As wondrous as language is for capturing the imagination, pictures in all their glory, whether it be photography, illustrations, paintings or graphic design are what make our imaginations soar. When presented together with language, imagination becomes infinite in a finite physical world. This applies to adults and children alike and I have no doubt our physical world sorely needs imaginative relief to re-discover the mystic embedded in our existence.
The biggest perplexity of being a children’s picture book author is my utter ineptitude at drawing. Oh, how I envy the plethora of amazing talent I see in picture books. Of course, when writing, I can imagine what the scene and characters look like, but we all have different perceptions of the language we are reading and how I see them, is not necessarily how you, the reader will see them, which of course, is okay. But how do you excite the mind of a child without pictures? How do you excite an authors mind without pictures?
Hence my writing process has long been stifled and given no end of frustration … until I discovered self-publishing and Pixabay.com. Pixabay is a platform provided by artists of all genre, to showcase some of their work in high quality and provide it free for commercial use. Without them, my writing and publishing would have stayed dormant to my grave. So this blog is specifically to thank those wonderfully creative people who have spurred my imagination to new depths and heights, by showing me theirs.
My method? I browse Pixabay with a theme in mind, for example, ‘fantasy’ … I’ll spend hours scrolling through the pictures and download the ones that specifically appeal to me, then write the story around them. This process has freed my imagination to visit places I never thought could exist. I am eternally grateful to those artists, without them, I would not have accomplished publishing eight children’s picture books in two months. I am awestruck by your work and I humbly thank you for changing my life.
Rainey Leigh Seraphine 