Please give a big welcome to Meredith Johnson. A prolific illustrator with 100 or so picture books to her name. Her bio on Picture Book goes like this:
“So do you have kids?” the editors ask, and Meredith always says “Yep, they’re my scrap.” Picture scrap, that is. Twenty-three years of illustrating children’s books and she’s not out of material, yet. Meredith lives nestled in the foothills of La Cañada, California.
Thanks for joining us today, Meredith.

When did you get started illustrating for children? What did you do before?

I did my first books in 1985. I was working as an art director in an advertising firm, Olgivy & Mather in LA. I simply did books nights and weekends for years.

Tell us a little bit about the recent books you illustrated, The Princess Twins and the Abby and Tess Pet Sitters series.

The Princess Twins and the Tea Party is a series of 4 easy readers for Zondervan, full color, 2 little girls as princesses sort of in the Middle Ages. Goldfish Don’t Take Bubble Baths (Abby and Tess Pet-Sitters) is a series of 8 chapter books. Each features a different adventure in pet sitting a different exotic pet. Each book has about 12 B&W illustrations for each chapter. These were fun to do because the stories are zaney.

What are you working on right now? Do you have any other books or art projects you’d like to talk about?

I’m working on an author’s self published picture book now, about a little girl and manners. I’m working with the book designer, a close friend,  all the way though, so it should be a very cute book. I’m also working on two easy reader picture books and a little bit of educational work in between.

Do you illustrate full time? If not, what else do you do?

I have been illustrating full time for the past 12 years, since getting out of full time agency work.

Your signature style has been consistent for years. Have you ever wanted to experiment with something different?

I do have  a signature style, and it would be nice to experiment, but I manage to stay really busy, so I stick to what I am comfortable with, and what I’m hired for.

When you illustrate a picture book how do you decide what scenes and details to draw?

When I first get the manuscript, I read it over several times to get the ebb and flow, and the feel for what the lead character should look like. Then I do really rough pencils, just thinking on paper. The pictures are meant to tell the story as much and more than the words, so I suppose it’s my way of “telling” what the author wrote.

When illustrating picture books do you include a visual storyline not mentioned by the text or include animals or people you know?

I always show more than the words show. I just about always add a pet as a sidekick, for more action in the pictures. A well written picture book is sparse on description, to let the pictures to be a grand show. A different illustrator would have a much different take on the same text.

Can you explain your art process?
My process is pencil or pen line, and markers on bond paper. This comes from years and years of storyboarding when I worked as an art director. I worked on Mattel Barbie commercials for 22 years, and every commercial had to be storyboarded several times. I was also doing 4 to 6 picture books a year then, so my most comfortable fit was marker made to look as much as possible like water color. My web site is meredithjohnson.net

Do you use models/source pictures or do you draw from your memory/imagination?

I don’t use models, but I do use Google to look up visuals of things I don’t have a good working knowledge of, like animals I’m not familiar with, things like that. Mostly I draw from memory. Because I draw children so much, I keep catalogs or magazines once in a while to use for ideas about the latest of what kids wear, and what they do with their hair.

If you could be anything other than an artist, what would you be?

I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than books, but publishing is getting smaller and leaner, so maybe I’d like to travel more instead of working all the time at a desk.

Is there a children’s book illustrator whose work you gravitate towards in the bookstore now?

The books and illustrators I admire are Carl Larsson, Arthur Rackham, Rien Poortvliet, Lisbeth Zwerger, Trina Schart Hyman, Sergio Martinez, Shirley Hughes, Hilary Knight, to name a few.  At bookstores now I get overwhelmed at the lovely art everywhere….there’s a lot of competition out there!

Thank you so much for taking time out of your hectic schedule to give us a peek into your illustrator’s life.

I should be getting myself off to bed, but I felt a need to share. Gods know why. This internet blogging stuff is sort of addictive.

I have been working on the final art for Watchers all year. Getting from rough idea to final page is a long process, one that completely baffles my accountant husband.

He doesn’t understand why I just can’t sit down and paint an entire book right on the watercolor paper. Maybe there is an artist out there who can, but I haven’t met him/her yet. All the artists I know do preliminary sketches and rough drafts. With a picture book like Watchers, there is also the thumbnails, sort of like an outline in really rough form. If I bothered to show anyone my thumbnails, I sincerely doubt anyone but the most imaginative could see anything but a huge scribble. Some of the thumbnails have a word or two just to help jog my memory as to what I was thinking.

I draw all the thumbnails on a single sheet of paper. Watchers is a relatively short book, thumbnail speaking. There are 12 main pages, a cover and a back cover. I sketched several series of thumbnails until I had the page turn right. That was done last August. I’ve spent the intervening month from then until early December reworking the story. It’s taken me 3 YEARS to get it right.

With a picture book, there are relatively few words, and as fashion will have it, they are getting fewer all the time. Back in the 60s a typical picture book had between 1000-1500 words. Now-a-days the typical picture book has between 500-1000 words. Consider that this blog entry has more words than that and you get the idea of how hard it is to make every word count. There just isn’t any room for a word which isn’t carrying its full weight. But back to the art.

After the thumbnails come the rough pencil sketches. These are where main details and composition are blocked in, kind of like putting up the studs for a wall in a room. These have to all work in harmony so that anything put on top of them will be true. So once the rough pencil sketches are done, they need to be approved. Most often they come back with comments and suggested changes. Of the 15 pieces of art in this book, only one came back “good as it is, don’t change a thing.”

After all the comments are in and major changes are made and they are approved, I move on to the tight pencil sketches. Here is when I add tiny details, such as fingers, patterns and make the changes suggested in the rough stage. Once these tight sketches are approved, then I transfer the approved art onto watercolor paper. I have a huge light table that I lay the tight pencil on, then lay the watercolor paper over and draw the final art lines onto the paper to ready it for coloring.

So far I have drawn each image 4 times. Now I have to go back to thumbnails, only this time instead of sketches they are color and value studies. Really rough splashes of color are made in small blocks so I can work out all the details of highlight and shadow, center of interest and all that technical stuff that artists do to make a beautiful piece of art. I won’t bore you with the details. I may do multiple color studies before I even get to the big art.

There are special issues when working on art for a picture book, the biggest among them is that the characters in the book must look consistent from start to finish. So must the clothing and the backgrounds and the supporting cast and props. Usually this issue is worked out in the rough pencil stage. I usually make sure of this by locking the cats in the basement and laying out all the full sized pieces on the living room floor before I paint them. I fix an eye there, a lip there and make an ear bigger there. Details on clothing are double checked. Does the shirt have the same cuff size and collar shape all the way through? You’d be surprised at how a misplaced pencil mark can change a peter pan collar to a boat neck collar instead.

And I wonder why making a book takes so long…

Then I have to take all this precious art and drive up to St. Louis and hand it to someone who will convert it into digital format. And hope a clumsy technician doesn’t spill his coffee on it or drop it on the floor where someone steps on it. Both things have happened to me in the past. Not recently though, thank Gods.

That reminds me, I need to order more pencils…