I’m sure I’ve mentioned before (here & here!) that I LOVE Quentin Blake’s illustration style, he’s such an inspiration! I enjoyed reading this transcribed interview with Quentin on the Children In The Picture website, here’s a snippit that totally captures what it’s like to develop a character for a children’s picturebook :

“The process begins with immersing yourself in it. You have to learn the book really and the book, the text, is the guide to the illustrator, that’s my view of it, but of course you start off, once you have read it a few times, you start off by drawing and its very interesting because there are some descriptions of the characters but you don’t really know them until you have drawn them so you start drawing and you sort of find out what they are like by drawing…. It’s is a very strange experience because you start drawing, even with characters of my own, by the time I have got to the finished illustrations in the book, you can look at the early ones that you started doing and they are not the same and you think “Oh, it doesn’t look like him”. It is a very strange experience, you’ve got to know them like a person, but you have to do it by drawing.  You can think something but that does not really produce the appearance of that person and what they are like.” – Quentin Blake

“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.” – Banksy (British graffiti artist)

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” – Unknown

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas

“Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children - as long as you make them laugh as well” – Roald Dahl

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.” – Pablo Picasso

“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” – Claude Monet

“To me, it’s not work. When I draw and I write, I find it relaxing. It’s not like 9-to-5, where a man goes to a job and he isn’t really interested in the job. Luckily, I get paid for doing what I’d do for nothing.” – Bob Kane, Creator of Batman

“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing can’t become dated for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.” – Walt Disney