You should check out Show & Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration by Dilys Evans.
You should check it out in the sense that it deserves a look, but you might also want to check it out literally, from a library.
I say this because is it is a beautiful and valuable book. Evans profiles a dozen children’s book illustrators. Each profile includes multiple images from each artist, and each page of the book is organized in a visually engaging fashion: a lot of thought has been put into which images to include, where to put them, how large to make them, and where to put the words in relation to them. Those carefully arranged words summarize artists’ backgrounds, careers, and art.
But if you don’t care about any of that, open this up to the two-page spread on pages 8 and 9 and write down the names of the dozen featured artists. You could feast for a year on the images this pantheon has created. I knew some of the names–please tell me you know David Shannon, of the David series (No, David!)–but others were new to me. And now I’m seeking them out.
