ROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Jerry Pinkney inhabits a strange and inviting universe where lilacs smile, spruce trees brood and billowing clouds of wild horses gallop in masses of lavender pink.

In his world life is revealed by the routine: a wrinkle of skin or the cotton crease of a turquoise summer dress. Crocodiles sport cravats. Giraffes squint through eyeglasses. And a motley assortment of children's book characters smile suspiciously like Mr. Pinkney, their creator and illustrator.

Mr. Pinkney has collected four prestigious Caldecott honor medals for his illustrations, although the outright Caldecott Prize eluded him again last year for his retelling of the 150-year-old classic "The Ugly Ducking." Those near misses have earned him the joking title of the Susan Lucci of illustrators.

But that does not deter loyal readers. In the field of children's picture-books, where sales of 10,000 copies are respectable, some of Mr. Pinkney's illustrated books, like "John Henry," have sold more than 125,000 copies. And collections of his vivid watercolors are constantly traveling on a national circuit of museums, including two ongoing exhibitions, one with his son Brian that was the inaugural program for the new quarters of the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature in Abilene, Tex.

Glimpses of Mr. Pinkney are scattered through his storybooks; there he is beaming slyly from the pages of, "Mirandy and Brother Wind," a breezy apparition in pale blue. Turn to another book, and he is a pensive lion in a red-checked waistcoat in an Uncle Remus fable. In another tale he has multiplied into an entire Lakota Indian tribe.

"I have to see the action in my head first," said Mr. Pinkney, a gentle man with a beard shot with gray who happily dons baggy pants and vintage vests to evoke the proper mood for drawing a buzzard in a top hat. "And then if I can see it in my head, it's very easy for me to find it in myself." Mr. Pinkney doesn't think his own life is the stuff of storybooks, but the outlines are there.

At age 61, this son of a Philadelphia handyman is the patriarch of a family dynasty of seven artists and writers. Next month alone the prolific Pinkney clan will publish three books, including his own "Goin' Someplace Special," the story of a young black girl's confrontation with Jim Crow segregation.

"He's a very capable artist, one of the few African-American artists of his generation to achieve mainstream status," said Leonard S. Marcus, a children's book historian and critic who has just written a book on elite teams of illustrators and writers, "Side by Side." "He's been one of the pioneers, and there aren't many."

Illustrators have long been overlooked by the conventional art world. But in recent years, Mr. Marcus said, artists like Mr. Pinkney have gained more respect with new museums, like the one in Abilene devoted to the genre. Another, the $15 million Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, is scheduled for construction on a seven-acre apple orchard in Shelburne Falls, Mass.

Lately Mr. Pinkney has become so well known that fan mail arrives here at his house in childish scrawl simply addressed to Mr. Pinkney, Croton-on-Hudson.

He lives and works in a 19th-century carriage house with a lavender door, set back among spruce trees. His ground-level studio opens on a sun porch with a view of grassy slopes and bursts of black-eyed susans. It is here for the last three decades that Mr. Pinkney has been painting and roaming an alternate world populated by black cowboys and Moroccan royalty, Jewish prophets and jazz singers.

His pattern is to sketch pencil illustrations and then transfer the design to watercolor paper, adding a mix of pale tones and jewel-like colors of yellow and red that radiate optimism even in a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's classic "The Little Match Girl," which ends in the girl's freezing death.

"My work is convincing rather than realistic, and so the anatomy has to be just right," Mr. Pinkney said. "My work also speaks to how people feel, and so I need to be able to see the characters."

He devotes as much time to research as he does to fluid lines and colors. To imagine slave life for "Minty," a book about the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, he examined and photographed a trunk full of plantation clothes from the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, Md. Then he stood in a nearby slave cemetery and tried, he said, to summon images and emotions.

To tell the tale of "The Little Match Girl," he pored through photographs of boys forced to work in the coal fields of western Pennsylvania. For a book about sharecroppers, he studied Depression-era photographs and interviewed a migrant worker, studying his hands and stooped posture bent from years of fruit and vegetable picking.

"I actually become the people I'm drawing, and I do that with animals, too," said Mr. Pinkney.

In a quest for authentic expressions, his wife and the sometime author of his books, Gloria Jean, enlists relatives, friends and assorted members of the Star of Bethlehem Missionary Baptist church in Ossining, N.Y., to pose for photographs of characters.

For his picture book "Sam and the Tigers" — a retelling of "Little Black Sambo" — Mr. Pinkney's grandson, Leon, then 8, was asked to model in rumpled costumes.

Occasionally some models balk; his young granddaughter was asked to play the role of a robin but insisted on being a rabbit. One of his sons, Brian, is still a little embarrassed by the childhood memory of the time his father asked him to dress like a girl for a photo. Even some of the paid models find it difficult to express themselves, Mr. Pinkney said, which is why he often turns the camera on himself.

"Sometimes we dressed up like in slavery times," said Myles C. Pinkney, 37, a photographer and the youngest of Mr. Pinkney's four children, who recalls that at the time his father's books were the only titles that offered him images of black children. "We would have to pretend like we were in a boat. It was cool because when we were done, we could see the finished result in his pictures."

Since he was a little boy, art has defined Mr. Pinkney like the lines of his sketches. One of six children, he recalled constantly searching for a refuge where he could draw in the cramped, brick row house his family lived in in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood. One of his favorite places was a spot under a grand piano that his father had painted pink.