I was really nervous the first time I commissioned artwork to go with one of my stories.  I didn't really know where to start, other than the tags on tumblr.

I was looking for somebody who could use my source photos as a starting point to create the characters, and I was looking for a reasonably realistic style, rather than cartoon representations… and other than that I didn’t know what I was doing!

 

The first artist I worked with was Fie, who went on to produce all of the artwork which accompanies the stories before Puckdrop.

 

I hadn't realised, before that first commission, how little I actually describe the characters in the stories. Partly this is because I tend to write from a fairly tight character point of view perspective, and nobody ever really thinks about how other people look in words.

For example, when I first wrote this I was sitting in a coffee shop. There was a lady drinking coffee on the other side of the room, and I identified her as "an old lady with a dog". I wasn’t thinking to myself that she'd got short white hair that was clearly permed, or that she was wearing a black cardigan. I could see that, but it wasn’t running through my head in specific words.

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The other part of it is that a lot of the time it doesn't actually matter what a character looks like. It doesn't usually matter if his hair is blond or brown, if his teeth are a bit uneven. So if it matters, I'll mention it somewhere, and if it doesn't matter then the reader can picture that character however they like and that's fine with me.

However - in order to commission artwork, I need to know what somebody looks like, and I need to be able to communicate that to the artist. The first piece I commissioned was a picture of Deets and Godric, and the only thing I could tell Fie about Deets was that he was blond.

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These days I have a whole document put together before I start approaching artists, with character photos, notes on the surroundings, excerpts from the story and sometimes additional scenes that I’ve written to give more information on the precise moment the picture represents, but it took a while to predict what kind of things an artist would like to know!