Chris Gall

Illustrator Chris Gall was featured on the cover of the last SCBWI Bulletin (which I’ve obviously been reading quite a bit) and I thought I’d share some thoughts on composition from the incumbent interview. When asked what the most essential elements in an illustration are Gall responds that foremost is content--if the content in and of itself is not interesting then the illustration is going to be unsuccessful regardless of technique. Second to that, though, and nearly as critical, is composition:

“Bad composition leads your eye all over the place; you don’t know where to look first. But in a good composition there’s no fat. There’s nothing missing, and there’s nothing that needs to be taken away.”

I try to think of this whenever I’m drawing (on my own--not professionally), but I almost never think of it when I’m looking at someone else’s art, particularly in a picture book. How much more, then, would we appreciate an illustrator’s work if we remained a bit more conscious of it while moving through a picture book, even if reading to a child? I haven’t tried this, but at a point you could even start talking about it with the child. Angles and vectors and sight lines and perspective and all of those wonderful elements--you don’t have to understand them very technically, I don’t expect, to introduce them to a three- to five-year-old.

Turning our attention to Gall’s art, he says that he draws in pencil on tracing paper. Those sketches get engraved onto a piece of Claybord which then is scanned into his computer as vector art. The combination of etching and vector- rather than pixel-based art explains the strong lines in his work (or so I would think, as a hobbyist). The colors are therefore all added in Illustrator (not Photoshop), never with actual paint any more. Here's one I like:

The results have a very solid presence, with a bold but nuanced palate--this isn't an exact parallel, but it makes me think somewhat of a Roy Lichtenstein for kids. The best resource on his work is his own website, which features a biography and list of published works. To really get into pictures, the ispot has a great gallery of his work, for adults as well as kids.

His newest book is There’s Nothing to Do on Mars . (Here's a quick review.) Stay tuned for the book Dinotrucks--what little boy wouldn’t want to cross trucks and dinosaurs, after all-coming out next spring.