During the course of this research, I learned that illustration can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For some, it is a way of complementing a story. For others, it is the story. For the illustrator, it is their artistic medium. For the reader, it is the experience. I had to look at a rather sizable number of picture books before being able to settle on the two author-illustrators that I chose for this assignment. In the end, they both caught my attention because they were so different from the other illustrators I looked at. Jeffers combines unique materials to create blended images and beautiful pages. Feeney has a very simple and clean style that makes the colors she does include in her illustrations pop and really come to life. Not long after starting to research the two illustrators, it became very easy to identify their work. This strong and recognizable style is what drew me into using Oliver Jeffers and Tatyana Feeney for this project.
As the research progressed, I started to notice more similarities between the two illustrators’ styles, despite their final products looking entirely different. These similarities went beyond using some of the same mediums. Once I started looking into their backgrounds, it was very interesting to discover that Jeffers and Feeney share such a similar history. The fact that each spent so much time on the east coast of the United States and Ireland had to mean something. By the end of the research, it became apparent that each illustrator was influenced by this unique combination of American and Irish culture.
As a whole, it became obvious very quickly that a lot more goes into illustrating a picture book than I previous thought. I had always imagined that an author wrote the story and handed it off to an illustrator to add pictures. While that is the case with some books, it is not the method that Jeffers and Feeney follow. For these two illustrators, the pictures tell the story as much as the words. They play on elements of visual literacy to strengthen the overall message they are conveying to the reader. To try this process out for myself, I actually attempted to write a children’s book. It was shortly into the storyboard process that I really discovered how difficult creating a picture book is. In the end, I had to work with a friend who has a strong art background to get past the many stumbling blocks I encountered. This gave me a whole new respect when I see a book with a singular author-illustrator.
As the research progressed, I started to notice more similarities between the two illustrators’ styles, despite their final products looking entirely different. These similarities went beyond using some of the same mediums. Once I started looking into their backgrounds, it was very interesting to discover that Jeffers and Feeney share such a similar history. The fact that each spent so much time on the east coast of the United States and Ireland had to mean something. By the end of the research, it became apparent that each illustrator was influenced by this unique combination of American and Irish culture.
As a whole, it became obvious very quickly that a lot more goes into illustrating a picture book than I previous thought. I had always imagined that an author wrote the story and handed it off to an illustrator to add pictures. While that is the case with some books, it is not the method that Jeffers and Feeney follow. For these two illustrators, the pictures tell the story as much as the words. They play on elements of visual literacy to strengthen the overall message they are conveying to the reader. To try this process out for myself, I actually attempted to write a children’s book. It was shortly into the storyboard process that I really discovered how difficult creating a picture book is. In the end, I had to work with a friend who has a strong art background to get past the many stumbling blocks I encountered. This gave me a whole new respect when I see a book with a singular author-illustrator.