Patrick has a huge following, and I really wanted to do the story justice. Jim: Not consciously thinking of making it my own I suppose, I just piled in with an immense sense of panic. She would have set it free, let it grow and change, and so I wasn't trying to guess what she might have written, I was merely following the same process she would have followed, which is a different thing. And I did this not for egomaniacal reasons, that my decisions were somehow automatically right or some such nonsense, but because I know that this is what Siobhan would have done. If I'd felt hampered at all – again, even for very good reasons – then that harms the story, I think. Patrick: I wouldn't have taken it on if I didn't have complete freedom to go wherever I needed to go with it. Given the time I would have preferred to try and illustrate the book entirely with etchings. It was a technique I hadn't tried before, dictated to some degree by the time constraints, which in hindsight may have helped. Due to other commitments I had a weekend to produce an image, and I very hastily created the scene of the Monster leaning against the house. As it was such a potent piece of writing, there was a risk of illustrations breaking the rhythm of that writing. However, I also wondered if it should be illustrated. I was gobsmacked by the manuscript, I knew I wanted to illustrate it straight away. Jim: Ben Norland, art director at Walker Books, sent me the manuscript and asked if I'd like to have a go at illustrating one scene from the book.
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