Recipes for the perfect picture-book blends of writer and illustrator

With the right personal alchemy, a writer and illustrator working together can produce storytelling gold

The best illustrated books add up to a great deal more than the sum of their parts. Alchemic interaction between the right words and the right images creates a soaring sense of departure, or total presence in the world of the story. Giggles are amplified into guffaws. Readers are wrung dry of tears and left, desiccated and snuffling, in a grey world of snotty tissue. Bafflingly, though, illustration is often still seen as childish, something to be swiftly moved past – “picture books are for babies”, “yes, but comics aren’t proper books” – en route to maturity, the realm of 8pt fonts and tundras of frozen text.

But this approach favours only the most resolute, confident young bookworms. Big, thick books, with text-dense pages largely unrelieved by images, are intimidating to many children, often representing a battle lost before it’s begun. And dynamic author-illustrator duos, striking the best kind of sparks off each other, enrich everyone, at any age or reading level.

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