Children's Book Illustrators -- Kids and Creativity
This is a companion story to this one; the bios of the illustrators we spoke to are here.
Krommes, who was drawn to book illustration when she started reading to her own children, finds her kids a helpful first audience. Though sometimes they are more willing than other times to give mom’s work a look.
“They’ve seen so much of it over the years that they’re not that interested. I have to sometimes give them a quarter to look at it and give me an opinion,” she said. “But they love when they’re in the pictures”
But not everyone is so interested in hearing what the kids have to say. Notoriously, many people who work in the children’s book industry do not have little ones themselves, nor do they want them.
Smith cites Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, in addition to himself, as not having much to do with children. “I guess maybe because they’re grown up kids themselves, [it’s] too much competition.”
Jeff Kinney, author of the Wimpy Kid series, does have a young child, a kindergartener, but doesn’t yet include him in the process.
“When my wife reads the book to him, she does a lot of censoring… I think you need to be in at least third grade to understand the humor in the book,” he said. “When I created 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was writing for adults, but my publisher thought that the series would be a hit with kids. I continue to write for adults and cross my fingers that the jokes don’t go over kids’ heads.”
