusion to Roald himself.”

This is a skill in itself. Maxwell Oginni illustrated My Rice Is Best, which was published last year and picked up a glut of award nominations. However, he comes from an animation background, where every I can’t speak for other authors, but the moment I first receive artwork from my illustrators (Nicola Slater for picture books, Vincent Batignole for chapter books) is often the moment where a story starts to feel more like a book. Both of them delight in adding background details – shopfronts, references, unimpressed background characters – that give the stories a richness they would otherwise lack. And they still surprise. “I love to add references to my favourite films, video games or manga,” says Batignole. “Plus I think there’s at least one Spice Girls reference in every book I’ve ever worked on.” This, it’s fair to say, is news to me.

“I don’t tell anyone about this, but I create a backstory for every character,” reveals Slater. “It might have no bearing on the story, but it helps to set the scene and their motivations, and it informs the way the book goes.”

“The best children’s writers know that they can leave lots of things to the illustrator,” explains Nick Sharratt, who has illustrated books for Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson. “Sometimes you’ve got to let the pictures do their job.”

A much more high-stakes author-illustrator relationship is the one that exists between Lydia Corry and Sally Gardner. This is because Gardner is Corry’s mum. Although they worked together on the gorgeous Tindims series, it wasn’t always the case. “When I was a lot younger I illustrated a tiny picture on the front of her book I, Coriander, and she really didn’t like it,” Corry says. “Now she has the painting in her house, but she was so attached to the story, and the visual thing was all in her head. So you do get nervous about whether or not it’s what the author wants.”

One way to assuage these nerves is to do everything yourself. There are no end of authors who illustrate their own work, allowing them a level of control over the finished product that the rest of us will never experience.

Best known for his Bunny v Monkey series, Jamie Smart loves that this approach leaves less space for reader misinterpretation, especially when making a comic. “I’m literally saying: ‘Here is this character, here is this joke, here is this bit of story,’ and it’s all laid out for you to see,” he says.

But even author-illustrators have their limits of control. “When you publish a book, you are giving it up completely,” says Debi Gliori, creator of classics including No Matter What. “You can’t stand behind people and go, ‘I think you should slow down,’ or ‘I think you should read that bit in a squeaky voice.’” Although illustrations can be used to almost any end, nearly everyone I speak to returns, sooner or later, to the same essential quality: joy. “I am very serious about being silly,” says Hendra, seriously. “Humour is so underestimated, especially for children. But if you arm a child with a love of being silly, it’s like a survival skill.” And this is a theme that runs across many of the illustrators I spoke to. Sarah Horne, who has illustrated books for Sam Copeland and Gianna Pollero, sees her job as “getting some silliness and joy into books”, while Smart’s wild energy makes him want to “stretch all the characters out and push them out of the panels”. McIntyre says that one of the most talked about details in her Adventuremice books is a picture of a character “sitting on the toilet, with a tiny poo floating into space. That doesn’t really need words.”

But even silliness takes craft. When Sue Hendra is finished with a book she will read it over and over from different viewpoints – a child, a teacher, a knackered parent – to make sure the rhythm is correct. Lauren Child tinkers with her books right up until her deadline. “I’ve just delivered a picture book, and we were still taking words out right up until the last minute,” she says.

Rob Biddulph does the same, removing any words that the pictures can communicate more clearly. “I write the story as a poem, so the tendency is to put everything that you want to happen in that story into the verse,” he says. “But an illustration will get the exact intention of the story across. Pictures paint a thousand words, as they say.”

The opening of the Quentin Blake Centre is a great indication that we have come a long way in recognising our incredible history of illustration, and the mountains of talent we have produced. But there is still a way to go. “Did you know that, unlike writers, illustrators still have no easily accessible sales data?” asks McIntyre. “While Julia Donaldson is a quantifiably bestselling author, Axel Scheffler doesn’t have any numbers for their books together. He doesn’t carry any of that sales data with him. This has a huge trickle-down effect on how illustrators are perceived.”

One thing that resonated throughout these interviews was how much of a privilege it is to be able to create books for children. For some illustrators, it offers an opportunity to tap back into the memory of bedtime stories with their children. For others, it’s the thrill of seeing a book that has been worn out through sheer use. Some view illustration as an intellectual challenge, others as a way of providing clarity on the state of the world. But all of them agreed on one thing: underestimate children at your peril.

The last question I ask Blake is why characters made for children have the potential to stick in the public consciousness for decades. “We feel we can relate to them,” he answers. “In a sense, they become our friends.”

• The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opens on 5 June. qbcentre.org.uk