Visual Art & Literary Creativity from Spain.

[Cosimah2o]

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A picture book is an art form that combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format. A true picture book tells the story both with words and pictures. Most often, the author and illustrator are two different people.

I would like to talk about my own experience. For me, the illustration world has opened a new horizon for the literary creativity.

Each writter has his leitmotif when he wrote a novel or short story. But when I thought about doing a picture book, I didn't know that I would learn to develop a visual creativity. I am used to working alone, but a picture book need illustrators.

I contacted with a Studio of Graphic's designers, a young illustrators with a great talent and very professionalism, ( we must support to our young graphic designers) and they gave shape and sense ( the skeleton) of our project. Well, I did the screenplay for each scene ( I did a logical pattern of facts like chapters with its interelated events and actions), then illustrators worked under these directives for conceptualizing sketchs, backgrounds, characters, but respecting my corrections as literary author..

The fact, the illustrators works are hand-drawn using ordinary graphite pencils on cartridge paper or with its specific single-weight-paper. Besides, they use a range of painting techniques susch as: acrylic, watercolor, gouache, ink coloured pencils, wax...
Although everything is hand-made, working digitally with preliminary drawing, is indispensable above all, with some Colors or certain textures or effects.

Finally, when they finished 20 illustrations (we already had our storyboard), we realized ourselves that all pictures was so dynamics that our short story could be understood without text . (Oh, that reminds me some works from Shaun Tan or Jimmy Liao ).
In fact some picture books, has two type of storylines: the one hand, pictures and the other, text. The magic item are two plots device in the same story.