Windows into Illustration: Sarah Massini

As part of the 80th anniversary of the original translation, Sarah Massini was asked to illustrate a new picture book version of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Her graceful, illustrations, wheeling back and forth from desert to stars, proved up to the task of retelling this much-loved classic. She explains her approach to illustration here.

My first response when asked to illustrate The Little Prince was complete euphoria. After all, it has been my favourite book since my early teens. I know it so well. I love it so much. I jubilantly signed on the dotted line… and then reality set in! How could I possibly even think of visually reinterpreting one of the most beloved and iconic books in the whole world? But then again, here was the opportunity of dreams….

The illustration I’ve decided to discuss is one that focusses on the two characters at the very heart of the story: the Prince and the Rose sitting on Asteroid B-612, with its three volcanoes (two live and one extinct, but you never know). It also happens to be the first illustration that I completed for the book. And I was really happy with how it turned out, which enabled me to tackle the rest of the book with a flim-flam of confidence – a belief that perhaps I could do this thing after all.

Illustrating a picture book is always a strict process of making THUMBNAIL SKETCHES, then DETAILED PENCIL ROUGHS, and finally FINAL ART.

Thumbnail Sketch

The Little Prince thumbnail sketch

I always love this stage as it’s so full of possibility. It’s speedy and energetic. And it’s all about the Cs: Composition, Characters, Colour, Content and Context. So with these, and also author Louise Greig’s beautiful and concise retelling in mind, I was propelled towards an obvious direction for this illustration. The Little Prince says, ‘How exquisite you are!’ and so I clearly needed to show him appearing to be enchanted by the Rose. And, prompted by ‘She shone a light… and Her beauty blazed like the flame of a lamp’, I created a compositional repetition of rounded shapes: the Asteroid and the Rose’s glowing light. And that light also helped provide the all-important focal point for the illustration, visually and also metaphorically, as The Little Prince is drawn inexorably into the Rose’s sphere.

Detailed Pencil Rough

Detailed pencil rough

This is an important stage not least because much of the detailed line-drawing ends up in the final art. I try to keep fluidity and vitality in my drawing. I always draw with a 2B pencil on layout paper- the right softness-of-lead upon paper which has a perfect level of friction. (It’s the little things that make the big things work out!)

Final Art

Painted and drawn elements that make up The Little Prince.(Not everything here got used.)

Like very many illustrators working today, I use a mixture of traditional and digital media. I create every detail separately, using mainly watercolour, pencil and pencil-crayon. The details are scanned and pulled into Photoshop, where, like a complex jigsaw puzzle, every little brush mark and pencil line gets coloured and teased into place. But it’s a trial-and-error approach.

Left – rejected watercolour. Mid – pencil-line coloured in Photoshop. Right – pencil-line combined with relief-print texture

I was keen in the end that the text should reverse out of a black Asteroid. I find it frustrating that we are always bound to black text for co-edition reasons. But if you reverse out the text, it can be in a colour, ie the background colour of the art. It’s a trick I probably overuse, but the black also makes an image bold and punchy.

The background – a blend of two textured watercolour washes

Some parts of the illustration – notably here, the space background – I plundered from my vast library of washes and blotches. I blended a dragged watercolour texture with what is, in fact, part of a landscape that I’d previously created for The Velveteen Rabbit. In both cases, the washes had been happy accidents, creating unique textures that are impossible to recreate no matter how hard I try. I’m obsessed with texture. And I love happy accidents.

All the while I’m fiddling with tiny bits of detail, I’ll have thought about contrast and balancing the colour; and creating a sense of atmosphere, ensuring the connection between the Little Prince and the Rose is the focal point for the illustration. And I’ll have been trying to keep everything fresh whilst wrestling with 100s of mind-boggling Photoshop layers. But I will have reminded myself of that first thumbnail which had so much immediacy and spontaneity in it. I always use the thumbnail as a benchmark for my final art. (The Little Prince Final)

The new edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince, adapted as a children’s illustrated picture book, written by Louise Greig, illustrations by Sarah Massini, is published by Farshore, 978-0008621759, £7.99 pbk.