Cecilia Yung: Everything You Ever Wanted to Ask an Art Director…

There was a full room for Cecilia Yung’s session in which the Penguin Young Readers Group art director fielded questions and offered advice.

She told the audience that there are five people in her department. She works very closely with printers to get what she wants in terms of achieving the specific vision of picture book artists. There are three components of her job: work with artists, work with her staff, and work with printers (which she demonstrating by showing several takes of a spread from a Tomie de Paola book whose color she worked on perfecting through slight adjustments in the inks).

In responds to a question about what to do when you get a positive response to a postcard mailing, she said when art directors (or editors) show a positive interest, they’re seeing a quality in your work, but they’re not ready to use you; they’ll keep an eye on you. She advises illustrators to keep updating their work—don’t keep sending the same postcard sample. They keep postcards on file—and they’ll keep building that file as you send new images.

Very often, she says, editors are the ones who find an illustrator. She doesn’t have to love the work of every illustrator she’s working with—she can find some qualities of the work she appreciates. When working with illustrators, she doesn’t think in terms of a book, but a career.

“I can’t make you brilliant,” she said, “But I can teach you how to put a picture book together.” Whomever you work with, she says, should be asking you a lot of questions, not doing all the talking.

And she said that illustrators have to accept that original art is original art and reproduction is reproduction—it’s never going to be exactly the same.