Picturebook Makers

Alexis Deacon graduated from the University of Brighton with a first class honours degree in Illustration. His second picturebook ‘Beegu’ was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Booktrust named Alexis as one of the best illustrators in the United Kingdom.
In this post, Alexis presents some development work and final illustrations from his extraordinary picturebook, ‘Croc and Bird’. He also talks about the challenge he faced in working on the book after several years of enforced inactivity due to illness.
Visit Alexis Deacon’s blog
Read an article about Alexis on The Guardian website

Illustration from 'Croc & Bird' by Alexis Deacon

Alexis: ‘Croc and Bird’ was one of the first projects I worked on after several years away from drawing through poor health. One of my main challenges was just remembering how to draw. Much like playing an instrument, drawing is something you have to practise and maintain if you want to stay good at it.

At first, it was deeply frustrating not being able to work at the level I was used to, but then I realised I could use the structure of the book itself to help me. Croc and Bird tells the story of two creatures, a crocodile and a bird, who hatch side by side and, without parents, bring each other up thinking that they are brothers. In the beginning, the world they know is very small and simple, gradually becoming more complex as they learn about it and discover it together. I realised that if I worked on the book in the same order, I would be starting out with very simple compositions. I could build up the level of complexity as I went through the story, just as the narrative required.

Whilst I tried several methods making this story, all of the artwork that appears in the published book is photocopied pencil drawing, painted with watercolour and gouache.

Now that I look back on it, I think of Croc and Bird as my favourite work. I really empathised with the struggles of the two central characters and I tried to put all of that feeling into the drawing.

Illustrations © Alexis Deacon.

Kitty Crowther, who is half English and half Swedish, was born in Brussels and lives in Wallonia in Belgium. She’s written and/or illustrated about forty books which have been translated into twenty languages. In 2010, Kitty won the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s literature: the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
In this post, Kitty talks about the creation of her latest picturebook, ‘Mère Méduse’ (Mother Medusa), and she shares some enchanting sketches and illustrations. This striking picturebook about the maternal bond is published in French by Pastel—l’école des loisirs.
See Kitty on the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award website

Kitty: It’s the fiftieth anniversary of l’école des loisirs in 2015. I used to read those books as a child and loved them over and over. I’ve now been working with Pastel—l’école des loisirs for twenty years. My latest book with them will be released in November 2014. It’s called ‘Mère Méduse’. To translate the title into English, I would say ‘Mother Medusa’ and not ‘Mother Jellyfish’. Even though medusa and jellyfish are connected.

For me, Mother Medusa is a descendant of Medusa from Greek mythology. I’ll come back to that.

As for jellyfish: The English name jellyfish has been used since 1796, although the term medusa was coined a short time before this by Linnaeus (more famous as Linné, the Swedish botanist. He was so famous that you could just refer to him as L). The Swedish author, August Strindberg wrote: ‘Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist’.

To keep it short, Linnaeus classified and named all the living things, and he gave jellyfish the name medusa because their tentacles made him think of the hair of Medusa, one of the three Gorgons from Greek mythology.

The other night, I was having dinner with my eldest son, Theodore. We were speaking about the future (he’s 17) and I was trying to find out what he wants to do. For fun, he asked me the same question: the famous ‘What do you want to be when you’re older?’ I smiled, and at first I said entomologist (the study of insects), but after several arguments, we opted for biologist. I thought about how I love every living thing. I have a huge weakness for birds, flowers, stones… And insects, of course.

So I’m sorry to invade your space with jellyfish. And science notions. But I like to talk about them, so in this post I’m going to overdo it.

I find jellyfish amazing. There’s as much saline density in the body of a jellyfish as there is in the sea. This is why they can stand so still. As if on hold. I like to watch them swim slowly. I tell myself that they’ve been in the oceans for 650 million years; I don’t even understand this length of time. It’s as if they are guards. I’m really not surprised that they play an important ecological role. There’s even talk of a species that’s immortal.

(Did you know that tuna, turtles and sunfish eat them?)

When I was a little girl, I watched jellyfish in fascination (those that were stranded on the beach), and I tried to put them back in the water. Of course I got stung. But whatever.

A fascinating beauty to keep at a distance. Just like the character in my book, Mother Medusa, who holds the world at a distance. It’s as if she’s locked up in her own hair. Only her daughter can approach her. So much hair she cannot untangle it.

Back to the story… I won this amazing prize four years ago (the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award) and I’ve travelled all over the world (to my delight), but sometimes it was too much. I didn’t have the time to write or draw. I also need time to do nothing. And a very particular kind of listening: to hear what wants to return. I very often say that it’s not the author that chooses the story, but the story that chooses you. Sometimes I’m so happy to have finished a book. Then nothing is planned… but it doesn’t last for long – like apnea – between inhaling and exhaling. And I wonder what will happen this time.

In 2012, I had this incredible exposure to Moulins in France: five rooms in the Musée de l’Illustration Jeunesse. They asked me about my desires. I made a large drawing with a hundred characters. They printed it even larger and mounted it on the wall so that the children could colour it in. It was nice to be in it rather than looking at it on a sheet of paper. And in this myriad of characters, a very strange woman appeared next to a very nice little girl. They’ve come back once again on a poster. Increasingly present.

Drawing hair is fascinating. I have total admiration for a book called ‘Letterdromen met Do’. I really like how the hair is presented. Sometimes resembling algae. Not far from a Japanese universe. There’s lots of things to say about it. The thread / the link / the spider, and so on. I won’t get into a psychoanalysis. I’ll leave that pleasure to you.

The mythological character, Medusa touches me deeply. Do you know her story? Here’s one version: It is said that Medusa was extremely beautiful. So beautiful that Zeus took her and raped her in the temple of Athena (daughter of Zeus, a virgin and a great warrior). Furiously, Athena metamorphosed Medusa along with her two immortal sisters (Euryale and Stheno). Her snake hair and her eyes that dilated and petrified all who crossed her… Perseus beheaded her (I’ll let you discover the epic), and from her sliced neck, Chrysaor (who had a golden sword) and Pegasus (yes-yes, the flying horse) were born.

My Medusa is in line with Chrysaor.

The power of the woman, the power of the look (a fatal woman), the fear of castration, the intimate relationship with the monstrous and the existence of prehistoric matriarchal societies. All of this in one woman!

Anyway, I juggle with very ancient symbols and mythical references. All powerful. Remember, I do not choose.

I thought of these very rebellious women, just like punks. I wondered how one can come into the world and have a mother like that. A little like Calamity Jane (read the beautiful book, ‘Letter to my daughter’, even though the authenticity of the letters is disputed). Female borderline. Who loves wrongly, but loves dearly. Being a little sweet one. Deeply sweet. She loves her mother, that’s for sure. But she would love to join others who are just like her.

Through travelling, the story developed in my mind. And I didn’t stop feeding it. Thinking about it. Seeing the magical bonds within it.

I struggled to begin the story. Usually, it’s obvious. But Medusa was very difficult to tame. I wanted to go in a certain direction – make her a bit witch-like, like a caricature, or a little like Tove Jansson – but each time it was a total rejection (although I didn’t become so obsessed with her that she came to life).

I also spent some time in Sweden (my mother is Swedish – on the west coast). I love all the flat rocks that live in the water there. They look like they’ve been polished by the ice and wind…

I try to make timeless stories. No phone, no television. Just people, the sky, the ground and everything that grows, walks and flies.

I have another fascination: iridescent colour. Like rainbows or like the oil remaining on the surface of the water. A little gross, but so beautiful to watch. Like nacre.

Mother Medusa will be published in Sweden in Autumn 2015. And in England, two of my books have just been published by Tate: ‘Poka & Mia: At the Cinema’ and ‘Poka & Mia: Football’. I’m extremely happy about this.

There was also this book called ‘Mon ami Jim’ that was translated into English a very long time ago by Hyperion in the USA.

Being half English (my passport is British) and having almost no English books gave me a funny feeling. Like being excluded.

A few days ago, I received the news that Enchanted Lion Books (USA) will be publishing my book, ‘Scritch scratch dip clapote!’.

Thank you for reading this post, and all my best.
—Kitty Crowther

Illustrations © Kitty Crowther. Short film by Thomas Lavachery and Denis Roussel (© l’école des loisirs).

Blexbolex (Bernard Granger) is an award-winning French illustrator who lives in Berlin. His books have been published all over the world, and he’s widely revered for his experimental approach to printmaking and book production. Blexbolex won the ‘Best Book Design from all over the World’ award at the Leipzig Book Fair.
In this post, Blexbolex talks about the creation of ‘Romance’ (Ballad). This incredible picturebook was originally published in French by Albin Michel Jeunesse, and has been translated into numerous languages including English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, German and Czech.
See Blexbolex on the Illustrissimo website

Blexbolex:‘Romance’ (Ballad) comes after ‘L’Imagier Des Gens’ (People) and ‘Saisons’ (Seasons) and was expected to be a picturebook of stories. I had to keep the same structure of the page – a word / an image – so it would fit within the trilogy.

When I started this project at the end of 2009, I had no idea about how to organise it. I had desires and atmospheres in my head but nothing really concrete. Little by little, it became clear that the pictures in the book must by themselves – progressively and step by step – be embedded in a narrative continuity and form a kind of story.

The pages of the book contain, for the most part, quotes from all kinds of stories or visual or literary quotations – some well-known, others less so. The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home. That put me on the path of rhymes, cumulative songs, old folk songs and on the somehow musical structure of the book. It also reminded me in a funny way of my own childhood memories – when I came home from school, of course.

Seeing that the book was going in the direction of storytelling, I also read ‘Morphology of the Folktale’ by Vladimir Propp to make sure I didn’t forget the milestones of the story genre.

It was a long process and I summarised a lot there, but I think I covered the essentials.

Here’s one of my hundreds of pages of notes. At this point, I’m still rather far from the final book – I’m more testing how the form could work with the elements and means. Hours and hours of calculations, but there’s nothing that alcohol and nicotine can’t solve!

The first six parts of the book were rather improvised, but it then became so complicated I needed to do some kind of a storyboard. Here’s an example.

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

Here’s the oldest versions of some landscapes along with the final work. I had to redo the bridge one for technical reasons, and could never catch the light and atmosphere again. As revenge, I printed the old picture as a small poster – a three-colour silkscreen.

Here’s the oldest versions of some characters along with the final work.

The witch is one of the main characters in the book. Her aim is to replace the small world that is being built page after page with her own. And she really wants it! If the spells she casts only affected the other characters or objects – but not the words – it seemed to me that this would have less impact on the imagination of the readers. The witch is the true antagonist and she wants to make the book disappear in order to take control, so it seemed logical to me that when she reaches the peak of her power, she can remove the things that were referenced earlier. Her victory may seem almost complete at this point. But despite her power, she only manages to win half the world, so it still has a chance to become itself again. I think this creates suspense and an expectation in this sense.

One of the consequences of this approach is that the gap between the words and images becomes very open. The child reader can have fun remembering the missing words, or perhaps making up their own or questioning them. They can play with their memory or imagination and participate in the story, as I invite them to do. They can become the author too.

I faced difficulties of all kinds throughout the making of the book. The constraints were huge and the difficulty to remain consistent until the end progressively increased. I can’t state all the difficulties I faced, but some were technical and related to the narrative (there’s sequences that I fully started, rewrote and redesigned, even though the book was already half done), and some were related to time and money. I initially tried to finance the book alone by accepting all the illustration work possible – but in doing so, I had no more time for the book. I felt like I was trapped under a spell, with every attempt to make the book moving the possibility of its completion even further away. Over time, my drawing was changing too, so I had to stop making new pages in order to redo the older ones.

What put an end to this vicious circle was the allocation of a creativity grant from the National Book Centre (CNL), which allowed me to work with the necessary continuity. I’m very grateful to them. My publisher at Albin Michel also provided me with constant support from beginning to end. We kept in touch by email and sometimes she had to read thousands of explanations, the poor thing! I’m kidding. Everyone at Albin Michel was great, really.

Illustrations © Blexbolex. Thanks to Claudia Bedrick (Enchanted Lion Books) for supplying the artwork text.

Founders of Hipopotam Studio, Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińscy are multiple award-winning graphic designers, authors, and creators of games, websites, applications and fonts. In 2010, they won the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi Award for their book, ‘Co z ciebie wyrośnie?’ (What will become of you?).
This post features work-in-progress and final spreads from Aleksandra’s and Daniel’s hugely successful ‘Mapy’ (Maps), which was first published by Polish publisher, Dwie Siostry, and has since been published in more than thirty countries.
Visit the Hipopotam Studio website

Daniel:‘Maps’ is an atlas of fifty-two maps, which are full of details and curiosities. The maps show not only borders, cities, rivers and peaks, but also the places of historical and cultural interest, eminent personalities, characteristic animals and plants, ways of spending free time, and many more fascinating features.

It took us three years to create Maps. Forty percent of this was research and fact checking – and fact checking again – and verifying every drawing with our editor and with dozens of editors of foreign editions.

First, we started with a print of a map – then we drew the first layer. Everything was drawn at exactly the same scale as it’s printed in the book.

Each small drawing was drawn separately and everything was combined in Photoshop.

We use a lot of hand lettering, and preparing all those foreign editions took us a long time. Because we’re control freaks, we were not satisfied when we asked someone else to draw the letters for us, so we designed two typefaces just for this book: Mrs White and Cartographer. It was very hard. To keep the organic feeling, you have to create a lot of alternate glyphs.

Each spread is filled with more than a hundred images (there’s over four thousand illustrations in the book). Every image is described, so you can see that in Roswell, there was this famous UFO crash – and in Poland, there are golumpkis, which is a very good food that is made from a cabbage and eaten with rice… and so on.

When we make our books, the pattern is always the same. We take a subject that’s interesting to us and is something that’s worth spreading. We pull it apart, choosing only the essence and the interesting bits – then we add some funny stories, because I truly believe that humour is the best medium for knowledge.

I really don’t have to hide the fact that a book or an app or a website is about education – because the world is interesting enough for children, and we just have to know how to show all the interesting stuff that surrounds us.

Some people think that buying ugly books is a necessary evil that goes with having a child. And I think they’re wrong. You can have a product that is enjoyable for children and interesting for parents. You go to any Pixar movie and you will have this feeling.

Recently, I was searching for a quote for a presentation – and I found this one that I think sums up our way of thinking about books for children. It’s from George Bernard Shaw: ”Make it a rule never to give a child a book that you would not read yourself.”

Illustrations and photographs © Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińscy.

Simone Rea was born in Albano Laziale where he lives and works. After studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and participating in several illustration courses, he became an illustrator. Simone has been selected for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition twice, and he was awarded a BIB Plaque at the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava.
In this post, Simone shares some development work and final illustrations from ‘L’uomo dei palloncini’ (The balloon man), which was written by Giovanna Zoboli and published by Topipittori. This beautiful picturebook is a stylistic departure for Simone, who talks about the new approach he took to illustrate Giovanna’s text.
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Simone: I received the proposal for this book three summers ago. Topipittori invited me to spend a few days in Vignola, where, in between walks through the forest, activities with children, and pieces of Barozzi cake, they presented me with this text by Giovanna Zoboli. It’s beautiful, simple and linear I told myself at the time. Almost three years have passed since then, and that text has hidden, and still hides, some great difficulties…

The first difficulty was in choosing the correct technique to use. I’ve used acrylic for many years, but I felt that acrylic wasn’t suited to this story. So Giovanna, Paolo Canton and I decided on pencils and pastels instead. This was the first time I’d worked with pencils and pastels for a professional project, so the greatest difficulties I faced were in using a brand new medium and in finding a style that was best suited to the poetic and evocative text.

Usually, I don’t do many rough drawings before creating the final illustrations – but in this case, there were many diverse elements: a balloon man, balloons, children, adults, and the locations the characters needed to move around in. Therefore, it was essential to do roughs!

A fundamental aspect for the success of any book is the pace – and in this case, it was quite complex. Unlike other books that I’ve worked on, the emptiness, or rather, the white space in this book plays a vital role and is key to the success of the images.

Discussing your work with other professionals is so important. In the case of this book, I was having issues with the balloon seller character. I’d already defined the character, but then I spent months trying to make him bigger and more prominent in the scenes. I tried for so long, but it just didn’t look right; the idea only worked in my head. And so, an obligatory ‘thank you’ goes to Pablo Auladell. Pablo said: “You can’t make the character bigger? Ok, that’s fine. Don’t make him bigger then.” It seems like quite a banal statement, but in fact, it’s not. Pablo’s affirmation underlines the importance of collaboration. It demonstrates how another professional’s eyes can help you to see the world from a different perspective. And then there was light!

Having fun with a project is always a strong temptation. I get very excited in the early stages, and it often seems like I have the whole storyboard in my head. But my excitement doesn’t always let me think clearly! And then, once the excitement subsides and those first doubts emerge, insecurities can replace new ideas, and it’s possible to lose focus…

Making a book is beautiful. Long live this profession! However, there are some ‘creative steps’ that you can’t really avoid. This was very much the case with the creation of this book because the creative steps infiltrated the whole process.

Some of the tasks for this book were very elaborate – such as the characterisation of the children and the compositions where they interact with each other. Each child has their own unique character and behaves very differently. There’s the one who sticks their finger in their nose, the one who pretends to be a superhero, the one who hides, the one who throws confetti, the shy child who plays ‘house’ in their head, and the one who’s dressed like a pirate.

The following illustration is very dear to me because it perfectly represents the spirit that I wanted the book to have.

Illustrations © Simone Rea.

Kaatje Vermeire studied Graphic Design and Advertising at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. She’s received a number of awards for her work, including a Boekenpluim (Book Plume) and a White Ravens Award. Kaatje’s books have been translated into many languages, which include Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English.
In this post, Kaatje describes her unique working process and shares some stunning roughs and illustrations from ‘Japie de Stapelaar’ (Jack the Stacker). This remarkable picturebook was written by the Dutch author, Bas Rompa, and published by De Eenhoorn.
Visit Kaatje Vermeire’s website

Kaatje: Jack is a collector. He collects all kinds of stuff that people from the village drop near his house, where he lives on his own with only his little dog, his birds, and the sounds of nature for company. As an inventor, he creates all kinds of things with these ‘lost’ materials. Although Jack seems like a bit of an outcast and a loner, he is actually quite sophisticated, intelligent and satisfied with his moderate way of living. One day, things are turned upside down when Jack discovers a suitcase full of old postcards. There’s one that grabs his attention because of the mysterious message from a girl on the back of the card: “I’m in heaven, it’s great here!” From that moment on, Jack knows that there is another world, far away, outside of his piles and stacks… He starts dreaming of other horizons and invents ways to get up to the clouds.

This is a philosophical story about letting go of the things you know and are familiar with, about holding on to dreams, about dealing with disappointment, and about imagination and ‘travelling’ inside your own head. The end, of course, I will not reveal. You need to buy the book to find out!

I immediately liked this text by Bas Rompa because of the high degree of identification and self-recognition; I am a huge collector myself! So it was quite easy for me to imagine the world of Jack by just looking at my own surroundings and the piles of objects in my atelier. I wanted to present Jack as an elderly person, but not old or dusty – a man full of energy, humour and imagination. As I often base my characters on people I know, I chose a client from the butchers I worked at for several years. He is a characteristic proud man with a white moustache and a lazy eye that looks the other way slightly. I find this to be very beautiful, but didn’t add it to my character because it would have made him look a bit crazy – and I didn’t want that.

As for the landscapes, they could be situated in Scandinavia, as well as here in our Belgian woods. I wanted this vast, wide endlessness to be in great contrast to Jack’s limited habitat.

As there is only one human character in the book, I thought it would be very boring to see Jack on every page, so I invented a little companion for him: a Jack Russell dog. For variety, I also tried to play with the perspective and I included some humour.

I spend a lot of time making sketches of my characters, drawing them in all kinds of poses. I took some photographs of the real Jack and then I started drawing. I found some of the poses hard to draw, so I asked my boyfriend to pose for me. The sketches I make are often monotypes on old, brown paper. I fear the white page, and monotype gives me more confidence and enables me to experiment more. It also causes stains and ‘noise’ on the paper, which happens by pure coincidence and immediately gives the drawings a certain atmosphere. I often like these sketches more than the end results because of their roughness, power and spontaneity.

After the sketches, I cut my separate figures and landscapes out of offset plates and make dry etchings out of them. I then print them all separately with my etching press. I scan all these elements into the computer and put them in separate layers in Photoshop. I then enlarge or decrease the elements in order to get the right composition for the text. My final illustrations are a combination of dry etchings, acrylic painting, coloured pencils and digital consolidation.

At the moment, my sketches and research for Jack the Stacker are part of an exhibition in Hasselt together with other Belgian illustrators. The aim of the exhibition is to give visitors a glimpse at the workplace of illustrators and authors though their sketchbooks, working materials, objects and other stuff that inspires them. These photos of my ‘simulated workspace’ show you the things that inspired me to create the illustrations for Jack the Stacker.

Illustrations and photographs © Kaatje Vermeire.

Elena Odriozola worked at an advertising agency before becoming a children’s book illustrator. She was a winner of the third CJ Picture Book Awards in Korea, her work was selected for the exhibition of the guest country at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and she was nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
In this post, Elena talks about her unique approach to illustrating Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, and she shares some development work, final illustrations, behind-the-scenes photos and a trailer for the book. This strikingly original interpretation of the much-loved classic was published by Nórdica Libros in 2013.
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Elena: I have to confess that, although I find it a little embarrassing, I had never read Frankenstein until I was commissioned to illustrate the book. That’s what sometimes happens when you’ve seen movie adaptations and so many other images that are a part of our collective memory. You get the feeling that you already know the story, and then it’s harder to read it. Or at least that’s what happens to me. In any case, I have not seen any Frankenstein as fearsome as the one that I imagined.

I also have to confess that while I read the book, at times I was scared. The scariest part was the monster’s ‘watery eyes’, and his black lips and extremely white teeth. I pictured him as terrible – unimaginably terrible. So much so that it wasn’t even worth it to draw him. The mental image of those eyes would be scarier than anything I could draw. I was also impressed by the speeches – whole paragraphs full of such rich vocabulary. And there was something else that surprised me. Dr. Frankenstein must have dug up a basketball team to create his creature; unless he was wearing huge shoes like in the movie, you tell me how else the monster could be as tall as he is described in the book. Whatever the case, I was always right there with him.

A lot of editors wouldn’t have thought of me to illustrate this book, and I was really happy when Diego Moreno of Nórdica Libros offered it to me. To illustrate a book with such an ingrained iconography is always a challenge. And what I appreciated most was that they entrusted it to me without demanding a particular aesthetic. The usual practice is that editors think they already know what you’re going to give them, and this is something that’s always bothered me – and increasingly so as time goes on.

I think I’ve created something quite distinct from the story that’s told. Although it’s distinct from its characters and setting, I feel that it captures the essence of the book: the irresponsibility and the guilt it entails.

Once I was clear about what I wanted to convey, I got down to drawing.

I liked the results, but something was missing. I wanted to keep the setting and the characters, but for whatever reason I thought that wouldn’t work. I’m not sure why, but I thought that it would be better if I turned it into a representation. So I started playing around. At first I tried to create a little movable theatre with the smallest possible number of pieces. But that idea didn’t work, and the little theatre turned into a great hulking thing.

Just like what happened to Frankenstein, I had to glue the pieces of the little theatre together, because if I’d tried to join them on just one side, the other side would be out of balance. I tried to tell myself that the final result was the most important thing – the photography (which was done by my photographer friend, Perdinande Sancho) and not the intricacies – but in my heart of hearts, I still felt a little guilty.

To achieve the desired effect, I gave the theatre true depth by making a very long stage. I also decided that I had to maintain the size of the character, as this is something I do in all of my books. So in the photos, the smallest figure you see is that way because it’s actually far away. This created focus problems.

I drew the character quite a bit bigger than the original version. I then scanned it into the computer and printed it on Sumi-e paper.

Once it was printed, I traced the lines and painted it with acrylic. I did it this way because if I’d drawn the face actual size, I wouldn’t have been able to give enough definition to the expressions – and that’s really important to me.

The depiction is carried out in two settings: the interior of the house with views to the outside, and the exterior of the house with a view to the inside. And the time portrayed goes from summer to winter. I substituted the usual white of my drawings for dark blue, which in my opinion was necessary for a horror story such as this. I think it’s much more frightening to come face to face with a monster in the dark. Well, everything is more frightening in the dark.

Like I said, if Dr. Frankenstein’s monster had been too detailed, it wouldn’t have worked for me. Those watery eyes are much more terrifying to imagine. We create the monster in our own minds.

Illustrations © Elena Odriozola. Photographs © Perdinande Sancho.

Yara Kono is a Brazilian illustrator who lives in Portugal and is part of the Planeta Tangerina team. She won an Honourable Mention at the first Compostela International Prize for Picture Books, and she received a Mention for ‘A Ilha’ (written by João Gomes de Abreu) in the Opera Prima Category at the 2013 Bologna Ragazzi Awards.
In this post, Yara talks about her working process and shares some wonderful illustrations from ‘ABZZZZ…’. This highly original alphabet book was written by Isabel Minhós Martins and is the most recent picturebook to be published by Planeta Tangerina.
Visit Planeta Tangerina’s website

Yara: Having a new text to illustrate is always a challenge, and I always try to take things a little further. The exploitation of the book as an object, the selection of the format, the most appropriate font, the colour palette, the illustration technique and the graphical composition… These are some of the essential issues at play when I illustrate a book.

‘ABZZZZ…’ had two specific challenges for me: the page composition and the colour palette. I selected a palette of brighter colours which I wasn’t used to working with at all. Really, these are colours which are far too vibrant for a book about sleep.

The idea was to juxtapose the brighter colours with black and also with some neutral shades – and that I’d try to simplify the illustrations as much as possible. This happened because, unlike most of the books I’ve illustrated in the past, I couldn’t create double-page illustrations for this one. As it’s an alphabet book, I had to create each page separately.

Since each page represents a single letter of the alphabet, each two pages of a spread needed to illustrate distinct and sometimes quite unique themes. It was therefore very challenging for me to create harmony across the spreads.

To begin with, there were pages with a lot of noise which were very rich in patterns and details… and I gradually realised that when you put the pages side by side, they didn’t look good. So I simplified them and cleaned them up until I arrived at an end result which I was happy with.

Illustrations © Yara Kono / Planeta Tangerina.

Chris Haughton’s first picturebook, ‘A Bit Lost’ has been translated into over twenty languages and has won many international awards, including the Premio Andersen Award. Chris co-founded the fair trade social business, NODE, and he was listed in Time Magazine’s ‘Design 100’ for his work with the fair trade company, People Tree.
In this post, Chris talks about the creation of his bold new picturebook with Walker Books, ‘Shh! We have a plan’. The book has been translated into numerous languages including Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese.
Visit Chris Haughton’s website

Chris: As an illustrator, it’s been drilled into me that I need to simplify everything to communicate something very elemental – so I try to find the very essence of a story and strip everything else back. One of the things I’ve been trying with my books is to tell stories as much as possible through images rather than through words. If the story can be read without language, it should have the ability to be understood by the very young.

I’d like to think all my books are told in a way that someone without language could understand, but I think this book could be the most visual of the three. It certainly has the least text. In fact, the total word count is a hundred and three, and ten of those words are ‘shh’, which I’m not sure is a word, but I counted it anyway.

I started sketching out ideas thinking there must be some way of making a chase/catch type book. It was sparked by seeing an incredibly inspiring show at the Edinburgh Fringe by Mr. Bunk called Swamp Juice. It brought me around to thinking of the Road Runner cartoons where there are elaborate plans which could work well visually. Quite suddenly, three goon-type characters trying to trap a bird popped into my head – and I thought it would be great if they each had a different plan. What I liked the best was there could be a drawn-out pantomime effect (similar to ‘A Bit Lost’ and ‘Oh No, George!’) with an anticipatory page-turn between ‘ready, steady’ – where the three position themselves to catch the bird – and ‘GO!’… where of course, they miss.

Finding the ending was easy as I had sort of come up with it in the beginning! The really tricky part was fitting it into the story. I originally had three other ‘good’ characters who were feeding the birds – but it seemed abrupt to introduce them midway. It seemed best to have a character with the answer the whole way through. The book seemed a little clunky and wordy when mocked up with four or five characters on every page, so together with my art director, Deirdre, we hit on the idea of a conversation happening across the page. There was lots of comic potential with this. It makes use of repetition, where each character repeats the same thing, over and over again. It’s predictable, but it also has a pantomime effect and is great for doing silly voices.

For my other two books, I’m always asked if I used paper cut, as they look quite like it – but in fact I didn’t use paper cut at all when creating the artwork. It was all pencil and digital. For this book though, because it had five characters on each page, it needed some sort of drastic simplification for it to be read clearly. Not only that, but I was keen for the conversations to read across the page, matching each line with the action of the character. There was so much shifting of compositions around on the pages that it became clear the best way to compose each page was by collage. In fact, it made perfect sense to create a mainly silhouette image from paper cut – and the design of the birds benefitted from it too.

For the final artwork I was keen that that the bird seemed somehow from another world – brightly coloured and abstracted and removed from the world of the characters. It focuses all our attention on the relatively tiny bird on the page, leads the reader through the pages of the book, and gives a punch of colour at the end. My other books are very colourful, so it was quite satisfying to try to work almost entirely in silhouette for this one. In fact, there were a lot of really interesting experiments with the colour. Usually full colour printing is in CMYK, but the whole of this book is printed in only CMK (blue, magenta and black), and the only yellow that appears in the book is in the colour of the birds. It was our hope that with this approach the bird would stand out completely from the rest of the book.

Illustrations and photographs © Chris Haughton. Trailer animated by Animade – Sound/music by Matt Wand.

Maurizio Quarello was born in Turin, where he studied graphic design, architecture and illustration. He’s illustrated over thirty books for publishers such as Orecchio Acerbo, Sarbacane, Rouergue, Barbara Fiore, Milan, Sterling, Kumon, SM and Gerstenberg. Maurizio has received many awards including an Andersen and IBBY Silverstar.
In this post, Maurizio shares some striking illustrations from ‘Mio padre il grande pirata’ (My father the great pirate). The poignant story by Davide Cali was inspired by those who left Italy seeking a better life after World War II, and by the Marcinelle mining disaster in 1956. The book was originally published in Italian by Orecchio Acerbo, and is soon to be published in English by Wilkins Farago.
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Maurizio: Since this is a fairly complex story in which there are many characters and lots of things happening, I decided to use a comic strip format on many of the pages by creating illustrations within cartoon panels. This allowed me to make the development of the scenes more cinematic and dynamic. The illustration technique I chose for the book is also close to the comic strip: pencil, hematite and inks.

It was an interesting challenge for me to illustrate this book. When the father of the child protagonist comes home, he tells his son that he’s a pirate and describes his various adventures on the high seas with his crew – when in reality, the father works as a miner abroad. The truth is revealed about halfway through the book, so I had to come up with a series of tricks to depict real miners who looked like pirates, and give the impression of them doing pirate things. Here and there in the first part, there are objects, facts and clues which come up again later and help to reconstruct the story – and also contribute to the game that is created between writer, illustrator and reader.

In addition, the story takes place in three different time periods and over a number of years. This set me the problem of underlining the passage of time and of differentiating the three different periods. I decided to do this by using a different colour palette depending on the background and atmosphere. So in the first part, when the father describes his fantastic adventures, the colours are warm, bright and cheerful – mainly red and yellow. In the second part, when the child discovers the truth after his father has a serious accident in the mine, the palette becomes cold and the colours gloomy – grey and blue. In the last part, which takes place in the present, the colours become more realistic.

Illustrations © Maurizio Quarello.

Jonathan Yamakami is a graphic designer from Brazil. After gaining a degree in Journalism from the University of São Paulo, he worked for five years with Conrad Editora in Brazil, and then for two years with Tara Books in India. In 2011, he moved to Rhode Island to pursue an MFA in Graphic Design. Jonathan currently lives in New York.
In this post, Jonathan reflects on his experience working on the exquisite book, ‘I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail’ with Tara Books. This edition of the 17th century English ‘trick’ poem was illustrated by Ramsingh Urveti, who is one of the most brilliant living artists of the Gond tradition. Ramsingh has won numerous international awards.
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Visit Jonathan Yamakami’s website

Jonathan: There was one thing that always struck me during my time as a designer with Tara Books. The number of projects which were waiting in line for someone (in this case a graphic designer) to claim them – no doubt the result of the creative energy of an office constantly brimming with new ideas. Looking back now, ‘I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail’ – a project that took almost two years to complete – was emblematic of my stay with Tara. It taught me a lot about book design and how essential time is in order for a project to mature. It illustrated the importance of collaboration while showing me that a designer must inevitably find their own voice in the midst of different opinions.

I remember the first time I saw the work of Gond artist, Ramsingh Urveti. Around the same period, I had been involved in designing another book, ‘Sita’s Ramayana’, a graphic novel with illustrations by Patua artist, Moyna Chitrakar. Moyna’s beautiful panels were so vivid and colourful, that Ramsingh’s black and white work felt to me like a quiet respite. It was silent and reserved and, for lack of a less obvious word, poetic.

As for the 17th century ‘trick’ poem, I was not familiar with it. It goes like this:

From the very beginning, the main question to me was: how do we create a book that presents both readings without actually printing the poem twice? A lot of different solutions were considered. I think Gita Wolf (Tara publisher) was the one who hinted at the direction of die-cutting, although she was still open to other possibilities. Using transparent paper and printing with two colors was another suggestion, but there was an issue of cost and, more importantly, it just seemed too complex for a poem that was in itself so simple. After all, once you crack the puzzle that it holds, you can’t help but wonder how you could have missed it to begin with.

We decided to pursue die-cutting as a solution and here I have to mention Katsumi Komagata, even though I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. I’d been a fan of his books for a few years and I was pretty excited when I found out that everybody at Tara shared the same admiration for his work. I remember seeing one of his books, ‘Namida’, for the first time when I was in Japan in 2007.

Now this is interesting because Tara had a good collection of Katsumi’s books in the office, but ‘Namida’ was not one of them. After I came back to Brazil, I saw this book on my shelf. I didn’t remember what the cover looked like, but I was so surprised when I saw it! It shows how much influence Katsumi had on ‘I Saw a Peacock’. Often while working on this project, I wondered what Katsumi would think of this book.

Below is the first dummy that I made. The cuts were all rectangular and quite functional: they existed so that the text on the following spread could be read. It’s a bit hard to explain why I felt that the die-cutting shouldn’t ‘interfere’ too much, but I was still attached to certain ideas of what a designer should or shouldn’t do, and how I was supposed to ‘lead’ the reader throughout this book. At that point, I thought that die-cutting should act much more as a magnifying glass, rather than add a new layer of meaning.

After producing this first dummy, I showed it to Gita, V. Geetha (Tara publisher) and Arumugam (Tara production manager), and received a positive response. Some time later, our London-based designer, Rathna Ramanathan was in the office and I asked for her opinion as well. She pointed out that the die-cutting should be reconsidered. Not in terms of shape, but in terms of their position on the page and their relationship with the illustrations. The cuts were also telling a narrative and I should be aware of that.

As I was about to restart work on the book, Tara received two other visitors: artist Gabrielle Manglou from Réunion, who was doing a residence with us, and designer Marion Bataille, who was in Chennai to launch her pop-up book, ‘ABC3D’. Once more, the first dummy was shown. Gabrielle’s impression was that the illustrations were not flowing throughout the book as lightly as the poem did. Part of it, she believed, was because I had used fixed positions for the text.

Marion’s opinion was a bit harder to digest. In her very sweet way, she said that the die-cutting wasn’t working at all, which took me aback. As a designer, you constantly have to present your ideas and receive feedback – that’s only natural. But I confess that it is hard when someone points out that whatever you have done is NOT working in the least – you can’t help feeling a bit lost. But Marion was also the first person to use the word ‘play’. The book had to be playful and, if there were so many possibilities lying there, why were the die-cuts so austere? Why was the text fixed in such a strong grid?

And that is how the second part of designing this book started. It was an exciting moment because I didn’t feel lost anymore – the question became how to do something rather than what to do. Die-cutting had to be organic and add to the illustrations. Trying to find out which shapes I could use for the cuts on a spread was an interesting puzzle because the same shapes still had to make sense once the page was turned. So I was looking for common imagery that I could use. The peacock feather could become a comet’s tail. The shape of a tear could also be the one of a flame. And again, when you’re working on a poetry book, there is so much freedom. As time passed, the shapes became bolder. The book starts with circles and simpler forms that grow in complexity.

So we reached the production stage, and here a new challenge arose. Up until that point I had done several different dummies by hand. But it is one thing to make one dummy yourself – another story is to print 3000 copies of a book.

We were lucky to be working with a very attentive printer in China, but there were a lot of trials to work through. Because the book doesn’t open entirely flat, some of the cuts moved, even only millimetres, and had to be repositioned. I remember some emails in which we asked the printer to move a circle one millimetre to the left. They reassured us and mentioned that part of the binding would be done by hand, and I guess it shows. The book was just beautifully done and we have to thank the printers for all their care.

My only regret about this project is the fact that I haven’t seen Ramsingh’s reaction to the final book; I was about to leave India when the copies were sent to him. I met him in Bhopal for a workshop in February 2010 and I found him to be extremely focused, introspective and very good at translating complex ideas into visuals. I hope we meet again and we’re able to talk about his impressions.

I don’t want to get nostalgic (if I start mentioning all the things and people that I miss in India, it might take a while) but I do miss the pace at Tara. I miss contemplation and working and reworking on projects. Obviously we always do and redo things, but there’s something about time and the processes it triggers. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet some of these people if it were not for the extended period in which I worked on this book.

Images and short film © Tara Books.

Shaun Tan grew up in Perth. As well as writing and illustrating world-renowned books, he’s worked as a concept artist for animated films such as Pixar’s WALL-E, and he directed the Academy Award-winning short film, ‘The Lost Thing’, with Passion Pictures Australia. In 2011, Shaun won the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
In this post, Shaun talks about the creation of ‘Rules of Summer’ and he gives a fascinating insight into his working process. This beautifully surreal picturebook was originally published by Hachette Australia in 2013, and has been translated into twenty languages.
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Visit Shaun Tan’s blog

Shaun:‘Rules of Summer’ is a picture book that had a very long gestation, I’d been thinking about it for a decade or so, mainly trying to figure out just what the story could be. I routinely draw lots of little vignettes in small sketchbooks, like loose bones in search of some connective tissue that might lead to a narrative, and in this case that narrative proved very hard to find. I just had lots of scenes of two characters, modeled more or less on myself and my older brother as kids, getting caught in all manner of odd situations. Eventually it occurred to me to forget about story altogether – why not? In fact, one thing I love about picture books is an ability to depart from linear narrative, and particularly from explanation. I think readers appreciate that too, the ability to freely imagine what is going on in each picture.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean, here are a couple of consecutive images with very spare text. ‘Never leave a red sock on the clothesline’ is a kind of self-contained little story of its own, albeit very enigmatic.

Turning the page finds us in another place altogether, with the cautionary line, ‘Never eat the last olive at a party’.

For me this kind of structure, or lack thereof, actually reminds me of childhood, the memory of which can feel quite jumbled and discontinuous. At the same time, there’s a sort of emotional connectivity under the surface (always the same two boys with a particular power relationship), and that’s always been my main interest: how we identify ourselves, and our values and desires, within a changing and unexpected world.

But rather than talk too much about overall themes, I thought it would be more interesting to focus on a single illustration, and look at some progressive ideas and sketches. I think I’m quite a slow illustrator, and have a habit of drawing the same images over and over again, and this is a good place to show a little of this working style.

First the concept, which usually comes to me as quite a vague mental picture. In this case, centred on the relationship between a person and a gang of oddball creatures, something along the lines of this much earlier illustration from my book ‘Tales from Outer Suburbia’.

The creature with a single big eye in particular tends to recur throughout my work, as do scenes of humans trying to relate to non-humans, as you can see in this pencil drawing some years later.

It’s a sort of evolutionary step, towards Rules of Summer (at the time just called ‘summer project’ in my filing cabinet) in which the focus has shifted to a relationship between two human characters, possibly a brother and sister. In the above drawing, one of them is enjoying a backyard birthday party while the other is left out, but we don’t quite know the reason. Maybe he wasn’t invited, or forgot to bring a gift, or shy, we just don’t know.

Here’s another similar scene sketched with a biro, for a possible graphic novel: I plotted out some eighty pages before deciding it didn’t feel quite right.

Here the two characters, now both boys, are having an argument over a boundary line, which leads to a fight. The creatures are a gang of dismayed onlookers, the idea being that they represent a deeper emotional knowledge beneath all the bickering. I still like these scenes very much, but unfortunately I could not wrangle a sustained tale out of them, and it all felt a bit overwrought.

So then I thought, let’s forget about storylines or sequencing, and just see how different ideas look when shuffled together randomly, as in this notebook doodle.

Most of these sketchy vignettes fell by the wayside, but not without establishing a kind of tone or loose scaffolding. One idea that survived was, again, this ‘creature-gang’ scene (hard to see here, with the caption ‘some are good at making friends’). I liked it because it reminded me of certain real childhood experiences.

Here is the creature-gang doodle elaborated. What you can see is a group of several creatures marching along in the foreground, led by a boy who is waving to another boy in the background, who is reading a book beside a big creature on a hill.

The concept here has something to do with competition, pride and envy: one kid is demonstrating how good he is at making lots of friends – literally, since all the creatures are big robots – while the other is being left behind. Notably, a sort of boundary line is still present, defined by a road.

Here’s the same scene sketched again, but with the emotional tone adjusted.

The boy on the hill is building the one-eyed creature, and is far from finished. The other, now more defined as an older brother, is essentially ignoring the younger and regarding his watch, his body language radiating impatience. The working caption was simply ‘don’t be late’. I liked this variation because the relationship between the characters now felt slightly autobiographical. I identify with the younger incompetent one!

So once I think the concept sketch is working, I’ll refine my drawings on a larger piece of paper. Often what I do is scan and enlarge the concept sketch, and trace over it on a lightbox to get the basic composition, and then refine each element.

My attention here is mainly on composition and character, how the viewer’s eye moves through an image, and what emotional resonances can be conveyed – as well as getting the balance of weirdness and familiarity just right, with not too much of either. You want to invite the reader through the door without telling them where they are.

Next I’ll create a small colour sketch using acrylic paint and pastel crayons, thinking about light, atmosphere as well at the way that colour can draw attention to certain details, such as the one-eyed creature on the hill. I wanted the mood of the painting to be delightful, partly because it’s a fun scene, but also to contrast with a darker tension between the brothers. I always enjoy that kind of ambiguous mood.

Now happy with the composition, I began working on a final painting with pastel crayons on a large bit of unprimed canvas, enjoying the softness and immediacy of this medium. While this painting is fine on its own, the feeling wasn’t quite right for the book overall, perhaps a little too dark or static, the details a bit fussy.

I started over again, this time working in oils, using mainly a palette knife to achieve a slightly less controlled texture, and hoped this might liven up the scene.

So here is the final oil painting, 30 x 34 inches, executed over several stages and taking about four to five working days.

The main difference is a brighter colour, closer to the original colour sketch, but you’ll also notice some elements changed (a fish and bird removed, some buildings added). I don’t think this is necessarily a better painting, but it’s better for this moment in the book, which needed to feel sunny and bright. One advantage of oil paint is that it’s easy to revise, unlike pastels. That’s important when working on a series, as sometimes I need to go back and make little changes, anything from a character’s face to an overall varnish of colour. While I can edit digitally, I prefer to get things right by hand as much as possible.

The final text accompanying the image is small and understated on the facing page, ‘Never be late for a parade’. It adds a little context without over-interpreting the painting, and the word ‘Never’ ended up as a connecting thread between all pictures, and ultimately informed the title, ‘Rules of Summer’. I will often rewrite the text multiple times as the last part of a book project, in part because it’s far easier to change than the paintings!

So that’s an example of one piece of a larger puzzle, and I always feel that the unseen evolution of an idea is as interesting as the final result. After all, that’s the thing that gets me hooked as a creator, having a sense that something is bubbling its way to the surface, and really just wanting to see what it looks like! The complete work is often slightly surprising: oh, so that’s what it looks like. Nothing to do but go back to the sketchbook and move on to the next one…

Illustrations © Shaun Tan.

Violeta Lópiz was born in Ibiza and later moved to Madrid, where she studied illustration at the Escuela de Arte 10. Since 2006, she’s illustrated books with Éditions du Rouergue, Kalandraka, Edelvives, Almadraba, Macmillan, Anaya and Topipittori. Violeta was a winner of the third CJ Picture Book Awards in Korea.
In this post, Violeta shares some development work and final illustrations from ‘Amigos Do Peito’ (Friends from the heart), which was written by Cláudio Thebas and published by Bruaá Editora. This beautifully illustrated picturebook is a stylistic departure for Violeta.
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Violeta: When Bruaá invited me to illustrate Cláudio Thebas’s poem, I liked the text because of its simplicity. I thought it was so simple that I could illustrate it quickly – something that I often try, but never manage to achieve.

My slowness is nothing but my brain’s need to reset itself every time it faces a new project. It forgets everything that it has done up to that point and needs quite a while to repair itself and be able to produce something new.

This time, the first thing I did to reset my brain was move to Lisbon (thanks to the generosity of the Portuguese Screen Printing Centre that hosted me). The second thing I did was to read the poem over and over again, which made me understand that it’s not a simple text at all, as it gives away almost no clues and doesn’t have a storyline.

(I spent a large part of my Lisbon life stuck in a chair.)

The third thing I did was to find Miguel, one of Bruaá’s two editors, who proved to be a gentleman from another time. He gave me the Cantigas do Maio album by José Afonso and a blind trust that left me stunned.

I devoted half of the time to deciphering what Cláudio’s text was telling me and the other half trying to understand what I wanted to convey. Finding the idea, matching it with the text, the style, the content, the technique, the page sequence, the intention, the characters, the sizes, the composition, the relationship with the text, the setting of the text… all of that amounts to quite a laborious puzzle.

At some points, I felt like a clumsy Buster Keaton setting up an old tent. I would hoist up one of the little sticks and another one would fall down; when I had three sticks up, I couldn’t reach the nails and they all fell down again; and when there was only the fourth stick to go, a bear came and I had to run off.

My process is quite a chaotic one. I allow myself to be guided by my intuition. If I get tired of researching, I start drawing or writing, and when I run out of ideas, I switch tasks again. This a trick that Linda Wolfsgruber taught me when she saw me getting blocked.

For this project, I decided to explore the relationship between places and people, architecture and feelings, mental maps, places on the body, in the mind, on the street… The memories that live in those places and the places that live within memories.

I submerged myself in the architecture and the cartography — collecting houses, roofs, chimneys, shops, walls, windows, squares, markets and routes.

I was ready to do two things that I didn’t know how to do before: draw buildings and paint with felt-tip pens.

At the same time, I felt the need to tell a story with images – a story that would personally link me to the work. And there, I rediscovered something I had originally discovered as a little girl: realising that something exists when that something is no longer there…

Thanks to spending time alone, I noticed things that I didn’t notice when someone was with me. One of these things was the pleasure and the need to have friends.

Even though it scared me a bit, I decided to distance myself from the text and illustrate what I felt about friendship. I would let the images be in contrast to the text but talk about the same thing.

I planned out the story so that the protagonist would always appear alone. Only the places would be left over from the friends who were no longer there. By replacing the children with places, a tension would be created, as well as a contrast which would be resolved by an emotive ending.

With this approach, I felt that the reader would be invited to search for the place where Cláudio says the protagonist’s friends live.

I continued sketching and defining images…

The searching phase ended when I produced the following image.

After the learning and the exploration, what is left is the choice of a path – which in my case begins with a sign. This sign is the surprise of doing an illustration that I really like, and that I still like after several days. Once found, it serves me as a guide for the rest of the work to be done.

The final stage was planning the pages of the book: the composition and all the elements. I did the storyboard the size of a matchbox and I showed it to Bruaá. Slowly, the pages got filled.

I really enjoyed painting the people and hiding all of my friends inside the illustrations.

The music to this book is José Afonso; the theme is the crazy wind on the Rua dos Industriais and the alarm to change the firefighter’s shift; the smell is the wet streets of Lisbon and the ink of master Marçal’s studio; the taste is quince, requeijão and Portuguese stew; the book is ‘Maps of the imagination’ by Peter Turchi.

Illustrations © Violeta Lópiz.

Benjamin Chaud was born in Briançon in the Hautes-Alpes and he studied drawing and applied arts at the Arts Appliqués in Paris and the Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. He’s worked with numerous publishers including Albin Michel and Actes Sud, and his award-winning books have been translated into over twenty languages.
In this post, Benjamin talks about the creation of ‘Une chanson d’ours’ (The Bear’s Song). This richly illustrated picturebook was originally published in French by Hélium, and has been translated into many languages including English, Russian, Polish and Dutch.
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Benjamin: It all started with this poster I created for an opera called ‘La maison est en carton’ (The house is made of cardboard)…

As well as being an image for on opera, it was also about the birth of my first child. I really liked working on this image and I wanted to create more images like it.

I proposed to Sophie Giraud, the editor of Hélium, that I create a book with these kinds of images and she said, “alright, create something like ‘Where’s Wally?’ in opera with a papa kangaroo and his little kangaroo” (in the same way that I always carried my baby around in a sling)…

I don’t like drawing kangaroos, so I drew bears, which I feel closer to as far as animals go – and I went on to recount what it’s like being a dad.

As I really liked making this book and it was mostly well-received, I have since made a second one. And as I just had my second child, I continued with the adventures of papa bear in a third book which is quite autobiographical.

For ‘The Bear’s Song’, I didn’t really know if I was capable of doing it, and I didn’t think I’d enjoy creating images with so much detail – but once I got started, I began to slowly enjoy myself.

I started by making tiny sketches. To work out the composition, I imagined situations and people, and then tried to put it all down on paper – a bit like doing a puzzle.

I’ve always liked to create imaginary worlds. It’s a bit like being God and being able to decide all that happens – I have a lot of patience for that. But sometimes I ask myself, “What possessed me to make a book with so many people and details?”… and then I draw someone I know, doing something silly in the corner of a page, and I end up laughing to myself over my work.

It’s impossible for me to imagine so many characters, so I draw friends, family members or famous people. This helps me a lot; knowing that they actually exist allows me to know how they move, what they do, how they’re dressed… and I make them all star in my made-up movie.

For this book, it was very important to make myself laugh while drawing, otherwise I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to finish the images.

I had to really simplify the colours all the way to the bare essentials. There’s so much detail in the images, I couldn’t add realistic colours to the characters because it would have taken too much time to do so, and the image would have become illegible. And this turned out for the best, as it allowed me to stylise my work and find strong colour guidelines – something that I still don’t always accomplish in my work.

Illustrations © Benjamin Chaud.

Vitali Konstantinov was born in Ukraine and lives in Germany. After studying architecture, graphic arts, painting and art history, he became an illustrator, and has now illustrated books with publishers all over the world. Vitali was nominated for the German Children’s Literature Award and The White Ravens Award.
In this post, Vitali shares some of his fantastic illustrations from ‘Seis Barbudos’ (Six Bearded Men), which was written by Mar Pavón and published in Spain by OQO Editora. Vitali talks about the challenge of illustrating Mar’s text, which is very open to interpretation.
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Vitali: The text for ‘Seis Barbudos’ is a little bit abstract and funny and has a strictly rhythmic structure - like a counting-out rhyme or like the famous song about the ten little… you know, indigenous guys, or ten brothers in the Yiddish tradition.

The author doesn’t define exactly who the protagonists are. We only read about other people’s reaction when they meet the Barbudos; they are irritated, shocked, suspicious, and nobody expects anything good from them at all. But all the Barbudos want to do is buy some bread, chorizo, fairy tale books and various other things. So I saw this as a story about tolerance and intolerance, and about prejudices.

I live as an immigrant in Germany – I’m not blonde and I have a full beard – so I know very well what it means to be a stranger… especially a bearded stranger! Furthermore, men with long beards are usually representative of some marginal groups in society: religious fundamentalists (Islamic, Jewish, Orthodox Christians, etc), bikers, yogis, hippies, artists, hobos, etc. Even the word ‘hobo’ in Italian is ‘barbone’ – from ‘barba’, which means ‘beard’.

The first challenge for me was how I should represent these bearded characters in the illustrations. I didn’t want any religious allusions in there. It’s a funny children’s book after all!

Eventially, I found the solution…

Throughout the book, I illustrated the Barbudos as mysterious, unidentifiable, ominous silhouettes. But of course, I know who they are!

All the mysterious preparations the Barbudos are doing in the book are for the birthday party of a poor boy – this is the surprise happy ending in the text. But to add another narrative layer with the illustrations, on the final page I surprise the reader (hopefully) by revealing the true identity of the Barbudos. I won’t reveal the funny joke here; the book is available!

The second challenge was drawing the imaginary vehicles. Each Barbudo goes away (don’t worry, they’re not killed off!) in a strange vehicle. The author invented crazy names for the vehicles, so I had to learn the spanish wordplay and then design a ‘petal-wheel’, ‘monkey-bus’ and more. For me, this book is a good example of the relationship between words and pictures – between ‘show’ and ‘don’t show’ – ‘tell’ and ‘don’t tell’.

With my books, there’s a flowing transition from sketching to final artwork. I don’t really like to keep my sketches and normally I just cast them away; if you’re going to a restaurant for dinner, it’s best you don’t see their kitchen, right? However, for this post I found some scribbles (although I hesitated in showing them!). Here’s my first storyboard and a composition idea for one of the spreads, as well as my first attempt at the characters using a different technique (coloured ink).

What about the technique I used for the final illustrations? It’s the most simple technique in the world: pencil and crayon drawings on paper. Okay, I used a very good handmade French paper and the best German fixative!

Illustrations © Vitali Konstantinov.

Marianne Dubuc received her degree in graphic design from the University of Quebec, Montreal. She’s created many different kinds of books for readers of all ages, and her work has been published in fifteen countries. In 2014, The Canada Council for the Arts awarded Marianne a Governor General’s Literary Award.
In this post, Marianne talks about the creation of her award-winning picturebook, ‘Le Lion et l’oiseau’ (The Lion and the Bird). This enchanting story was first published in French by Éditions de La Pastèque, and has been translated into many languages.
Visit Marianne Dubuc’s website

Marianne:‘The Lion and the Bird’ was written in a few minutes. This is often how my stories come to life: writing really quickly what comes into my mind. It can take a few hours, days, months or even (as in this case) years for the story to start forming clearly in my head – but once this happens, I have to write it down very quickly or it will drift away.

When I’m searching for a new book idea, I usually write continuously in a notebook, as if I were talking to it. It’s a little bit like automatic writing, where you write everything that comes into your mind, without censoring yourself. That is how my brain feels free to create stories. It’s very funny to go back to my old notebooks and see all the stories that I’ve started. Some are good – others are horrible.

I tend to see my stories in images before I write them down in my notebook. At this stage, I rarely write the actual text that will be read in the book – that part comes later in the process. I simply write the story as it comes to me, as if I were telling it to someone.

My first published book was ‘La mer’ (The sea) – a wordless picture book about a cat who follows a winged fish on a long adventure.

The publisher, Éditions de La Pastèque, asked me if I had another project, but having children and making other books took a lot of my time… so years passed before I had a new idea to present to them. It was really important to me that my next project with La Pastèque was a strong one, since ‘La mer’ was my favourite book, and I wanted to make another one in the same spirit.

I knew I wanted to write a story about two characters – two friends – and that they would be animals. I always tell stories with animal characters in them. I don’t like to draw humans; I haven’t found a way to draw them that satisfies me yet. I think that when drawing animals, I give myself more freedom of interpretation than I do with humans.

‘The Lion and the Bird’ is the story of a Lion who finds a wounded bird on a chilly autumn day. The bird’s flock is flying south for the winter, but he can’t go with them because his wing is broken. Lion takes Bird to his house, and they pass the long winter months together, happy to have each other. But in the spring, the other birds return. Bird has to decide whether he should fly north with his family or stay with Lion.

Growing up as an only child, my family and friends were really important to me. With many of them, we’ve grown apart for different reasons; some of them moved away (or I moved away) and others simply changed. C’est la vie. ‘The Lion and the Bird’ is about life’s way of taking people away from the ones they love. It’s also about letting go of the ones you love, and having faith in life’s way of sending them back your way some day.

One day, many years ago, I was sad because I felt I was slowly losing one of my best friends. My mother told me (I remember her exact words): “Marianne, sometimes in life people drift apart. But you’ll see… you might cross them in the street ten years from now, and your friendship will come back as if nothing ever happened.” And that is exactly what happened for me with this particular friend… and it’s what I hope will happen with other people who are no longer in my life.

When I wrote the story for ‘The Lion and the Bird’, I actually saw the book in images first. It usually happens this way when I create a book. I knew I wanted to add words, but not too many. I wanted the text and the images to work together, with the words adding just what was needed so the story would be threaded from beginning to end. I am particularly fond of wordless picture books. I like the openness they give to the readers to interpret the story in their own way.

So my intention for ‘The Lion and the Bird’ was to create the story with images and add the text afterwards. I had no idea if this would work the way I intended it to, but it actually did. It even surpassed my expectations. I realised that the absence of words and the silences that come throughout the story leave space for the readers’ emotions and interpretations. I think this is why the book touches so many readers.

I like the following image because to me it expresses the calm contentment of being with someone you’re happy with. It seems like a nice place to be.

As I wrote the book, I wanted it to be full of silences. There had to be a rhythm: the rhythm of time and of the seasons passing. This is expressed in many ways. For example, some pages might have only two or three words, or none at all, and there are two completely blank spreads in the middle of the book, representing the passing of the long months of winter (I live in Quebec, where winter lasts forever!). But I guess it’s hard to explain this simply in words – and I think in order to understand the importance of the rhythm of this book, you would need to read it.

I made the rough drawings for the book using a graphics tablet. I don’t usually use those devices because I feel it changes my style; I prefer to use my mechanical pencil. But this way is quicker for touch ups. I actually like the style of these roughs. It might be something I could try for a book in the future.

I used watercolour and pencil to do the illustrations. I have always preferred my roughs to my final images. I find them more spontaneous (I think I am not the only illustrator to say this!). In this book, I tried a new technique: I did the watercolour first, then I drew all of the black lines on top using a 2B mechanical pencil. This technique gave me a chance to draw spontaneously, knowing I could erase the pencil if I made a mistake. I also used some wood colouring pencils, which is usually my main medium.

Valerio Vidali is an Italian illustrator who lives in Berlin. He was a winner of ILUSTRARTE: the Biennial of Children’s Book Illustration in Portugal, and the CJ Picture Book Awards in Korea. Valerio has been selected for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition four times and his work has been published in more than a dozen countries.
In this post, Valerio talks about the creation of ‘Jemmy Button’, which is the result of his fascinating collaboration with American artist, Jennifer Uman. This beautifully illustrated picturebook is based on the true story of a native boy from Tierra del Fuego, who was brought to England in the mid-1800s to be ‘educated’ and ‘civilised’.
Visit Valerio Vidali’s website
Visit Jennifer Uman’s website

Valerio: I received the first email from Jennifer on June 12th, 2008. It contained a delightful small painting on canvas, depicting a grey-haired gentleman holding a tiny red cat in his hand. Jennifer told me that even though we didn’t know each other, I had been the inspiration for the painting. Me, of all people! She assured me it was true. The email was written in a bizarre and surreal Italian. Jennifer had seen my work and liked it – and realising I couldn’t speak any English, she resorted to Google Translate.

As I had the chance to observe, Jennifer is a formidable self-taught painter with a unique language and sensibility. In addition to the ‘colour’ the translations added to our conversations, I was surprised and amused by her way of speaking and being. Almost without realising it, I found myself waiting impatiently for her next email. At an almost daily pace, Jennifer told me about New York, about the films of Satyajit Ray and Horace Pippin, and about the birds singing outside her window. I talked to her about Barcelona, El Raval, my stolen bike, Botero’s cat and, amongst many other things, about Jemmy Button.

Jemmy Button was a child from the Yamana tribe (a native from Tierra del Fuego), who was taken hostage and brought to Europe in 1830 by Captain Robert FitzRoy aboard the HMS Beagle (the ship that later became famous for accompanying Darwin on his voyages). The kidnapping was planned as punitive retaliation for the theft of a boat by the natives. After failing to recover the stolen boat, FitzRoy, who was a refined aristocratic gentleman with a penchant for science, decided he would bring the hostage back to England, in what would become a kind of sociological experiment.

The idea was to educate Jemmy according to the principles and the lifestyle of Victorian England and, after a few years, to bring him back to his home land, hoping that he’d be able to ‘civilise’ his fellow natives.

In London, Jemmy became a celebrity. He quickly became accustomed to his stylish new clothes, he learned English, the rules of etiquette and the proper way to talk to a lady. He also proved prone to a certain kind of vanity; he met the Queen and he moved in the highest social circles. Nevertheless, a year later when he went back home during the second expedition of the Beagle, it took him no longer than a few moments to fully embrace his old self (under the disappointed supervision of Darwin).

I came across this story by accident and I fell deeply in love with it. The few publications on the subject were almost exclusively in English, and Jennifer, who in the meantime had been captured by it as much as me, began to buy and read all the books she could find. As she advanced in her reading, Jennifer sent me page after page of summaries about what she was reading – summaries that Google Translate inevitably turned into a messy pile of incomprehensible sentences without any logical connection between them. Such generosity and enthusiasm was touching, and it mattered little that I didn’t understand a word of what she wrote.

The more we explored Jemmy’s life, the more a desire to turn his story into a book manifested itself in both of us. So one day Jennifer said, “Hey! Why don’t you come to New York and we can do this book together?” “Mmmm… okay!” I replied.

In 2010, I flew to New York and met Jennifer for the first time. I don’t know what we were thinking before then, but in that precise moment we realised that we’d been far too optimistic about our ability to communicate. Both very embarrassed, we sat in front of each other and began to gesticulate like two orang-utans.

During the first few weeks, Jennifer led me through the wonders of the big city; we visited the museums and the many secret places the city has to offer and, just like Jemmy, I got used to my new situation. Every morning I took the subway and went to Jennifer’s house. We sat beside each other at the kitchen table and we drew in silence.

The story of Jemmy Button offered many different interpretations. On the one hand, there’s the story of the abduction of a child and of a cultural violence that’s hard even to imagine, and on the other, there’s the story of an extraordinary adventure: the journey of a fifteen year old boy in a new and incredible world. We felt it was important to tell both of these stories, but we didn’t want to pass moral judgements on historical facts.

The aspect that was dearest to us was that of travel and change. We wanted to talk about the nostalgia and restlessness experienced by someone who has changed dramatically and is trapped between two worlds and two different ways of being.

We wanted to create images with a narrative that could work even without text. Once we found the basic structure of the story, we started working on the final pictures. We were drawing simultaneously on the same sheet of paper, or on two separate sheets that we would then exchange with each other, so that the other could continue to work. Both of us could intervene and change the work of the other at any time – and if one of us wasn’t satisfied with a certain picture, it was redone until we were both happy with the result.

Despite the initial difficulties due to our cumbersome communication, the creation of the book was surprisingly spontaneous and natural. Our way of thinking and drawing was very different, and this greatly enriched our collaboration. Before then, illustration had been for a me a solitary and self-referential work. Jennifer injected into me her love for tiny details and taught me a new way of drawing, based on heavy brush strokes, dripping with paint, a way of drawing where it’s permissible to dilute oil paints with water, and where people’s noses resemble the letters of an exotic script.

The last thing we worked on was the text. Jennifer and I wanted a dry, precise text that could interact with the images and reinforce their meaning. We entrusted a writer friend, Alix Barzelay, with the task of finding the most appropriate words. After about six months of intensive work, our Jemmy was ready to leave Jennifer’s kitchen table and go off in search of a publishing house.

Jennifer and I spent the night of December 16th listening to ‘Coffee Break for Heroes and Villains’, the radio show of Noah (her husband), who dedicated to me the introduction of ‘The Warriors’, one of my favourite ‘New York movies’. The next morning I flew back to Milan.

Isol (Marisol Misenta) is an Argentine pop singer, illustrator and picturebook maker. Since her first book was published in 1997, she’s produced an impressive body of work and has won many awards. For her contribution to children’s and young adult literature, Isol received the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2013.
In this post, Isol talks about the creation of ‘La bella Griselda’ (Beautiful Griselda) and she shares some wonderful development work. This striking picturebook about the pitfalls of narcissism was originally published in Spanish by Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Visit Isol’s website

Isol: This book was born from a popular phrase which is related to the idea of metaphorically losing one’s head over someone. The literal illustration of this phrase, which is like a compliment when said of someone (‘she is so beautiful that everyone loses their head over her’), was the trigger for the entire story of Princess Griselda. The image of this situation seemed disturbing and comic to me, with the heads of the suitors rolling around her.

What would you do with so many heads? Collect them? Something about the values of the perfect princess, of conquests for the ego, seemed to be stripped bare after continually drawing and taking to the extreme the situation where beauty never brings real happiness to its owner.

The princess starts to wish she could find someone who doesn’t succumb to her beauty, so she calls to a nearly-blind prince who will last at least a couple of hours…

… until the moment arrives in which the protagonist herself happily loses her own head when she becomes a mother.

The sketches were done in pencil and I kept showing others the progression of my drawing. I changed parts of the story as time went on after conversations with my friends and colleagues.

As you can see, my early sketches are very similar to some of the final illustrations.

The pages after Griselda loses her head were initially the most work for me, as finishing a story is always the most difficult part. Leaving a girl without a mother could be very sad, so I had to be delicate with the final illustrations.

The final phrase of the book is difficult to translate into some languages because it’s a play on words that only works in Latin languages (‘the daughter loves to assemble jigsaw puzzles’… the word for ‘jigsaw puzzles’ is literally ‘break heads’ in Spanish). So for the English version, I had to find another way.

With my books, I always work a lot on the text so that it’s concise and powerful – and I do the same with the drawings.

Once I had finished the sketches, I took quite a while to find the right visual language for the book. I didn’t have faith in the flowing and simple lines of the sketches, and I wanted to research other possibilities.

For example, I used ink sgraffito and oil pastels, but it started to lose fluidity and looked overdone. In the end, I returned to a line similar to that of the sketches, in which the expression of the characters was the most clear. But I had trouble developing the final drawings and their expression. I ended up working with pencil and pen on tracing paper.

Another challenge was having to draw scenes in which a lot was happening – and scenes with many people, which was something I hadn’t done in my previous books. It was clear that I had to draw the interior of the palace where Griselda lived, or at least evoke it somehow. I worked with pastel on paper, then took photos and tried them out.

There’s so many options! Working with the computer can be a never-ending story; I had to simplify matters. I think that it was for that reason that I finally decided to use only four colours in the entire book, and only Pantone colours, which are colours from a special international palette.

I’ve loved using solid colours ever since I did serigraphy (silkscreens) and etching, where the colours are applied separately. I played with the transparencies and overlapping of the colours, and with the colours of the lines of the characters. I also had to learn how to work with separate inks; it took me a while but it was very interesting, and having those possibilities and limitations resolved other questions for me. I worked by using channels in Photoshop – not the standard CMYK colours.

I decided the colours were going to be blue, orange, black and pale yellow. And for the first time, I used patterns taken from origami papers to make the costumes and the castle decorations, processing them and putting them into the drawing.

I was also influenced by the floral designs of medieval tapestries, which were a great reference point as they’ve fascinated me for some time. In fact, I used a composition similar to that of the 15th century tapestry, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ for the front cover.

I also took photos of some mosaics that I have on the floor of my house and I used them on the floor of Griselda’s castle.

The great Paolo Uccello was a reference point for the knights.

Having the text included in the images meant I had to think about the design as a whole and make sure that the background didn’t make it difficult to read.

And in the countryside background when Griselda is in the carriage, there are real castles. I needed something that was weighty and concrete for the buildings – something that wasn’t light or movable like my drawings, but heavier. So I put real castles in the background of the illustration to give it strength.

Here you can see the development of a few of my other illustrations. There’s early and final versions of the medieval joust and of Griselda feeling bored. I really think that thanks to the time I dedicated to this project, the images improved a lot and the book has taken on a coherent and strong aesthetic, without losing any of its freshness or humour.

Bernardo P. Carvalho is a graduate of the Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts and a co-founder of Planeta Tangerina. He was a winner of the second CJ Picture Book Awards in Korea, the National Illustration Award, and he received honourable mentions for the ‘Best Book Design from all over the World’ award at the Leipzig Book Fair.
In this post, Bernardo talks about the creation of his ingenious picturebook, ‘Olhe, por favor, não viu uma luzinha a piscar? / Corre, coelhinho, corre’ (Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run). He also shares artwork from two more stunning books from Planeta Tangerina, ‘The World in a Second’ and ‘Two Roads’.
Visit Planeta Tangerina’s website

Bernardo: This book’s story started a long time ago, when here at Planeta Tangerina we started with this idea of trying to tell parallel stories and different things that take place at the same time, in the same book.

I believe that being editors as well as illustrators gives us a great advantage in being able to take chances and make books as we wish to make them – about whichever topics we wish – rather than merely working on-demand.

With this comes the desire to explore and knead the book in a different way – to tell stories from left to right, from right to left, and both ways simultaneously.

Anything is allowed, except making folds, holes in the pages or pop-ups, because that’s cheating (and very expensive).

When talking about ‘Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run’, it’s impossible not to at least mention two other books:

In ‘The World in a Second’ (Planeta Tangerina, 2006 – to be published in English by Enchanted Lion Books in April 2015), we froze the world for one second and looked at the many things that happen at precisely that second, all around the world.

‘Two Roads’ (Planeta Tangerina, 2009) is a book with two parallel stories that, in a similar way to ‘Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run’, move in opposite directions – but in this case with text and drawings overlaid and inverted.

In that sense, ‘Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run’ is a sort of extension of this idea of telling things that are happening at exactly the same time, or as in this instance, two different stories that share the same stage, or one story that gives rise to another, or stories that latch onto one another in a never-ending loop.

When one ends, the next one starts – and it starts because the other one has ended.

Confused? It sounds confusing when told this way, but it isn’t.

The most important thing was to get the reader to follow just one story without consciously being aware of the other one, or at least to make sure the other story didn’t get in the way of the first one, and vice versa.

As always, I ruminated over the idea for some time, making tons of small sequences in my sketchbooks and on spare pieces of paper or coffee napkins that I then subsequently lost here and there… and for this reason I apologise for the lack of sketches, as I’m very disorganised and found almost nothing.

Due to my lack of discipline, or just because I enjoy experimenting, or for some other reason, I rarely reuse the same technique from one book to the next, and this one was no exception. That’s why I decided to illustrate it with watercolour – something I’d never done before.

Techniques where patience and precision are paramount are not my strength, and I’m usually more restrained regarding excessive drawing and confusing scenes. But here, I realised it could actually come in handy – to sort of camouflage the other story hiding behind it.

With plainer colours and fewer details, it would have been harder to distance ourselves from the other story.

In other words, for this book to work it was very important that the two stories be completely readable and autonomous, despite sharing the same set of pages and setting.

For two stories to share the same pages and setting, the challenge is more in the organisation and how to display the images within the frame, rather than in the illustration process itself.

Both narratives in this book are journeys in opposite directions: One from the forest to the city, the other from the city to the forest.

Follow the Firefly
In the first story, which begins at a barbecue around a campfire in the woods, we follow a firefly who’s feeling sad because he doesn’t have a blinking light to keep him company. And so he sets off alone on a long journey, asking (politely as only fireflies can be) the other animals that he meets along the way if they’ve “seen a little blinking light?” All the directions he receives point him to the big city, where he finally meets and falls in love with a light that blinks: a traffic light.

Run, Rabbit, Run
That reciprocated love between firefly and traffic light (now completely overrun with passion and blinking lights) causes a huge crash at the crossing, with several cars involved. Among these cars is a pickup truck belonging to a hunter of exotic animals (like chickens and little bunnies).
From the impact of the crash, the cage of one of the white bunnies opens and the bunny escapes. The hunter’s guard dog was alert and notices this, and so begins an epic chase that leads them both from the city to the forest.

In the forest, the bunny finds shelter on the back of his gorilla friend, and now the dog in turn finds himself alone and lost, far from home and not knowing his way back.

Luckily for the dog, our bunny is a pretty cool bunny and invites him to a barbecue with the rest of his friends – one of which is a firefly who’s feeling sad because he doesn’t have a blinking light to keep him company.

Marta Altés worked as a graphic designer in Barcelona before moving to the UK to complete a Masters in Children’s Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art. Since graduating, Marta has written and illustrated a number of successful picturebooks for UK publishers, and she was nominated for the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal.
In this post, Marta talks about the creation of ‘My Grandpa’. This beautifully illustrated, poignant picturebook was originally published in the UK by Macmillan Children’s Books, and has been translated into numerous languages including Catalan, Korean and Japanese.
Visit Marta Altés’s website

Marta:‘My Grandpa’ is a very special book to me. I wrote and illustrated it when I was still studying the MA in Children’s Book Illustration in Cambridge. It was one of my last projects along with ‘I am an artist’. I worked on both at the same time. There were a few crazy months of non-stop working and not sleeping before we finished the MA. But it didn’t matter! I was enjoying it a LOT! After quitting my job as a graphic designer, it was the first time I could spend AAAAALL DAY drawing and writing!

‘My Grandpa’ was the result of a combination of a few circumstances. Different things came together at the right time…

The very first one, of course, was missing my grandpa. He was the best. He passed away years ago… I remember mostly the good times my brother and I spent with him, but I also remember how in his later days he wouldn’t recognise me, and how difficult that was.

Before starting the last module of the MA, Pam Smy, who is an amazing illustrator and is now a good friend, gave a very interesting lecture about picture books that deal with difficult issues.

And finally, what probably made me decide to start this project was seeing how a friend’s nephews reacted in front of their very old grandpa. He suffered from Alzheimer’s, and you could see how the kids could tell that there was something ‘strange’. They didn’t want to play with him, hug him, or even be close to him… His eyes looked extremely sad when this happened. It was heartbreaking.

Something clicked inside me, and I wanted to write a story about it.

So I started thinking about what my grandpa used to do. About his life, what he liked to do… I wrote all the memories I had of him. That led me to think about how special the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren is. And how happy they make each other.

I wanted the story to be about my grandpa, so I tried to draw him. But it didn’t go well. Although, to be honest, I didn’t try very hard. I felt I needed some distance between the story and my personal experience. That’s why I decided to pick bears for my characters.

The next thing I did after writing down some memories and ideas, was to start drawing the two characters in different situations. Always trying to think about the positive things that grandpa and grandson give to each other.

After lots of juggling, text and images came together to tell the story.

I worked on the text and the illustrations at the same time. And when I had some compositions that I liked, I started working on the storyboard. I love storyboards!

I don’t remember how many times I wrote the story. I have endless pages in my sketchbooks with almost the same text. I don’t know why, but I prefer writing stories in my sketchbooks than I do on the computer.

English is not my first language, but I do try to write my stories in English. It’s very challenging!

The sentences I used were very short, but every word had to count. I really enjoyed it, although at some points I felt I was going a bit crazy with all the text options. That’s why it was so good to be working on my ‘I am an artist’ book at the same time. When I got to a point where I couldn’t move forward on a project, I would swap and work on the other one. Probably because they are extremely different stories, whenever I looked at the other story, I would do it with fresh eyes. Almost as if I was seeing it for the first time.

For each situation, I tried different drawings and compositions. And then I picked the ones I liked the most.

Because the illustrations and the compositions were very clean and simple, I thought that colour would have to be very important. Colour would almost have its own voice. It had to help to communicate the idea of the book, and I wanted it to have a limited palette.

After trying different combinations of colours, I decided to go for pale but warm brown for the grandpa and vibrant orangey-red for the grandson. I thought it was the right combination for the story that I was trying to tell.

After experimenting with screen printing on the MA, I fell in love with the technique. And unconsciously I think I treated the illustrations of this book almost as if I was screen printing them. Even though I used watercolours and pencil.

Once the storyboard made sense, I made this little dummy book.

I painted with watercolours straight onto the paper of the dummy book. Both sides, which made it very difficult to scan later on. But I did it, and that was what I presented at the final MA show at Foyles bookshop gallery in London, with my classmates.

It still feels unreal, but after the final MA show I started working with Macmillan Children’s Books. They wanted to publish both of my final projects! ‘My Grandpa’ and ‘I am an Artist’!

I got on very well with my editor, Emily Ford, and the art director of this book, Jo Spooner. Working on this project with them was great. We talked a lot! And up until the very last minute, we were tweaking words. It was fun!

This is the final storyboard that was approved before doing the artwork.

Most of the illustrations remained the same as the ones I had in my dummy book. But I did all the illustrations again to improve the compositions, colours and the consistency of the characters, as much as I could.

I had just started using watercolours on the MA, so I did the illustrations many times to get the ‘shades’ right. And with some of them I used Photoshop to fix them or to make them lighter where I wanted.

I did some of the images in layers (like screen printing). Red on one layer, brown on another one, and pencil on top. That way I could control the colours better. Or I could move things around – like the trees in this case.

This is one of the pages that changed the most. And I’m very happy about it! I think it’s less literal than the one I had. And I really liked the idea of a living room turning into a jungle! My grandpa could do that.

Something that I’m also very happy about in this book, is that the publisher wanted to keep the feeling of the hand lettering I had in the dummy book. So they turned it into a font! A very ‘grandpa’ font, that I think connects very well with the illustrations.

As I said, because there are very few elements in this book, I wanted for all of them to count. Colour, font, endpapers, title page… I really like the idea of a story starting from the cover.

Alexis Deacon

Kitty Crowther

Blexbolex

Aleksandra & Daniel Mizielińscy

Simone Rea

Kaatje Vermeire

Elena Odriozola

Yara Kono

Chris Haughton

Maurizio Quarello

Tara Books: Jonathan Yamakami

Shaun Tan

Violeta Lópiz

Benjamin Chaud

Vitali Konstantinov

Marianne Dubuc

Valerio Vidali

Isol

Bernardo P. Carvalho

Marta Altés

Croc and Bird

Hutchinson (Random House), United Kingdom, 2012

Mère Méduse /Mother Medusa

Pastel—l’école des loisirs, Belgium, 2014

Romance / Ballad

Albin Michel Jeunesse, France, 2013

Mapy / Maps

Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry, Poland, 2012

L’uomo dei palloncini / The balloon man

Giovanna Zoboli & Simone Rea

Topipittori, Italy, 2014

Japie de stapelaar / Jack the Stacker

Bas Rompa& Kaatje Vermeire

De Eenhoorn, Belgium, 2012

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley& Elena Odriozola

Nórdica Libros, Spain, 2013

ABZZZZ…

Isabel Minhós Martins& Yara Kono

Planeta Tangerina, Portugal, 2014

Shh! We have a plan

Walker Books, United Kingdom, 2014

Mio padre il grande pirata / My father the great pirate

Davide Cali& Maurizio Quarello

Orecchio Acerbo, Italy, 2013

I saw a peacock with a fiery tail

Illustrated by Ramsingh Urveti

Designed by Jonathan Yamakami

Tara Books, India, 2010

Rules of Summer

Lothian Children’s Books (Hachette), Australia, 2013

Amigos do peito / Friends from the heart

Cláudio Thebas & Violeta Lópiz

Bruaá Editora, Portugal, 2014

Une chanson d’ours / The Bear’s Song

Hélium Editions, France, 2011

Seis Barbudos / Six Bearded Men

Mar Pavón& Vitali Konstantinov

OQO Editora, Spain, 2012

Le Lion et l’oiseau / The Lion and the Bird

Éditions de La Pastèque, Canada, 2013

Jemmy Button

Jennifer Uman& Valerio Vidali

Templar Publishing, United Kingdom, 2013

La bella Griselda / Beautiful Griselda

Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 2010

Olhe, por favor, não viu uma luzinha a piscar? / Corre, coelhinho, corre!Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run

Planeta Tangerina, Portugal, 2013

My Grandpa

Macmillan Children’s Books, United Kingdom, 2012

Mère Méduse /
Mother Medusa

L’uomo dei palloncini /
The balloon man

Japie de stapelaar /
Jack the Stacker

Mio padre il grande pirata /
My father the great pirate

Amigos do peito /
Friends from the heart

Le Lion et l’oiseau /
The Lion and the Bird

La bella Griselda /
Beautiful Griselda

Olhe, por favor, não viu uma luzinha a piscar? / Corre, coelhinho, corre!
Follow the Firefly / Run, Rabbit, Run