Picnic Books

DINNER TIME

Many times during Sunday roast, my young grandson has remarked we eat lots of bouncy broccoli don’t we granddad, and big bag of potatoes isn’t very full now, we’ve just eaten them, has mucky mango all gone? all this between drinking his dinosaur milk.
He did spend a lot of time with me while I was illustrating the story of “THE DINOSAUR AND DRAGON JUICE CAFÉ” and seemingly little mind certainly absorbed the story line and characters.

I am very lucky to have such a lovely knowledgeable little fellow who loves his food.
He eats so well, loves his greens, always discusses healthy foods and is absolutely no problem at the table, he has obviously been raised well.
He is eagerly waiting for me to draw a battle story, as his main interest is soldiers (especially Russian troops with fur hats and a red star).

I am looking forward to start working on my second book “TIGER TRAP” hopefully getting a better start, having ironed out some of the challenges I encountered with my first effort!

James A. Crabb

WHAT THE CHILDREN SAY

“The Dinosaur & Dragon Juice Café” An odd title for a book, but explains itself as the story unfolds.
A pleasant exciting little story, which seems to delight and baffle our young ones with its sad, or is it sad, ending?
How can it be sad when bouncy broccoli, mucky mango and big bag of potatoes are delighted at the outcome!

My young grandson and his friends have read a preview of the book, and like all seven year olds were quick to pass judgement.
Overall they gave a good thumbs up approval, and are eagerly waiting the arrival of the finished book to emerge.
Whilst previewing the story, their comments were really comical and delightful. For example…they knew potatoes have eyes, but they don’t open and close do they silly. And (between fits of giggles) broccoli can’t run either, what’s a mango? and Grandad where is The Dinosaur and Dragon Juice Café? Such innocence.

Have you ever had comical or interesting comments from your young readers?
I would like to hear from you if you have.
The aim of the story is not only to give youngsters pleasure, but also to try and  introduce them to eating healthy food in a nice way.
My opinion is, the story does both in an excellent way. If you have a child or grand-child who is not too keen on vegetable, or milk, buy the book and you’ll be surprised how things can change!

James A. Crabb

ABOUT ILLUSTRATING

One of the nicest moments of being a grandparent is reading a story to a seven year old at bedtime.
It is even nicer when it is a children’s story book that you, yourself, have helped to produce.

My initiation into the fairy tale world of children’s reading books, started with my dear friends persuading me, with tales of wealth and grandeur, to use my artistic skills to illustrate a nice little story called ” The Dinosaur and  Dragon Juice Café”.
When I first read this story, my reaction was where on earth do I start?
Having retired from fifty years of engineering to have a well earned rest, I now find I am busier than ever, starting a new career, and wondering where all the time has gone!

However, months later of drawing, and redrawing, painting, scanning, printing, modifications, criticisms and frustration I am delighted with the overall result. It is a nice rewarding feeling that hopefully someone, either parents, grandparents and more importantly children somewhere, are enjoying my efforts in creative drawing.

I have sat many times with my young grandson listening to him reading his school books, sometimes skipping through the pages very quickly, because he says he has already read it in class (or he would rather use his Playstation or Wii), other times having a small discussion about the book, regarding the characters, whether exciting or boring.
Looking at the condition of the books,(some looking like they have narrowly escaped the shredder), I often wonder if their  days  are numbered, but how can you replace imagination? That’s what books are all about and that’s where hopefully my new career carries on.
There are so many beautiful books available these days, it would be a terrible shame to lose them!

What do you think?

Thank you all,
                                                                                 
James A Crabb.

Illustrating children’s books and taking criticism

I have always been keen to get advice and feedback about my illustrations from other than friends and family . . . who obviously marvel at my creative work. In search of more objective feedback, it is always interesting to quiz professionals in the children’s books industry.

Once, I talked to an agent and showed her the cover of The Sleepy Ladybird. She said that the children looked slightly oriental. This was an interesting comment but I won’t expand on it now. She also said that they looked too ‘cutesy’ for her taste. I love cute and endearing characters, but some people in the industry think it is a no-no and think cute is only for greeting cards.

Curious to hear what the top illustrators had to say, I went to a couple of seminars.  One of them was with Chris Riddell, a superbly talented illustrator who started his career in children’s book illustration when his friend Kathryn Cave asked him to illustrate Something Else, a book about accepting differences and one of my favourites. His ‘doodle books’ as he calls them, were covered with ready to print drawings, no pencil marks or sign of rubber use.  Amazingly, Chris’ pen stroke is always perfect first time round – or is this clever marketing?.  Unfortunately I did not manage to squeeze through the crowd and talk to him on this occasion, so I was determined to make contact at the next seminar.

This was even more crowded with eager wannabe-illustrators and wannabe-writers and it was all about Tony Ross, the author/illustrator of The little Princess series as well as Horrid Henry,  for young readers.  Tony claims he produces one book a week, which is truly impressive. Clever marketing again?  After his talk, which included a few sarcastic jokes about fellow colleagues in the industry, whom I won’t name here, and wanting his advice, I managed to approach him to show him my half-done-illustrations of The Sleepy Ladybird. Understandably, I was a bit nervous. When this happens, my French accent can sometime become stronger.  He had a look at the drawings of Charlotte and Freddie and remarked, ‘They look French’. 

 Me: ‘All right, is there anything else you can see?’

 Tony Ross: ‘They look like they have some kind of brain disease and their heads are about to fall off.’

 Pause - 

 Me: ‘Oh really, Thanks.’ 

Well, I did ask for ‘la critique’, didn’t I? Although it’s impossible to know if Tony Ross was being sarcastic or giving true comments – probably a mix of both – I took on board there must be some spec of truth in what he was saying.  After all, I am just an insect compared to him. So, I seriously considered reducing all the heads.  But then I changed my mind, deciding the heads were just right.  I did touch up a few drawings but didn’t do anything about the French aspect . . .

. . . apart from removing the baguettes and berets.

As long as I keep my mouth shut, I thought, nobody will notice!

Next on the illustrator Blog is James Anthony Crabb who will be telling you all about the Dinosaur and Dragon Juice Café which is being printed right now, watch out for this one!

Lots of love and until the next time – Christmas I think.

Caro x

One of the lovely aspects of children’s books for 3 to 5 years old is that they give an opportunity for a shared moment with a parent, elder or guardian. Often with close contact, there is a chance to interact, understand together, comment and exchange ideas, express surprise, laugh, remember etc . . .

In the 70’s I used to flick through books while listening to the recorded story playing on a vinyl.  I remember the exciting magic sound of the bell ringing each time a page had to be turned. This pleasant but somewhat lonesome experience was not dissimilar to today’s digital books or books with narrated stories on a cd-rom.

Despite loving doing traditional illustration on paper, I am not a stranger to multimedia work as I have designed several web and multimedia projects. One of them involved creating a website with a virtual house with various rooms with topical educational games and activities. The target audience is adults with learning disabilities, but the website is also widely used by children and schools. 

One of the favourite ‘rooms’ is the Sensory room, which can be fully customised to create a mood with a choice of settings, animations and music. Characters have been drawn digitally with a computer tablet and digital pen to create what we call ‘vector graphics’ using Flash software; the characters were then slightly animated.

The most animated characters are located in the music room. You can get musicians from a band to play their instruments or stay still while the rest of the band is playing. When animating the guitarist, I initially just animated the hands and arms playing the guitar.  Note that each animated element has to be drawn separately, on a separate level or layer and animated individually (for instance a hand or an eye would each be an element – think of Mr Potato Head if each plastic piece was animated and then assembled).  Coming back to the guitarist, I realised I needed to give a slight rhythmic movement to the guitar to make it look more natural. The body also had to move slightly or the character would look too stiff.  In the end, very few elements remained still – and this was nevertheless a very basic animation that had to remain minimal for quick web download!

You can have a play with the various music bands here:

http://www.sensoryworld.org/funk/music_band_funk.html

And the sensory room

http://www.sensoryworld.org/sensory_room.html

  Children’s Illustrated Books: Character Design

One of my favourite parts of the creative process is designing characters.  For example, the first thing I had to do for Oliver the Ladybird was . . .  find an image of a real ladybird!  It might seem obvious but, off hand, I wasn’t sure how many legs or dots it had, or whether a dot could be across two wings. 

Despite good feedback, I decided my first drafts were a bit too cartoon-like. So, I went back to the drawing board and created a character that was more insect-like with long thin legs, slim arms with long pointy fingers and a much darker complexion. Pure black would have made it almost impossible to show the tiny facial expressions, so I used a blue dark grey.  The antennas were great to convey the mood of the ladybird so I extended them: droopy antennas if he was sad or sleepy; straight up if attentive or angry.  I added a red bow tie to match his red wings. The round belly went well with his sleepy mood and boisterous persona. Voila! Oliver the Ladybird was born.

The next stage was ‘getting to know him’.  To facilitate this, I drew him from different angles, with different expressions. 

This avoids making mistakes later on, such as, for instance, having too many arms or legs, shorter antennas etc . . .  Once you get busy sketching, painting & outlining, it is easy to miss something, especially clothing details.

 After illustrating The Sleepy Ladybird, I was very keen to observe a young child reading the book.  Picnic Publishing generously sent me a big pile of free samples. I admired the sleek colourful covers and although I had seen bits of the book through the various production stages, there is nothing like handling the end product: it just looked perfect and like a real book!

Shortly after, I visited my childhood friend in France and she read the story to her three-year-old, Zoé.  Incredibly, she translated it into French in real time.  Zoé listened very attentively, looked at the drawings, pointed at the characters and made a lot of comments.  As soon as the story unfolded, she pointed out with triumph that Oliver the Ladybird had lied! I was shocked. I had been painting these illustrations for months and hadn’t even noticed: Did the ladybird lie? That’s what happens when your nose is too close to the drawing board!  Once the story was over, Zoe immediately asked her mum to tell it again ‘Very quickly’.  Of course, this could have been a trick not to go to bed but Hey! This was still a good sign. I was over the moon.

My friend Henri Renard, the author of The Sleepy Ladybird, told me about a 3-year-old boy named Kieron who particularly loved the drawing of Oliver the Ladybird asleep on Bobby the Labrador’s nose at the end.   Kieron also made his grandmother Sally – who is not unconnected with Picnic’s distributors (!) – read and re-read it.  Sally said what was fascinating was that for the first time ever, her grandson was listening to the story and checking out the pictures. He then insisted it be read again – and re-checked the pictures. Sally is wild about the book because she says children have no vocabulary but do have sophisticated minds, which children’s books do not exploit. 

Meanwhile, her grandson said: ‘Oliver is bad boy.  Bobby is good boy. Bobby and Oliver are friends.  Oliver becomes good boy like me.’ (In a nutshell!)

Note re Market Research:  ‘The Management’ would like me to explain that Picnic only exploits the children and grandchildren of its nicest friends and colleagues . . .

 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?

One of the things I have discovered over the last few months is how little I know about the business of books.

I am a director of one of the world’s most prestigious publishers, Penguin. Before that I was with the world’s largest educational publisher, Pearson Education, and before that with W H Smith and Waterstone’s, Britain’s leading booksellers. I thought I had a pretty good idea how the industry worked.  I didn’t.

Take the role of agents. It is axiomatic at Penguin that authors need agents. Nowadays it is virtually impossible without an agent to get a major publisher interested in a new author.  Agents diligently mine their slush piles, I thought, looking for gems to polish and sell.

My Penguin colleagues have been enormously supportive and introduced me to numerous agents who were – usually – very gracious in their rejections. As one remarked candidly “If you were a celebrity Empires Apart could be a best seller, if you were a politician or academic it would sell, as it is you won’t get through the door at Waterstone’s.”

Eventually I did find a leading agent who seemed keen. I spent what seemed an enormous amount of time on things I thought he would do like competitor analysis and marketing plans before he announced he was sending my manuscript to his “reader”.

That’s when my naiveté really showed. I thought a reader would read my precious manuscript. At last a chance to receive a serious, professional review. What I received was a damning indictment that made the agent drop me like the proverbial hot potato. I read the reader’s comments with incredulity – the one thing he had clearly not done was read the book.

At the beginning of Empires Apart I mention two Viking explorers. Leif Ericson is famous for supposedly discovering America, but in fact has no real historical importance. Rurik on the other hand is completely forgotten but, I wrote, founded Russia: Rurik’s Land. I wanted to explore the way history is transformed over time and rewritten by each new generation and a few pages later I returned to Rurik. The Rurik tale I wrote was like much of Russian history, it was stirring, adventurous and almost certainly untrue. Nobody really knows where the name Russia comes from and I mentioned various other theories, all more probable than Rurik’s Land.

The agent’s anonymous reader clearly had not read very far. I was condemned for presenting the story of Rurik as if it was the undisputed truth. There were other versions of Russia’s origins commented the reader – which was exactly my point. In skimming through my manuscript the reader had made a number of similar errors, ascribing views to me that I had not expressed and the reason soon became clear: politics. The reader readily admitted he had no sympathy with the political views he presumed to colour my writing. I was he decided another conspiracy theorist.

No historical writing is value free and I wouldn’t pretend that my own is any different. The problem arises when the politics of the writer and the reader, any reader, are so far apart that rational debate becomes impossible. The incredibly detailed research in a book like Robin Ramsay’s Politics & Paranoia gets dismissed not on the quality of its analysis but on the political flavour of its conclusions.

One theme the agent’s reader found impossible to deal with in Empires Apart was my treatment of terrorism in America. I described what I thought was barbaric: an indiscriminate attack without warning by religious fundamentalists  on people going peacefully about their daily lives, an attack that caused carnage on an unprecedented scale and whose “justification” was not only totally incomprehensible to the victims but totally alien to the values of their society. I thought that was a pretty fair description of the 9/11 attacks.

It was also a pretty fair description of the events nearly four centuries earlier at Mystic, Connecticut. The native Pequot township of Missituck was surrounded before dawn on the 27^th of May 1637 by a group of armed men led by Captain John Underhill, an English mercenary hired by the Puritan settlers of Boston. As the first rays of the morning sun streaked the sky Underhill’s men fell on the sleeping villagers (mainly women, children and elderly as the men were away hunting). There were only five survivors.  The Mystic Massacre contravened all the norms of what American natives considered to be civilised warfare. Its purpose was not just the ethnic cleansing of the Pequot but to terrorise any natives unwilling to recognise the superiority of the white man and his religion.

I thought a comparison between the Mystic Massacre and 9/11 was usefully thought-provoking. It graphically illustrated my thesis that one of the factors influencing the development of America’s political landscape was a strain of religious fundamentalism more akin to modern Iran than to contemporary Europe. After the massacre William Bradford, the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers and a man lauded to this day in American textbooks, gave praise for the “sweet sacrifice” of natives “frying in the fire”. One can imagine Osama Bin Laden speaking similar words after 9/11.

I can imagine that – the agent’s reader certainly could not. Such a suggestion he asserted, (in a phrase for which I must admit to having a grudging admiration), was “approaching the wild borders of Chomskystan”.

My purpose in relaying this vignette is not to get my own back on the hack who savaged my work (or at least that is not the only reason) but to illustrate how precarious writing can be. How many brilliant books lie unpublished because someone took a dislike to the opening line in a synopsis or the casual wording of the Contents page?

I eventually gave up on agents and sent my manuscript direct to publishers and was lucky enough to find two or three who read it all the way through.

Before passing on the blogging baton to Caroline Bailey, the first of Picnic’s children’s book illustrators to blog, I must therefore give heartfelt thanks to Picnic for willingness to read beyond the first page and give others the opportunity to decide whether Empires Apart is thought-provoking or conspiracy theorising.

Some blogs are streams of consciousness ramblings that meander from subject to apparently unrelated subject. I feel like doing something like that today because three different ideas have been buzzing around my mind as possible blog topics: the Plantagenets, Gordon Brown and breakfast cereals. Not subjects with any obvious link. But bear with me.

The history of the Plantagenets which my predecessor on this blog, Guy Fraser-Sampson, is writing is exactly the sort of book I like reading. He is chronicling one of the most exciting periods in English history. In concluding his blog he compared the Plantagenet Empire to the American and Russian Empires I am writing about. The Plantagenet Empire, he said, was “Much sin but no spin, did not pretend its missiles were good for you and, of course, lasted longer”. The first two points are brilliant, but “lasted longer”? That perhaps is yet to be proved.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as a “naive fable” the absurd sound-bite I mentioned yesterday from Francis Fukuyama that the fall of the Iron Curtain marked “the end of history”. Solzhenitsyn was being uncharacteristically generous. The end of the Cold War may have seen the dismemberment of most of the Soviet Empire but it did nothing to dent the imperial intent which has been a feature of Russian history since Ivan the Terrible if not before. Now that intent is obvious again in the Caucuses and the rest of the world needs to decide how to respond.

Gordon Brown is quite clear. Writing in last Sunday’s Observer he points out that Russia can’t be allowed to get away with invading sovereign nations, picking and choosing which international rules to follow and acting unilaterally. The answer to all this awful stuff, he writes, is to “strengthen the transatlantic alliance”. That is we need an alliance with a United States government that invades sovereign nations, picks and chooses which international rules to follow and acts unilaterally.

The hypocrisy would be sickening were it not that Brown is not being hypocritical, he really believes that the United States is not what it is.  His is a classic example of cognitive dissonance. When facts come up that don’t fit his ideological preconceptions his mind alters the facts not the preconceptions.

I quote in Empires Apart as pure an example of cognitive dissonance as it is possible to get. In his 2004 re-election campaign President Bush proclaimed the moral superiority of free nations like the United States “Free nations are peaceful nations”, he insisted. “Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.” Coming from the leader of a nation that had just invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and whose armouries included more than half of the entire world’s stock of weapons of mass destruction these words surely exceed any absurdity Gordon Brown might utter.

But their absurdity seems to escape not just Bush and Brown, (and to complete the roll call of B-list politicians, Blair) but most of our other opinion-leaders.

Why do we so easily see actions as evil when the perpetrators are Russian but not when the same things are done by America?  That’s a question it would take far more than a blog to answer; I’m not sure Empires Apart fully answers it. But part of the answer may be that we are totally enmeshed by America’s commercial empire and its values. It is simply taken for granted that Americans are the goodies.

American corporations now seem to be a natural part of all our lives. I would argue that increasingly it is accepted that they and not the state should look after us and decide for us what is worthwhile and what is not. That may seem an extreme suggestion but let me quote an apparently innocent example.

My daughters are keen swimmers. They both recently moved up a level and received certificates and lovely cloth badges. The certificates and badges proclaim “National Swim Awards” (and isn’t “swim” rather than “swimming” an Americanism?). They also proclaim in flamboyant letters “Kellogg’s FROSTIES”. The swimming achievements of British children are being funded not by a levy on taxpayers organized by the British government but by a levy on buyers of breakfast cereals organized by a foreign corporation. (And Kellogg is a foreign corporation although I have noticed that it never uses in Britain the slogan I remember from my school days in Illinois “Kellog’s – the all-American breakfast”).

Of course it is rather a leap to suggest that an American corporation insidiously promoting its sugary pap to British school children somehow bears comparison with America invading Iraq or Russia invading Georgia, but sometimes random thoughts are not as unrelated as they seem.

When I was in primary school I remember playing a game in which we were given two or three unrelated words and then had to put them together in a single sentence. Usually the results were nonsensical but every so often somebody would produce something almost believable. Now I almost believe it really is possible to link the Plantagenets, Gordon Brown and breakfast cereals.