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May 4, 2006

Garden State Book Awards Luncheon

Really, this post should be titled "Paul Zelinsky: Best Speaker Ever".

Mr. Zelinsky, a Caldecott Medal winner and three-time Caldecott Honor winner, gave a talk on the subject of how changes in technology have changed the way he illustrates books.

Liberally peppered with self-deprecating humor and full of beautiful slides of the many iterations of artwork from draft to published book, this was one of the best lectures I have ever attended on any topic.

Technological advances have helped Mr. Zelinsky refine and improve the process of illustrating books, but just as these new tools have added layers of depth and sophistication to his work, they've also added layers of complication to the process.

For his first books, published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Zelinsky would painstakingly match up his watercolor and gouache illustrations with Pantone color sheets so that the printers could get the mixes of red, blue, and yellow correct.

Eventually, he moved on to photocopying his pencil drawings and using them as underdrawings for tweaks and changes over the course of drafting and perfecting the illustrations.

Soon, he purchased a scanner, and would scan the hand-drawn illustrations into Photoshop and manipulate them to get the color exactly right or change the size of certain elements, and then print them out on large sheets of watercolor paper to add to them.

The illustrations I photographed for this post are examples of the work Mr. Zelinsky created for the triumphant and giddily worded book Doodler Doodling -- it's worth noting that the reader reading and the flyer flying were both drawn live, while Mr. Zelinsky held a microphone in one hand, speaking all the while.

In spite of the complications arising from using increasingly sophisticated technology to create his artwork, sketching and perfecting the artwork digitally is very useful for correcting errors, like the time Mr. Zelinsky miscalculated the position of the book's gutter or left a distinguishing feature of a character out of a handful of illustrations.

Selected bibliography:
The Shivers In The Fridge, forthcoming October 2006
Doodler Doodling
Knick Knack Paddywhack
Awful Ogre's Awful Day
Rapunzel
The Wheels on the Bus
Rumplestiltskin

More photos from the GSBA Luncheon are available at NJLA's Flickr Photostream.

Posted by at May 4, 2006 12:58 PM

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