How to Navigate Your First Illustration Jobs
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@Lee-White @Will-Terry @Jake-Parker Your discussion about the nature of the monthly prompts here on SVS was really intriguing to me... Will's comment that the prompts might be less about responding to material and more about originality of the concept was a real eye-opener.
Yesterday, I attended my monthly SCBWI meeting (virtually on Zoom, of course) and Lauren Rille, Art Director at Simon & Schuster, led a workshop on the process of picture books. It hit me that there is a LOT of Art Director/Illustrator discussion that happens throughout the process of illustrating a text. She showed us several examples of books she's worked on through the Thumbnail/Conceptualization/Pagination/Book Map/Galley/Color process and how the illustrations changed from the beginning to the end, as well as the kinds of notes that came from her (as Art Director) and the Editor. She even shared with us some of her own challenges (I had no idea that book covers got voted on by 50-some-odd people--including salespeople!!--in giant Cover Meetings, and even though the Art Director might be confident in a particular cover it still might not get approved...). It taught me that even Art Directors can be absolutely sure about something and it will still get changed...
It was incredibly enlightening, and made me realize that no illustration happens in a vacuum. Picture Book making is a continual collaborative process with lots and lots of responsive iterations over and over again. And it also made me realize that the mini-responses you provide during the Critique Arenas are literally the beginnings of that kind of back-and-forth process. And that the process itself always makes things better in the end.
I'm wondering if perhaps there might be an opportunity to have a prompt with a bit more guided parameters--like making a black and white spot illustration specifically for a Middle Grade or Chapter Book, or three sequential images showing before/during/after, or a single character design expressing three different emotional expressions/poses/actions in a narrative, or illustrating around text on a page (like a Galley page), or working within a specific size or color palette. It seems to me these might be the kinds of things Art Directors might ask their Illustrators to do as part of the process. Lauren Rille gave us examples of each of these exercises that she had even her most seasoned, experienced pros do for her. And how they were important and helpful to the final work. It could be a really interesting experience to do a mini-deep-dive for a monthly prompt someday.
