The Artist's Magazine - November 2008 - Imagining Wondrous Worlds (Page 40)

assigning students to draw from life, then go to an empty studio to draw the absent model from memory.

When I visited him in his studio, he illustrated this aesthetic flexibility with a story about the baseball pitcher Greg Maddux, who said that he didn’t want the batter to remember him or the mix of his pitches. In that spirit, Hillenbrand would rather you remember not the illustrator but “the engaging characters, landscapes so rich you slip into them, and a story so well told that you’re drawn to the following page.”

Each book begins with a myriad of tiny thumbnail sketches, followed by drawn vignettes that go up on a slanted board over his computer. (See sketch for Traveling to Tondo, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991 (below) and for The Tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Holiday House, 1996 (on page 39)). There you can trace the evolution of a book from sketch to enlargement, composition to page spread and on and on—until the illustrations are ready to be scanned into the computer (see steps leading up to this stage on page 42). Hillenbrand works with a variety of materials: pencil, crayons, colored pencil, ink markers, watercolor and pastel. “After I’m happy with my sketches,” he explains, “I scan them into my computer, where I can make them bigger or smaller and arrange them on the page with the text. I can move

the text around to see where it fits best. When I like what I see, I print out the pages, making a book dummy/storyboard. I’ll then forward a copy of the storyboard to the publisher for review. A phone call will follow, during which all the ideas for the book will be poured over. I’ll factor agreed-upon changes into the revised dummy, and another review will take place. If all is well, I’ll begin making the final art.”

When composing a two-page spread, the artist is at his best. Frequently, these spreads use a dynamic diagonal composition that sweeps across the page in a graphic crescendo. These sweeps are not only used for waves or landscapes, but can feature the looming monsters towering over smaller figures. Another Hillenbrand illustrative trademark is a subplot or series of secondary events. In Starting from Sketch: Inside the Picture Book with Hillenbrand ( Thurber House, 2000), he describes these events as “talking pictures,” which are extra things—like recurring balloons—that readers can search for in a favorite book. In the published notes to his books, Hillenbrand often discusses the many techniques he’s used as well as his research sources. Coyote and the Fire Stick (Gulliver Books, 1996), written by Barbara Diamond Goldin, is a Pacific North-west Indian tale set in a stark, even harsh landscape.

www.artistsmagazine.com ■ November 2008

“For Traveling to Tondo, I used a m echani-cal pencil on newsprint (above). I cut and reassembled the drawings to make a tighter composition. Using a standard copy machine, I enlarged and printed the art on brown craft paper, then used oil and oil pastels”(at right).