What comes first, the words or the illustrations?

As an author-illustrator, I’m often asked whether I start with the words or the illustrations.

In the case of the first three books in The Accidental Diary of B.U.G. series, the short answer is: the words.

Here’s an extended version of how I worked on this series, in case you’re interested:

• I complied all my ideas into a story.

• While beavering away with the text, I made comments in my document of doodle/picture ideas as I thought of them.

• I sent all the text along with my illustration ideas to my editor who considered the text before the picture ideas.

• Once the manuscript was semi-finalised, it was sent to a page designer. Her job was to lay out the text and send a document back to me with placeholders to indicate how much room I could have for each approved picture idea. Like this:

• I then drew pictures to fit the spaces and sent them back to her so she could bob them into the document. Like this:

• And the finished page looked like this:

There are currently three books in this series:

1. The Accidental Diary of B.U.G.
2. The Accidental Diary of B.U.G: BASICALLY FAMOUS
3. The Accidental Diary of B.U.G: Sister Act

For each book, I worked in exactly the same way: IDEA then WORDS then PICTURES.