The books behind the Children's Book Workshop — and why the best picture books are a masterclass in everything art school forgets to teach.
If you want to learn how to tell a story in pictures — how to make a single image carry feeling, how to leave space for the reader, how to say the most with the least — don't start with a fine-art monograph. Start with the picture-book shelf.
People underestimate picture books because they're "for children." That's exactly backwards. A great picture book has to do, in thirty-two pages and a few hundred words, what a novel gets four hundred pages to do. Every image has to earn its place. Every page-turn has to land. There is nowhere to hide. It is the most disciplined visual storytelling there is, and the masters of it are some of the finest illustrators alive.
This is the shelf I keep coming back to — the canon behind the Children's Book Workshop. If you only ever study these four, you'd learn more about picture-making than most degree courses teach.
Shaun Tan — the master of the wordless and the strange
If you read one thing on this list, read The Arrival — a wordless graphic novel about migration told entirely in sepia images, no text at all. It will rearrange how you think about pictures. Tan proves that images alone can carry grief, wonder, displacement and hope, with a precision words can't reach.
What he teaches: atmosphere and the unsaid. Tan builds worlds that are uncanny but emotionally exact — The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, Tales from the Inner City. He shows you that a picture's job isn't to illustrate the words; it's to do the work the words can't. Study him for mood, for restraint, and for the courage to let an image be mysterious.
Jon Klassen — the genius of restraint and the deadpan
Klassen's hat books — I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat — are masterclasses in saying almost nothing. Muted palettes, tiny eye movements, vast areas of flat negative space, and a wit so dry it's almost subliminal. The drama happens in what's not drawn.
What he teaches: negative space and economy. Klassen will teach you that you don't need to fill the page. The empty space does the acting. A character's whole emotional state can live in the angle of two dot-eyes. And his page-turns — the gap between what we see and what we know — are a clinic in using the turn itself as a storytelling tool. For any painter who overworks, Klassen is the cure.
Quentin Blake — the line that breathes
Blake — Roald Dahl's illustrator, and Britain's first Children's Laureate — draws with a scratchy, dancing, seemingly careless line that is anything but careless. That looseness is hard-won. His figures are pure energy and feeling, and not a single mark is wasted.
What he teaches: gesture, energy, and the confident line. Blake is the great argument against fussiness. His drawings look like they were dashed off in seconds — and that liveliness is the point. He teaches you to chase the feeling of a figure rather than its accuracy, and to trust a loose, committed mark over a tight, timid one. Exactly the lesson I bang on about in watercolour: a confident wrong line beats a hesitant right one.
Oliver Jeffers — heart, humour, and handmade text
Jeffers — Lost and Found, The Day the Crayons Quit, Here We Are — pairs naïve, charming, painterly illustration with genuine emotional warmth and a wicked sense of humour. He also famously makes the hand-lettering part of the art, so the words and pictures feel like one made object.
What he teaches: warmth, voice, and integration. Jeffers shows that "simple" and "childlike" are not the same as easy — there's enormous craft under that apparent naïvety. And he teaches the thing many illustrators miss: the text isn't a label stuck on top of the picture; type and image are one design. Study him for tone of voice and for treating the whole spread as a single composition.
The thread that connects them
Four very different artists, one shared lesson: say more with less, and let the reader do some of the work.
- Tan leaves out the words.
- Klassen leaves out the clutter.
- Blake leaves out the fuss.
- Jeffers leaves out the gap between word and image.
Every one of them trusts the reader. None of them over-explains. That restraint — knowing what to leave out — is the whole game, in picture books and in painting alike. It's the same instinct as putting the brush down before the wash is overworked.
How to actually study them
You don't study a picture book by reading it once. You study it like this:
- Read it for the story. Just enjoy it. Let it work on you.
- Read it again, slowly, for the pictures. What's in each image? More importantly — what's left out?
- Watch the page-turns. What does each turn reveal or withhold? The turn is the picture-book equivalent of a film cut, and the great ones use it on purpose.
- Cover the words. Does the story still hold? In the best books, mostly yes — and that tells you how much work the pictures are really doing.
- Copy a spread. Badly, in your own hand. You learn more redrawing one Klassen spread than reading ten articles about him.
This shelf is the foundation of the Children's Book Workshop — where we take these lessons and use them to build your own story in pictures. (I'm building one myself: a character called Princess Boucles, whose wild curly hair has a life of its own. More on that another day.) If making a picture book is on your list, this is where it starts — on the shelf, learning from the masters, before you draw a single page.