Illustrators’ Sketchbooks: Inside the Creative Processes of 60 Iconic and Emerging Artists

Salisbury (Children’s Picturebooks), a professor of illustration at the Cambridge School of Art in England, rifles through the sketchbooks of 60 magazine and book illustrators from the 1700s to the present in this captivating collection. In entries that combine brief biographies with lush color reproductions, Salisbury spotlights Quentin Blake’s wispily scribbled figures; Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) prints of animals and humans rendered “with an exquisite combination of poetry... and anatomical accuracy”; and the “intensely observed studies of wild birds” that filled Charles Tunnicliffe’s (1901–1979) “legendary sketchbooks” (“You take a sketchbook out and get as much of the live bird in it as you possibly can, and when it flies away... you go home and have another sketchbook, where you try to memorize what you have seen,” Tunnicliffe explained of his meticulous process). Elsewhere, readers encounter Beatrix Potter’s (1866–1943) watercolors and Georges Prosper Remi’s (better known as Hergé) (1907–1983) sketches for The Adventures of Tintin. Enriched by some illustrators’ insights into their creative process (for Shaun Tan, sketching is “thinking out loud”), Salisbury’s survey makes abundantly clear that there’s “a great deal more to an artists’ effortless-looking final image than meets the eye,” and that what lies beneath can sometimes be even more fascinating than what ends up on the page. Amateur artists will be inspired. (Oct.)