Dahl & Blake

Roald Dahl & Quentin Blake

Its is not often that you hear Roald Dahls name used without the mention of his close friend and illustrator Quentin Blake, such is the iconicness of their relationship and of their visual 'brand'.

What is interesting in this pairing is the complete trust and intuitiveness with which both artist and writer viewed each others work.
"While working on the BFG in 1982, Dahl even altered his own written description of the friendly giant so it fitted with some of the drawings Blake had already made. In the storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, Donald Sturrock says that Blake was able to almost intuit what Dahl's characters would look like. "Quentin began to realise just how precisely Roald imagined his stories," he writes, "Initially, Dahl had described his character wearing a black hat, apron and large black boots. But when Roald saw Quentin's drawing, he knew at once that the giant needed to look softer and more loveable."

That Dahl changed his narrative after seeing Blake's illustrations in key in discussing how a relationship like this works and that unlike many re-illustrated volumes, illustration had an equal position to the writing:  "Dahl was adamant that his text be full of illustrations, "What was so nice about Roald was that he actually wanted the pictures," Blake recalls on his website. "He didn't like it if there weren't enough."
While this is unfortunately very unique of authors (and more frequent in children's literature) it shows that the narrative and illustrations were intended to be read together, in a single discourse.

Blake on illustrating:
"Blake's job was to convey their many unappealing traits in pictures. (the Twits)
Early on in the story, Dahl describes Mr Twit's beard as being lodged with bits of decaying food. Conveying this in a single portrait image was difficult  so Blake drew a 'magnifying glass' as an in-set illustration, which zoomed in on the hairs and the morsels of sardines, cornflakes and gorgonzola contained within.  It was he says, a question of "how do you enlarge the text slightly, without contradicting it?" Blake added further visual elements too which, while not taken directly from Dahl's text, were pitched as if they were."
An example of extending the narrative, mainly through disgust. Blake could have chosen to draw a portrait of the man purely as a representation of what is written, instead he gives us this close up which acts to heighten our dislike of a foul man through its stomach turning imagery. (Which kids love!)

Quentin Blake on Illustrating The Twits.

Like the collaborations between Thompson and Steadman a brand has been created with the style, typography and interactions between text and image. Both artists are synonymous with each others work.


Blake on his process and collaboration