Quentin Blake

I think Quentin Blake was the first illustrator whom I really studied. He's best-known, especially here in the States, for illustrating many of Roald Dahl's books, but he's done covers or interiors for literally hundreds of books, from classic literature to picture books he wrote himself.

It's the quality of Quentin Blake's line that has compelled me to spend so many hours with my nose an inch away from the pages of his books. His drawings are loose, expressive, and full of energy. They look as though he dashed them off without half-thinking. That's not quite accurate--he uses a light box--but it takes a practiced hand to make it look both exactly right and easy as pie. And as many illustrators know, it's a hard thing to maintain the energy of your sketches in your finals.

Quentin Blake is British; although he's merely well-known here, he's famous there. He was appointed the first Children's Laureate, from 1999-2001. The Library of Congress recently invented a similar position, which is called the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Ambassador, not Laureate, because laureate is a tricky word for Americans and because children's books here are a matter of civic duty rather than artistic achievement. Anyway, that person is currently Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Stories and many other hilarities. But I digress!

Many British illustrators--Simon James, Polly Dunbar, Tony Ross, Charlotte Voake--seem to have taken technical and stylistic cues from Quentin Blake, so much so that I think of their work as distinctly British. Whether Quentin Blake is the progenitor of this look or whether he and others are responding to something else entirely, I do not know.

Quentin Blake's website is a treat for both readers and illustrators. It's full of his work, of course, but it's also got photos of his studio, an explanation of his process, and even a short film showing him at the drawing board.