A Quote by Dick Bruna
I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.
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My goal with The Adventures of Captain Underpants was to invent a style which was almost identical to that of a picture book - in a novel format. So I wrote incredibly short chapters and tried to fill each page with more pictures than words. I wanted to create a book that kids who don't like to read would want to read.
The process for writing a picture book is completely different from the process of writing a chapter book or novel. For one thing, most of my picture books rhyme. Also, when I write a picture book I'm always thinking about the role the pictures will play in the telling of the story. It can take me several months to write a picture book, but it takes me several years to write a novel.
I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.
I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'
I never know if my picture is a good picture or a bad picture, because I'm not making pictures thinking of the public, I'm making pictures to realize myself.
Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!
It is, because you've got a nice picture, you want to put it up, and then you're like, 'Do I want this to go out in the press? Do I want them to run it and make a story surrounding that picture?' That's what I have to think of all the time.
I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.
It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards.
There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.
Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
I think of writing--particularly of writing picture books--as a kind of choreography. A picture book must have pace and movement and pattern. Pictures and text should, together, create the pattern, rather than simply run parallel.
The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.
You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)
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