Picnic Books

 Well, it is a little difficult launching into The Sleepy Ladybird after Brian Landers’ posts about warring empires – but maybe this is why Picnic asked me to lead the children’s illustrators: a change of scene is always good for us! I have met a lot of people interested in becoming children’s book illustrators. I am sure it sometimes starts when they flick through the books in the bookshop and decide ‘I could do that!’ or ‘These drawings are not very good, I could do better!’ In reality it’s a little bit more complicated than that . . .

Once you spend some months studying and analysing children’s books you start looking at them in a completely different light. For instance, a drawing that once looked badly drawn – suddenly looks stylised or badly drawn on purpose to appeal to children or amuse their parents. Other drawings that once looked 100% perfect suddenly look commercial or mass-market. Children’s books become a world with its own language and codes of practices, trends and brands. What looks effortless on the shelves of the bookshop becomes a complex commercial product where nothing is left to chance.

First of all, it starts with the story, in the case of The Sleepy Ladybird, Henri Renard’s gentle tale about two children Charlotte and Freddie, Bobby the Labrador and a ladybird called Oliver. Written for five year olds with a sophisticated morality a surprising number of very young children grasped, my part was to illustrate the book.

Immediately after reading it, I started seeing pictures popping in my mind. I had to calm down and first work on my characters to decide what they would look like. For the children, I started with some sketches of Charlotte and chose a brunette with olive skin and hazel eyes and by contrast Freddie became a red head with big green eyes. I love big heads as I find them more expressive and childlike (this is possibly an influence from Cabbage Patch and Blythe dolls). Then the golden Labrador was easy as my neighbour has one in his garden. As for Oliver the ladybird, he went through a couple of redesigns, but ended up as a little grumpy & lovable fellow with stringy limbs and a potbelly.

Now that I had the cast, I needed to capture the images of settings and facial expressions leaping into my mind before they vanished, so I started a storyboard with rough pencil sketches. Then, in order to get a feel for the book and understand how the text and drawings were going to work together, I grabbed a scissors and sticky tape to create a miniature basic mock-up. This was almost like a monochrome mini-book – for these first attempts, the smaller the better. It is a crucial step as it shows the facing pages and the page-turns. These reveal the ‘articulations’ of the book/story.

Then I drew every scene again in a large scale on normal paper. A light box is quite handy to trace previous drawings quickly. (A light box is a wooden box with a frosted glass panel and a light bulb behind. This allows the illustrator to see through normal paper like tracing paper.) One of the challenges is that I was using watercolour paper with such a heavy grain that it was impossible to draw a smooth line with a thin point pen. So I decided to scan my line drawings and print them on the heavy grain paper before painting. This trick worked beautifully and avoided the risk of smudging by outlining after painting. I then painted the illustrations: the way I used watercolour was very much like coloured ink, with plenty of pigments for a very colourful result. The computer came in handy again to do some touch ups, alterations and special effects such as adding a lens flare, transparency, shadows or windy blurred effect and duplicating poppy petals for the end papers. In some cases, I painted the ladybird on a separate drawing from the backdrops. These gave me total flexibility to position the ladybird, rescale it or even duplicate it.

These days, most children books are a mix of traditional art mediums and computer graphics. Researching the work of other illustrators, I was surprised to discover that their work was 100% computer graphics despite looking like a traditional art medium. ‘The Village of Basketeers’ by acclaimed illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli looks a lot like pastel illustrations but is all computer work.

It becomes increasingly impossible to guess a process from looking at illustrations. Do you agree or can you tell by looking?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 12:49 am and is filed under The Sleepy Ladybird illustrated by Caroline Bailey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.