Where do ideas come from?
The first ideas come from reading the text very carefully. Terry Denton once said to me something along the lines of, “first understand what the author is on about – and respect that – but the text should allow for the illustrations to stretch the story in a surprising way”. Terry would actually have said this in a much more entertaining way. I agree with this approach, and it sounds pretty obvious. But one author once complained to me that she didn’t think her illustrators read her stories… “they just draw what they ….well want to”.
