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Laura, how has your relationship with your family influenced your work?
LC: My daughter Lilly is my daily inspiration. She's older now, but she is each and every character in my books - the clothes, the sand art, the Scotch tape, the imagination, the concoctions. Thank goodness, even at "cool" thirteen, she still lapses now and then into the delightful obliviousness of childhood - mismatched clothes, toy kits, and of course watching Nickelodeon and Disney on TV.
What do you do when you begin to illustrate a new book, and what is it about Jamie's texts that inspires you most?
LC: I sit with my editor and we come up with a big vision for the book. We discuss what the text is about on many levels and we figure out how to clearly convey with illustrations ideas that are not readily apparent in the text.
Once we decide on the elements of the big picture, I begin to create the character for each book. We decide if the character should be a boy or a girl - in I'm Gonna Like Me, I had two characters to create - and I come up with what the kid's hobbies are, what fills his/her room, what he/she wears - all the little details that make a character distinctive. Then I roughly thumbnail little spreads/page ideas. And then finally I take those vague ideas to a bigger page, creating a fully realized sketch dummy. Finally I ink and color, only when we've determined in sketch form what each page will look like.
What inspires me in these books is that Jamie's ideas are big and "been-there," either herself or through her children, or through her compassion and empathy. Her texts are touching, funny, and wonderfully conveyed. They allow me a subtext of little ideas. Her books address all kinds of kid and adult issues in a way that comes from remembering what it was like to be a kid. And her books rhyme! When I began reading to my daughter, it was the rhyme and rhythm of a book's text that held her attention, and mine. |
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