Leading children and adult book illustrators took part in an interactive session at Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), called “Drawing a Story” to discuss the importance of text and colour in illustrations, as well as the growing trend of adult drawing books.Moderator, Mohammed Hamida asked the panel consisting of author and illustrator Jeff Mack, Freelance Illustrator Kerby Rosanes and painter and photographer Salah Al Mur about the importance of text in Illustration or picture books for children.Jeff demonstrated with his book “Good New Bad News”, which has only four words in it, and said: “Text comes secondary, as a picture is most of the complete story unless it requires some text to convey specific details of expressions. Pictures carry a story in them. “Good News Bad News”, had many dialogue bubbles, but many of them were redundant as pictures could convey the story. The expression “Ah!” in a story can describe both excitement and pain, the syllable depends on the picture for its correct meaning.”
Kerby said that for an illustrator working on projects for publishers or authors, there is no text involved in drawing but textual directions are the raw material for drawing. Whereas Salah is of the opinion that picture and text complement each other in presenting a complete story for readers.He said: “Though pictures speak a lot about comprehension, it also depends on the person looking at the book, so text used in an illustration presents the needed explanations. Drawing characters and a setting that suits the culture of your readers’ lives makes it easy to understand and relate.”Speaking on the selection of colours in illustrations for children, Jeff said that with the options to undo colours in computerised illustrations sometimes it becomes a huge challenge, but colour selection is a very important factor when you are drawing for children, you have to see things through their eyes. Salah said that black and white can summarise all the colours; to use or not to use colour should be decided depending on the theme of the story.
Answering the audience query on how to draw creative illustrations, Jeff said that the best advice would be to throw away your eraser. He said: “Sometimes you are obsessed to make a drawing perfect, that it results in ruining the fun of drawing it in the first place. Everybody has got their own style of drawing. I also scribble a lot and draw ideas from them later when I work on story.”According to Kerby to be a good artist or illustrator one has to draw what makes them happy. Whereas Salah said that to succeed as an illustrator, artists should find the uniqueness around them and explore the culture they live and make strokes and colours their passion.