A blog about not blogging! We were in London last week and, of course, had all good intentions of preparing blogs to go up while we were away, but never got around to it. And this week will be blog-free as well, so here’s a quick glimpse of what’s coming up next week:
The Quentin Blake exhibition in the House of Illustration
London street art (which may even include a Banksy).
We finally get inside the Pollock Toy Museum.
(Photo by Beth O’ Rafferty)
In Parts one through three of this blog I talked about creating the art for the children’s picture book, Miss Brooks Story Nook, (were stories are told and ogres are welcome), from the very first sketches, to finished pencil drawings ready for painting.
Below are finished drawings clipped up on my studio wall. You can see two smaller drawings clipped to the top, which is new art for this spread, I decided on after I supposedly had, um, finished. I try not to do this kind of last minute endless changing, it can lead to madness. I’m never completely happy with what I’ve done anyway. But… sometimes it’s worth it. And this was one of those times. 
For whatever reason I can only guess at now, I decided to paint the rejected drawings along with the new art meant to replace them. This turned out to be a dumb thing to do, as you’ll see later.
I used soft, tube watercolors for this book. start all painting for a book like this,figuring out my palette of must-have colors. For instance, I know for sure all the kids will have skin…, so I start by putting in the skin tones. It’s an easy way to jump into the process without freaking out trying to decide where to start. In this case a lot of that mock caucasian skin that looks a bit like the color of a Band-Aid. It looks a bit garish but experience tells me put it in stronger than might look right, because once all the other colors are in, if you make it look good alone on white paper, it will look too pale later. And I try to only make the same mistake 3 or 4 times before I wise up…
I mix the colors I will definitely need ahead of time – hopefully enough for the entire book. I’ll use good, expensive paint and brushes, and nice porcelain pots like the one above. (I think I might have stolen that one from my father years ago). It never pays to scrimp on materials. You always regret it.
I’ll mix skin colors for the main character, Missy, first, then certain specific colors for her blue overalls and the pink and green stripes of her hat, that have to be used as they are from the previous book. Then I’ll paint them all at once, so they look consistent throughout the book. I can spend an hour painting little green stripes. That’s why I put all the art up on the wall. So I can scan for every place the striped hat appears. And Yes, I do screw up sometimes and somehow not notice one stupid hat and have to try and salvage dried up paint to match it with the other hats as much as possible. 
It can be frustrating to not have a single finished painting until the book is all done. But it’s the only way I know to do it without color shifts.
Below you can see one of my aging brain tricks, which is to mix colors and label them since I forget instantly what exact colors I used for something. And it even matters what brand of color you use. Rembrandt Rose Madder Genuine will not mix the same way as Windsor and Newton Rose Madder Genuine. No two colors are exactly the same, and mixing the exact same color twice is practically impossible, which is why I mix a bunch of some color I plan on using. If I do run out, I can try and remember what I used. 
As you can see first I did Missy’s skin, hair, then the striped hat, blue overalls, and Billy’s skin hair, and turquoise track suit. Then the rest of the colors.
Below is the final color painted art. The scarf is in similar colors as her hat, but it was OK to paint them at different times, because they are not the same. The top image is not going to be used in the final book , but, as I said before, I painted them anyway.
And below is the right hand page of the spread. It’s particularly important to make sure pages that will be seen together, if they have the same character, in the same clothes, they need to be the same.
Below is the first printed proof for the book, with my notes, and with the wrong art on the top left. And it’s all because I inexplicably painted it in. Someone naturally assumed this was the correct art. Who wouldn’t? I covered it with a piece of paper taped over but it wasn’t enough.
Below is the final, fixed spread as it appears in the book with the new art on top.
By the time the book is finished, the studio is a mess, with palettes of color mixed paint, and test paint papers all over. A contrast to the small pile of neat illustrations to be mailed to the Knopf art director in New York.
See also:
Miss Brooks Story Nook – book page
More on the art for this book:
Miss Brooks Story Nook, The Art – Part One.
In parts one and two of this blog entry, I talked about creating the sketches and then the finish pencil drawings for the children’s picture book, Miss Brooks Story Nook (where tales are told and ogres are welcome). In this segment I’ll talk more about bringing the art closer to the finished, full color, printed artwork, some abandoned ideas, and evolving final layout.
Below are the finished pencil drawings for the spread in the book I’ve been using as an example. The scene is near at the end of the book, where the main character, Missy, confronts her nemesis, Billy. One of the themes of the book is about the power of storytelling. As you can see, there is an element of fantasy in the book, where Missy’s story telling is meant to be so vivid it comes alive. This was a complicated idea to illustrate, but it happens a lot in children’s books so I’ve had experience dealing with it before.
Missy, who is telling a tale about her neighbor’s snake she has been given as a gift, needs to be seen as both, “giving Billy her best ‘snake-eyed’ look”, but she cannot actually turn into a snake because I was told she couldn’t. At this point I can’t remember who rejected that idea, there are so many back and forth exchanges when I’m creating the art with the editor, designer, author (and possibly sales people). but it was one of many ideas that was shelved for one reason or the other.
But you can see in the finish drawing and sketch to the right, I still used the “snake-eye” idea as a three part point of view sequence, but removed it and any other suggestion Missy has become part snake. So I ended up using just two visual interpretations of Missy manifesting a snake through her storytelling – eyes and scarf.
In the sketches above and left you can see me working out the extent of cartoon vs. realism for the snake, and the rejected “missy-snake” idea.This one even has a scarf like tail… The snake popping out Billy’s eyes so that they bounce down the sidewalk(pavement) is in the text and in the final book art, but without glasses and hat. I rather like the Missy snake. It certainly looks nightmarish enough to scare away a thuggish brute like Billy.
The scene to the left is also in the book but again, the snake is not wearing a Missy hat and glasses as here…
Then there was a idea of what the snake was supposed to do to Billy. Before the text changed to popping his eyes out, it was a basic, “It’s gonna eat you up!” or something like that. So I drew that scene too. I like the idea of the bully being devoured. Like so many rejected ideas, maybe I’ll get to use it in some other book.
On Friday, in part 4, the painting begins.
See also:
Miss Brooks Story Nook – book page
More on the art for this book:
Miss Brooks Story Nook, The Art – Part One.
Miss Brooks Story Nook, The Art – Part Two.
In part one of this post, I talked about creating the art for Miss Brooks Story Nook (where tales are told and ogres are welcome),written by Barbara Bottner, beginning with the sketches and how they build from the very first loose drawings done directly on the text layouts, up to the final pencil line drawings. Below have a look at the final line drawings pinned up in the studio. The room I am renting at the moment is quite small so I must clip them up on a rack I made so I can see them all at once. It’s important to be able to see the whole book at once to see what may be missing or not up to snuff. And when the painting begins it’s important because I work a little bit at a time from one drawing to another. More about that later… the two color illustrations you can see are test images to show the publisher the look of the final art.
As you can see, I do all the final line drawing at once, before beginning the color painting. One big reason to do this is to try and have the the line work look as consistent as possible throughout the book. Believe it or not, I can draw slightly differently from week to week, day to day, maybe even hour to hour.
Below is the final pencil line art for the spread I talked about in Part One of this blog. I used a 5mm mechanical pencil in a B grade (I think), on cold press Arches 90lb watercolor paper. I use Arches as it’s readily available and there’s nothing worse than running out of paper mid job. The thin 90lb paper is because I use a light table to draw the final art from sketches.
As you’ll see later, the bottom illustration is final, but the top image will change before the book is published. Both Missy and Billy will be replaced by new drawings.
Below is the final pencil line art for the right hand page of this spread. It does not change. You can see I’m labeling the art, Miss Brooks Book Nook, not the final title, Miss Brooks Story Nook, but it was the working title I liked best so it was the only one I could remember.
In part one I followed one spread, the climax of the story, from sketches to final pencil art, in which the main character, Missy, confronts her nemesis, Billy, giving him a serious stare-down with her “snake-eye” look.
Above is the art for this spread pinned up on the wall. Notice the two smaller drawings clipped to the page at left. I mentioned I made a late change to the art? Two things bugged me: one was that long coat – I loved it, but decided it was more consistent to have her wear her easily identifiable blue overalls – and I thought Billy should be showing more of how crazy he was.
Here is Crazy Billy close-up.(above) He looked a bit angry before, which he is, but his madness I thought was a better way to play the scene. I’m so glad I did make the change. I love “crazy Billy”. Look at him – he’s crazy!
Above are the two Missy drawings side by side. Right is the new/final one. Like the coat on left but decided on keeping her outfit consistent.
These (above) are sketches I had done to further explore Missy’s “snake eye” smack down with a wild snake scarf. They were put aside when I created the animated sequence on the right hand page. (Can you see the little black arrows above? I use these all the time as a note to my self indicating which sketches on the page I like and want to remember.)
Above is a close-up of the drawing I liked the most. You’ll see later in the third and final part of this blog – Miss Brooks Story Nook, Part three – The Color Art – this particular drawing, and the one of Billy, are not wasted. Due to another late text change, they end up being used, almost untouched, for the new climax scene following the snake-eye spread.
More on the art for this book: Miss Brooks Story Nook – book page.
In my new book, Miss Brooks Story Nook, (written by Barbara Bottner) the illustrations took me over a year to finish. Which is not unusual for me. Why so long? Well, I’m slow, for one thing. But in general the work of illustrating a picture book is not constant. There are several stages you need to go through, from rough sketches of characters, layouts, final sketches, line drawings, then color, with breaks in between for the publisher, (editor, designer), and author to review what I’ve done, and send back comments, which I will listen to, or, ignore. They will listen to me and agree or disagree, and so on, back and forth, until we have negotiated the final look of the book. Sometimes a decision is made by the author or editor, based on what I’ve drawn, to change the text. And sometimes a change is made to the text while I’m drawing. This all adds time. So where do I begin? First I read the latest text over and over. Sometimes the editor sends just the written text, and sometimes the text is roughly positioned on layouts in the chosen typeface, as it might appear in the final book. This is helpful as it gives me an instant idea of how much room I have for art, and how the editor sees the page break down. This may remain unchanged, or, more likely, I will change things around a bit. For example, look at a spread below, where the main character, Missy, is staring down her nemesis, a boy named Billy, giving him, as the text states, her best “snake eyed” look. 
I almost always begin the sketch process right on the print-outs of the text layouts. As you can see above, I’m already working on ideas. This is a character I’ve drawn before so I did not need to completely re-create her for this book. The hair, glasses, overalls and stripe hat are a carry-over from the previous book. 
Next I move on to sketch books, working at home, or in coffee shops, creating the characters first, then thinking about different scenes each character must “act out”. You can see the date of the above sketch of Missy and Billy, when I began the process – over a year and a half from the book’s publication date of Aug. 2014. This drawing (above) is one of the first sketches I did for this book. This seemed like the pivotal scene of the book, so I’m focusing on it. I still love this drawing, and as usual, I seldom get as good, and as fresh a drawing in the final book as I get in the first few moments of visualizing a story. Sigh. 
Above (left) is the original sketchbook page and the detail on the right of Missy in the “snake Eye” scene. As you can see, I work on many ideas at once. So only one small drawing on this page is from this scene. Notice the unused raincoat outfit for Missy. I love the coat, but there was no room for it. Below I’m trying to visualize the “camera angle”. Notice I’m playing around with the idea of a long winter coat and scarf for Missy. The scarf acting like a kind of snake. Below that I’m developing the idea further but this actually will be the blueprint for the next page, due to changes in the text.
Above is a further refinement of the actual image to be used. Focus being on face front, and the view point of the eyes. Below you can see how I developed a new layout with a focus on the eyes/faces of both, in a cinematic “animated” panel sequence for the right page of the spread and a scene, (still desperately trying to get in that raincoat on the left). Changes like this often occur as the text changes because each new spread layout is considered as a whole. And there were more than the normal amount of text changes in this project. 
(Below) I went back to a face-on Missy on the bottom left, and fooling around with the idea, ultimately rejected, of her wearing a different hat than that in the first book. Also see refinement in the sequence of the two staring each other down… 
And here is the final BW pencil drawing for this spread. Notice the stripe hat is back but she is still in a long coat – which will change before the final book is printed, as will the drawing of Billy… More on the finish art in The Art – part 2…
It’s hard to visit a Wicklow beach without coming home with pockets full of stones! The colours and patterns are so lovely. Have close look at these groupings – click & scroll on for larger images – some of the pinks and oranges and blues are just stunning.
And sometimes the shape is what catches your eye…
The first of four colour ‘bouquets’.
When we start illustrating a new book we need to chose a palette. We go looking through favourite picturebooks and art books but we also hunt through our photo files. We are always on the look out for colour combinations – harmonious, vibrant, brash, soft – and we often take photos purely for colour. Nature is a great source – obviously – but cities yield great colour combos too.
Here is a bouquet from Brooklyn.
Click on the images for a closer look at the colours; that urn has mustard peppering its rose pink…
On Friday’s post, an autumn bouquet.
There once was an old book illustrator who lived in a moss-covered cottage on the east coast of Ireland. One warm June morning, he awoke to find a brown paper parcel outside the front door He picked it up and held it to his ear. It was buzzing, as if it contained a dozen mobile phones all ringing at once. Carefully he unwrapped the parcel, lifted the lid of a decorative gift box and discovered it wasn’t phones, it was bees: several neat rows of curiously round, wingless bees. They smelled lovely, delicious even.
He examined the box more closely. There was a card inside. It read, ’Happy Birthday! Enjoy the chocolate! Your friends at Little Brown’.
Of course – they were chocolate bees! It was a gift from his publishers. The artist was very late delivering his new book. They knew he had a particular weakness for chocolate and they hoped the chocolate bees might inspire him to get his brushes moving faster.
Ah well, he thought to himself, it was unlikely to get him out of his slump, but why not try one? Chocolate was the answer to so many questions after all. It was as he reached for one of the bees that he noticed one of them was missing.
“Conas atá tú?”
The artist jumped. One of the chocolate bees was on his nose, talking to him in Irish!
“Tá mé go maith,” replied the startled artist. “I’m fine, thank you, and you?”
“Well, we’d like to ask you a favour,” said the bee, getting straight to the point. The bee explained to the artist how frustrating it was for bees to be kept prisoners in the dark, with spring upon them, the sun shining, the flowers blooming, and the first tender green leaves filling the trees. Yes, they knew full well they were just chocolate bees, born to be eaten instead of makers of honey, but they were bees just the same. They wanted to experience what it’s like to be real bees, if only briefly.
“As you can see, my friends and I have no wings,” the bee explained. “We cannot float lightly from blossom to blossom gathering sweet nectar like other bees do. Please sir, can you help us? Life is so short. We just want to see something more of the world before it is all over.”
The bee’s speech moved the artist, and despite being hungry, he took pity on them. “Come with me,” he said, after some thought. He placed the bee gently in the palm of one hand and the box with the rest of the bees in the other. “Let’s go for a walk.”
First he carried the bees outside his cottage and showed them the heather in his window box.
Then he took them into the village and let them smell the tender lettuce leaves at the neighbourhood vegetable market.
Next he strolled with the chocolate bees to a local garden and took them for a tour, showing the bees all his favourite spots.
He showed them his favourite flowers.
He showed them Azalea alley.
He showed them the chuckling stream.
He even introduced them to the locals.
The chocolate bees loved everything. They got so excited the artist almost lost track of them among the colourful flowers. (They could move surprisingly fast considering they had no wings or feet.)
“It’s so much more beautiful than we ever imagined,” cried the chocolate bees.
In a shady corner of the garden, they spotted a row of little upright stones with lettering on them. “What is this place?” one bee asked.
“This is a pet cemetery,” the artist said. He explained how people thought this garden was the perfect spot for their dogs and cats to be after they died.
“I wish we could stay here forever,” sighed another chocolate bee.
A lovely meadow nearby had a sign at the entrance.
“What does this say?” the bees asked. The artist raised an eyebrow. One small bee explained, “No one ever bothers to teach chocolate bees to read. They say it’s not worth it – we don’t live long enough.”
The artist paused before speaking, watching the bees all wriggling with excitement and wonder. “The sign says, ‘Special Bee Garden. Welcome all chocolate bees! Welcome home!’”
“Does it really?” said the bees, who were now buzzing ecstatically, positively humming in the sparkling sunlight. The old artist sat down. The stream was chuckling in the background, the air warm, humid, and heavy with intoxicating perfume from a thousand blossoms. The world was all vibrant colour, all warm light.
The artist didn’t say another word. For the rest of the afternoon he just sat contentedly with the bees, in that beautiful place, in that wonderful, beguiling sunshine, and let them soften slowly, blending into the garden around them, until they were no longer individual bees, but a single swirl of silky liquid chocolate.
The artist licked his fingers, smiled, got slowly to his feet, and went back to work.
Sin é.
Thanks to Megan and everyone at Little, Brown Children’s Books, and all the chocolate bees that gave their lives for this story…
Michael has form with small chocolate creatures who arrive in the post…check out his Mouse Tour Of Greystones
Michael and Dave goofing around in lobby of Brown Bag Studios
We’ve had a long-standing invitation from our pal, David Maybury, to pop into his workplace someday for a tour, and as David works in Brown Bag, the amazing Dublin animation studios, you’d imagine we’d have been in there like a shot. But no. We waited until David was not only about to leave the building, but also the entire country. David has landed himself a fantastic new job with Scholastic in London. We figured we’d better get into Smithfield pretty quick for our personalised tour before the offer expired.
We met loads of lovely talented people and saw lots of great stuff, but we had to be careful not to take photos where anything top-secret was on display – like images from as yet unseen episodes of Henry Hugglemonster, Doc McStuffins, Octonauts, Peter Rabbit, or the brand new, first-aired-the-day-before, utterly adorable Bing.
Here are some things we could photograph!
The Brown Bag wall of… brown bags!
Derek Horan, one of the three people in Brown Bag who spend all day drawing by hand (meaning he’s a 2D artist in a building where most folk are working 3D). He chatted to us about how much fun he had doing conceptual work on the Hugglemonsters with Niamh (Sharkey) and how it is still quicker to sketch those first ideas out by pencil. As you can see, his work station is a highly personalized and visual space!
In the kitchen we met John Huikku, who worked on Frozen. Yep. Frozen. He chatted about working on the movie and told us he used his small son as a basis for the child Kristoff in the opening scenes, something we figure his son will be boasting about forever!
We said hi to Norton (Rugrats) Virgien who we have only ever met at parties. It seems he does actually work after all! He shares an office with Niamh as they work on the Hugglemonsters together, but, as Tuesday is Niamh’s day off, we had to substitute Henry for her in this pic. (Hi Niamh!)
We passed through a couple of large spaces with folk busily working on various shows. All those computers and screens make the spaces a little hot, hence the fans. We hung out for a while in one of the editing suites learning about the newest show, Bing. Séamus and Damien talked us through the different stages of development it went through and chatted about getting the details right – the blink of an eye, the light on Bing’s black fur, the squirt of a soap dispenser. We got lots more details about how it developed from children’s picturebook to screen when we met Nicky Phelan, the show’s director.
Nicky is also behind the wonderfully anarchical Granny Grim and he directs Octonauts. That chart of descending colours behind Nicky is the time chart for all 70 Bing shows as they travel through production. We got the impression that if the deep red bit had a sound effect, it would go something like ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHH!”
And this is Arthur, the very chilled hound who hangs out with the IT crowd!
Me, Richard Peck, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Michael – Frostburg 2007
In Maryland, USA, there is a town called Frostburg, and in that town there is a college. And in that college there is a children’s literature department.
The college is twinned with Mary Immaculate College in Limerick and every year a student travels from there to Frostburg to act as an assistant at the children’s lit facility. It was one of these exchange students, Maeve O’ Connell, who suggested to the folks at Frostburg (Dr Bill Bingman and Dr Barbara Ornstein) that they should invite me to speak, so in 2007 I travelled to the USA.
The other children’s authors invited to speak at the conference in 2007 were Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Richard Peck, and a guy called Michael Emberley.
We all hit it off immediately and had a lot of fun chatting at every opportunity. It was a two-day conference and we were kept pretty busy, but on Saturday night we all relaxed at the end-of-conference party at Bill and Karen’s house.
Barbara on left, Bill in pink t-shirt, Michael, Laura and all the fantastic students at Frostburg
Afterwards myself, Michael and Laura made our way back to our hotel, the gloriously eccentric and historic Hotel Gunter. It was after midnight but we decided to explore the hotel together – we’d all had just enough wine to think we were being quiet as mice.
Our tour began in the basement.
The basement of the Gunter had a bar, a mocked-up coalmine, and many many glass exhibition cases filled with stuffed animals – of both the toy and dead variety. Other cases contained dolls – the kind with eyes that seem to follow you as you move. Another case contained a collection of hats which belonged to a much-loved departed resident of the town.
And there was a prison cell.
A genuine prison cell. The hotel was once an overnight train stop enroute to Washington and a sheriff bringing a prisoner through would lock him/her up and retire to a room upstairs.
We peered through the bars. A life-size body was ‘sleeping’ under a blanket on the bunk, guarded by a life-size stuffed lion who glared out at us.
Up in the lobby we admired the fabulous Gone with the Wind stairs and climbed to the first floor landing where a teddy bears’ picnic was set up on the return. We stuck our noses up against a pair of French doors -locked- which led to the Wedding Room.
Not a room for weddings, a room of weddings. Everything was white. There were hundreds of dolls in wedding dresses but not a groom doll in sight. There were Christmas trees (it was April) smothered in white baubles. In the centre was a table (all white) set for dinner. Basically it was Miss Havisham, without the cobwebs.
We crept up the next flight of stairs passing more doll and teddy bear scenarios, Victorian wall lights, plus some random sinks placed along the corridors. We tiptoed past the ‘Black Room’ – a bedroom dedicated to the memory of a deceased country singer. A Limerick lecturer called Frank was asleep inside now but he had told me that everything in there was black. Black curtains, black bedspread, black four-poster, black shower curtains.
My room on the other hand, was all pink.
Massive four-poster with pink curtains, pink bedspread…you get the picture. Michael, Laura, and myself sat on my pink sofa, had another glass of wine, and talked children’s books for a while more before we called it a night.
Michael, Laura and Richard were leaving for the airport at dawn next morning. I was staying on another two days so I dragged myself out of my pink four-poster to go down to the lobby and say goodbye. Of course there was one person I was particularly sorry to say goodbye to, but I did have this very strong feeling that it wasn’t really goodbye…
Within a week Michael and myself were emailing each other a dozen times a day and within a month I was at Dublin Airport waiting for his plane to land.
Ah, Frostburg and the Hotel Gunter! Where love stories begin…
Fast forward to 2014, and last week we set off for Limerick with Pj Lynch and Siobhán Parkinson in the car. We were all speaking at Mary I’s very first Children’s Lit conference – Buzzing with Books. Siobhán and Pj are also past veterans of Frostburg (1998) and we all reminisced about the town and the wonderful Hotel Gunter.
We had a great time in Limerick. Mary I’s conference went off with a BANG; hopefully it’s the first of many. Bill and Barbara came over from Maryland, and Maeve O’Connell was there too – our three cupids and ourselves all gathered in the one place again! Apparently our story is retold at the Frostburg conference every year and they live in hope of inspiring another romance some year soon…
Us with our 3 cupids – Barbara, Maeve and Bill – in Limerick last week
And the car selfie, just for fun!
Michael, Siobhán, Pj, me
The Belugas are Watching 