And when my dreams start to become the dreams of the characters in the book, when their reality becomes a part of my subconscious, when I can live in their landscape, when I put on a little red cape with a hood and tie the red ribbons under my chin, then I know what to do with my pictures. I feel like an actor preparing for a role when I m working on a book. I need to get inside my characters and begin to think and feel their thoughts and feelings before I can succeed in my illustrations. In order to do that, I have to become them. I often get up from my drawing board and act out scenes. . . .
Illustration is theatre.
You have to pick a setting, create characters, costumes, lighting. You even have to think about weather and how the weather creates mood. I often think I should have been a film director, because I see the imagery of a story in my mind as a film first, from which I pick out particular frames that I want to illustrate. I don t use models, I think about friends and relatives when I create a character. He was the woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood.