Chris Riddell

And all we do to commune is open the pages of a book and start to read these hieroglyphics, and someone's personality comes through, or someone's voice enters ours.

And I think principally what I enjoy doing is creating a visual counterpoint to that,

um particularly in children's books where one knows that the reader is on this wonderful reading journey and as an illustrator what i love doing is is sort of interpreting the voice of the book in a sense in a visual way and providing a counterpoint what i never want to do is get in the way of the words you know the words are the most important thing and my job as an illustrator is to um

to accompany it in some way.

And I always think of myself a bit, you know, another sort of analogy, as a sort of, you know, the pianist who accompanies the soloist, you know, at a concert.

You don't want the pianist to sort of suddenly go off on a riff and take centre stage.

You want to hear the soloist.

And for me, the words are the soloist.

I wish I had thought that deeply about it, Kate, because in a way, I just love sharpening a pencil.

You know, that in itself is a joy to me.

And what I do when I'm drawing live is I work with a document camera that projects the page in front of me onto a screen so that the audience can see it sort of very clearly.

And sharpening the pencil, I suppose, is my warm up, you know, is a way of sort of saying, right now, pencil sharpened, I can start to draw.

The performance side of it is great fun because for me, drawing is a verb rather than a noun.

It's not the drawing as object at the end of it that's important.

It's the doing that's important.

And when I draw live for an audience, I think everybody knows that there's no safety net.

I'm just off I go drawing.

I can't take too long over something, particularly if I'm trying to illustrate a poem as it's being read.

And so there's a sort of acceptance in a way that what one is seeing is an action rather than the end result.

The end result is less important than the actual doing of it.