Mark at The Artist’s Print Room has had a busy 2021, but managed to squeeze me in for another set of lovely festive prints.
Because I worked on two books that Simon and Schuster published this year, it felt right that the main characters from both books ( Bear, Squirrel and Chicken from ‘I’m Sticking With You Too’ as well as Duck ( braving the ice) and Frog from ‘The Duck Who Didn’t Like Water’ ) appear on the Christmas cards.
Back in August of 2020, ( I know, I’m desperately trying to catch up on news over the past two years since I started illustrating picture books. ) the fine folk who run the Booksellers association and Books Are My Bag, kindly invited Smriti and myself to post a few images describing our process and what inspires us. I’m posting them here today, since, being the creature of habit that I am, nothing much has changed, and I’d be surprised if it ever did.
When starting this website, I imagined I would regularly check in and update with ideas and news in a spontaneous way. Then as 2020 began to reveal itself, routines and time-use needed a complete re-think. It sometimes felt like being submerged in a submarine and raising the periscope every now and then to check in and see if ‘normal’ life was still out here.
Part of that’ normal’ was Christmas. Holidays, visiting friends and family, gift buying and gift giving and taking time off were just a few of the things we’d all usually look forward to, that were this time slightly out of reach.
It felt odd to make cards that touched upon these normal things in light of the circumstances we all faced, but it seemed to me that even though we couldn’t see the people we loved or share simple connections, we nonetheless all looked forward to connecting with them again and, perhaps more quietly, celebrated the feelings inwardly for that year.
These cards were printed by Mark at https://www.theartistsprintroom.co.uk for Christmas 2020. I’d never worked with Mark before, but right from the get go, it was clear that he is a terrific craftsman and from start to finish, he was informative, helpful and thoroughly reliable.
Now I’m currently designing cards for 2021. This year wasn’t quite the return to usual that we had all hoped, but it was at least a start in the right direction.
I’m looking forward to working with Mark again.
Henry Holt and Company publishes ‘I’m Sticking With You’ in the US today.
As you can see, we went with a different cover for this edition. I’m particularly fond of this illustration because though I ‘found’ the characters when working on the close up for the original cover illustration, this was the first time I caught them pretty much how I’d always imagined them when seen full figure..
Here’s a few sketches I made on the way…
The first doodles always help to establish the essentials, though there’s always certain details in this more spontaneous stage that are maddeningly hard to translate into later paintings.
this was a step on the way to clarifying shapes and accessories. I liked how calm they were, jogging along rather peacefully like it was a comfortable routine.…
But in the end I decided to give them a little more movement…
I wouldn’t say that this amount of sketchwork was typical. Some illustrations need much less and others are much more. Sigh. But once I begin to know the characters a little better, I can generally loosen up and allow more to happen in the final artwork rather than look at everything too closely in advance with preparatory drawings.
We’ve been working on a trailer for a while and finished it earlier this week.
I was immensely lucky that StudioAKA were up for me putting a select team of artists together to bring the illustrations to life. The artists there have a tremendous sense of craft and are ever-enthusiastic in finding new techniques to lean into every nuance of a design and give it its full range.
Justine Waldie cleaned up all my rough animation and ironed out the creases without telling me, and Will Eagar ( yes, that is the correct spelling. Thanks to all those who suggested a correction) layered in all the watercolours and textures using a beautiful technique that he has refined over years and within a short time, there were the illustrations …alive. Seeing the results of people working with this level of craft and skill never gets old.
Back when we had a rough timing of the animation, we had to start thinking about music in order to refine the timing of the performance. I wanted it to be rather like a silent film with titles in between. This seemed to inherit that interesting way that books have of placing an idea into your head with only unspoken words. Then we would cut back to animation that responds to the idea. Ever so simple. Just like a picture book.
But time went by and we still had no music.
As chance would have it, whilst timing out the layouts and rough animating the scenes, I had a tune rolling around in my head. It was a tune that I had found myself whistling a few mornings back and I wasn’t sure where it had come from.
Just for fun, I whistled the tune and placed it against the picture. It worked. And the timing was so correct, it made me wonder if I had originally hummed the tune whilst thinking about the animation of the trailer right from the get go, maybe as a device for timing it- but forgot about it after.
I played the tune on my Ukulele. Which I only play for me. It’s kinder to the environment that way- and I thought…’hm this could work.’ Fortunately my friend and colleague Marc Craste is one of those maddeningly talented people who does most things with effortless ease. He also happens to be a great guitar player. He found the sweetest refrains to play with my Ukulele tune. We came up with a cosy lumbering bass line (it was always the Bear in my mind) and we were off. I practiced for over a week. And then we recorded at the studio….
I’d do the tune of the Squirrel on my ukulele, Marc would do the bass line of the Bear and also the guitar in-between. The glue that held them together.
Marc played several takes, each with elegant, subtle little differences. Then I joined in.
When I was a kid, my Grandad once sat me on his knee and played his little electric organ for me with a roll-up hanging out of the side of his mouth. My Grandad was one of those people who looked like they have tree in their genes. He was a solidly built fellow. His fingers were very wide and when he pressed them to the keyboard, he sometimes clipped the keys on either side. So you got little side notes playing every now and then..
When he finished, I remember pressing a white key with my little finger. I probably could have put all my fingers on the key and still not clipped the sides and even at the age of five, I understood the technical difficulties my Grandad faced. But I loved the way he played it.
I am not the impressive figure my Grandad was back then. But listening back to me playing in the sound session, I sounded as if my fingers were twice his size. After a careful discussion with Marc and Nic Gill, our sound technician/editor/and amazing composer, we fired the Ukulele player and let Marc’s guitar and sweet bass line show us how it was done.
Nic brought it all seamlessly together and, adding sound effects with his usual flair for less is always more, we finished it.
I’ll post it here again,
Many thanks to Sue Goffe, Marc Craste, Phil Hunt, Justine Waldie, Will Eagar and Nic Gill and Nikki Kefford-White for making it all happen.
Hello.
I’m launching this new website at the same time as my first book project is being published in the UK.
‘I’m Sticking With You’ written by Smriti Halls is published by Simon and Schuster UK and releases on the 30th of April 2020. You can purchase from your favourite local bookstore if they are still delivering.
I was fortunate to have worked with the terrific Editorial Director Helen Mackenzie Smith and Art Director Jane Buckley who patiently guided me through what it takes to publish a children’s picture book and made what is a lot of hard work for everyone involved, never anything less than pure fun.
When I first read Smriti’s story, it felt immediately familiar to me and I inwardly nodded to myself, acknowledging how it mirrored so many memories of relationships. I began to wonder who this apparently unlikely couple might be and as an illustrator, I knew I was already hooked and starting to work. Once I knew it was a Bear and a Squirrel, I set about trying to find their characters.
I was keen to emphasize how the story was largely to do with how the characters felt. I wondered if there was a way to do this that suggested that their ‘inside’ world was perhaps more apparent to them than the world around them. So I thought it might be interesting to keep background details to a minimum.
Though the story focuses on the Bear and the Squirrel, we encounter a few other characters in their world. I liked that while the thoughts and feelings of our main characters are being explored in an emphatic manner, we are left to guess how the other characters might get along.
It’s a golden age for illustrators now, with so very many techniques and working methods available to them. Some create wonderful, sensitive imagery which is entirely digital and never leaves the computer, while others like to let it all happen on real paper and invite the accidents and discoveries to form part of the final picture. While others prefer to mix it up a little.
Their craft and technique is always fascinating to me because no matter how well I understand their method, there’s still a very personal alchemy involved that gives the work a quality that is both like a signature and immediately identifiable and yet also other-worldly and unpredictable at the same time.
I like to do as much working out on paper as possible. So I stay in sketchbooks and on used envelopes, or anything that is to hand, for quite a while before I start to make final images.
Then I paint on paper as much as I can because it’s so much fun to discover solutions in the accidents. Once I’m equipped with all these ideas and images, I bring them into the computer and explore a little more.
So once we had finished all the art and put together a mock up, we made a poster to introduce it in Bologna last year in 2019.
…and earlier this year the book made it to the cover of The Bookseller.
I was invited towards the end of 2019 to contribute a sketch for the ‘Love Your Library’ campaign that toured the UK.
It seems that having spent rather a long time drawing the characters, you become quite attached. So it’s actually quite hard to stop drawing them.
These sketches were made in January/ February.
