Jon Klassen and Hervé Tullet visit Ireland: Part 1

Today we welcome Maria to the Picture Book Party. Maria is an extremely lovely picture book editor here at Walker Books. As she got to go to Ireland with Jon Klassen and Hervé Tullet recently, we asked if she could write a little about their adventures!

Deirdre, Walker’s picture book publisher and art director, and myself (a picture book editor) spend a lot of time at our desks making books. But, every now and then, we get a chance to escape the concrete clutches of Vauxhall, pretend we’re PR people and experience, first hand, the effect that our Walker books have on children and bibliophiles out there in the real world. That’s a pretty special thing.

On this particular occasion it was EXTRA special because we were accompanying two extraordinary picture book makers – Jon Klassen and Hervé Tullet. We travelled around with them for a few days as they both gave talks at the ever-brilliant 2013 CBI Conference in Dublin (and I travelled with Jon to Scotland afterwards for a day), drew pictures in every single book they touched and charmed audiences of both book-loving adults and very tiny children. It was unreal, and tons of fun, to experience that unique fizz and crackle that happens when two truly great artists come together in one place to talk about their work.

Here’s a little précis of some of our trip.

Maria

WHO WE MET




Hervé Tullet!

If you haven’t heard of Hervé Tullet already (where have you been?!), he’s the creator of more than fifty children’s books, including Press Here, which has been translated into no fewer than thirty-three languages around the world. It was completely amazing to spend time with Hervé and we had a remarkable opportunity to film him speaking about his new book, Help! We Need a Title! (out in September, keep your eyes peeled for the book and the film), at St Patrick’s Lodge (an amazing artists’ residence in the heart of Dublin) as well as watch him in action in front of a room of hundreds of people at the CBI Conference.



THE GREAT BITS

Hervé Tullet at the CBI Conference

If you ever have the opportunity to go to a Hervé Tullet event, DON’T MISS IT! Hervé spoke about his creative ‘burden’ – always trying to find ideas and how each of his books offer an idea to a reader but, more than that, they leave a space, a way in, for us to interpret and imagine his story in our own way. We got to see Hervé interact with a little baby in the audience, who he read Book of Mirrors to, and it was so special! Really, his whole CBI talk was completely captivating and the audience buzzed with creative energy and a sea of inspired faces. Who else could get a whole ROOM of grown-ups to say the word ‘BLOP!’ many times over with unbridled enthusiasm?!


THE BOOKS

Help! We Need a Title!

The VERY exciting thing about our trip was that a mere two days before we flew to Dublin, our handbound copies of Help! We Need a Title! were delivered to our desks. This is the first time that Walker Books has EVER published Hervé Tullet and we can’t believe that we have this exceptional piece of publishing to promote on our list! And, we assure you, it’s extraordinary. The idea of this new ‘book’ is … well, it’s not a book. It’s actually more of a notebook. Can you imagine if we had published an illustrator’s sketch book months before they had properly developed their characters, formed a solid story, finalised the colour palette or even, thought up a title! In fact, all you really had was their idea. Well, this is what Hervé’s new title is all about. It encourages children to interact with a book still in the process of being invented – so it’s pretty much an open invitation to create your own stories. And that’s a story in itself!

Watch this space for our film of Hervé talking about the book, which we’ll preview here.

WHAT WE ATE

• Scotch eggs
• Ossobuco (which is fun to say).

Part 2 … Later this week, we’ll tell you about our time in Ireland with Jon Klassen 

Win a pack of perfect picture books this half term!

With half term in full swing, we’ve got a bumper prize of amazing picture books that you could win!

The prize includes Arthur’sDream Boat by Polly Dunbar, And the Cars Go… by William Bee, Ballet Cat by Fiona Ross and Stick! by Andy Pritchett.

All you have to do is enter your details below for a chance to win!

Competition closes 31 July 2013. Open to residents of the UK and Ireland only.

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And the Cars Go... by William Bee

This month we went behind the scenes with author-illustrator William Bee and asked him all about the inspiration behind his latest book, And The Cars Go...

And The Cars Go... is full of illustrations of all kinds of amazing cars. Have you always been interested in drawing cars?
Yes! Second only to owning them. Although the cars and other vehicles in this book are caricatures of real ones. None of them are very day to day, even the family estate car has wood paneling.
 

What car do you drive?
I am always changing my cars, but at the moment I have just the three. For day to day rushing about i have a little Smart car - good fun to drive on country roads. I also have a 1994 Jaguar XJR 4 litre Supercharged, which is very fast and very thirsty ... and I have a 1930 Austin Seven which I race in historic championships. I just sold my 1968 Daimler - it now lives in Hampshire.
 

If you could have any car, what would it be and why?
A 1930's Bugatti. It would be like owning a work of art. A noisy, very fast and exciting work of art.
 

Did you always want to be an author/illustrator?
Nope. I wanted to be a car designer, but was put off when I was told I would need to be a whizz at maths and physics. Later i found out this was nonsense. Although I  have always drawn, the writing part was more accidental - who else was going to do it?

How do you go about creating your illustrations?
In the case of this book - and the train book too - I draw elements of what I want on paper with an ink pen, scan them into the computer and then manipulate them into the final 'shape'. It's very much like collage.

What was your favourite book when you were young?
I think it was the Ladybird book of Motor Cars - gosh we do have a theme ...
 

What do you enjoy most about making picture books?
The initial ideas, and developing them into something I can read to the team at Walker. I also very much enjoy working with editors and designers, it's not just that I could not do it without them, the books would be much poorer too.
 

What advice would you give to children who want to be an author/illustrator when they grow up?
Keep drawing! Most people stop at a certain age. The writing I do not know - I frankly have no idea what I am doing.
 
How do you come up with the ideas for you books?
They are usually visual  I think.  The train book was based on an image I did for a fashion company (the car book is just a logical extension of that). 'Whatever' was me having no one to write for me, so coming up with a simple idea which allowed me to draw a variety of odd things. The frog book came from hearing a radio programme about frogs, and a list of frogs which included 'the Edible Frog' - which struck me as a very unfortunate thing to be ... and this was on my mind when I saw one of those 'Beware of the Dog' signs the same day.
 

What's your studio like?
Here a re a few pictures. It's looking very tidy, but usually there are big sheets of paper strewn all over the place. The most important thing is that i am at home - I could not work in an office.

 

Get your hands on a copy of And The Cars Go... by William Bee at your local bookshop.

  

Half term activity sheets

With half term just around the corner and the sun still not quite shining, we've put together a bumper selection of downloadable activity sheets, perfect for keeping little hands busy. Join the dots, match the pairs, colour, cut, create and get crafty! Check out all the different activities here.

Stick!

Stick!, the debut picture book by Andy Pritchett, has only one word in it - stick! Hilarious, energetic and beautifully simple, Stick! is all about an adorable little puppy, one stick, and his quest for a friend. Today we go behind the scenes with author-illustrator Andy Pritchett, who tells us how the book came about...

Where did you get the idea?
I guess the idea for Stick! came out of the fact that I’m much better at eating cake than talking to people. There’s a saying ‘Write about what you know’ so when I was thinking of creating a picture book, an image popped into my head of animals having trouble connecting with other types of animals. For example, cows could talk to each other about grass until they came home, but what would they have to say to a dog or vice versa? The first image here shows that initial idea scribbled on a bit of scrap paper (I always forget to carry a sketchbook with me)


There aren’t many words are there?
No, in fact originally there weren’t any words at all. The ancient Egyptians didn’t need letters to make words and tell stories, they used pictograms (called hieroglyphics) and who am I to argue with thousands of years of ancient civilisation?

The sales department of Walker Books had different ideas though, so after a lot of too-ing and fro-ing it was agreed that the book would have some words, but one pictogram stayed in, can you spot it?

Were there any other changes to the story?
Looking back through all the scribbles I made when creating Stick! there aren’t many changes from the first version I showed to Walker. The ones that have been made were crucial though. You can thank Lucy and Maria, my editors, and Ben, the art director, for that, I’d never have thought of them! The most important was the main little dog character. You can see the differences in the second image here, when you compare the first spread of the story I showed to Walker and the same spread when I did the rough for the final book.

How do you create the images?
I worked out the book plan by hand in pencil. I then scanned this in, had a think about it and then moved bits around on the computer in a program called Photoshop. This is also when I thought about the colours throughout the book. I printed various bits out, put them on the wall and then had more of a think about the story or if the images were right. Stick-on-notes on these print outs come in handy when trying out different words or poses.


All the line work is drawn by hand. I traced the final images onto layout paper with a black pencil to get a nice crumbly line and then scanned them into the computer. Everything else is created in Photoshop and then Ben added the words and made a lovely cover.

When it comes to picture books I’m a big fan of Ed Vere, Mo Willems and Dick Bruna amongst others. I think that’s quite obvious when you look at Stick!


Do you have a dog?
I’ve never owned a dog, (or cow, pig or chicken!) but I have a cat. She likes chasing sticks, leaves, string and me when I have a glass of milk. 

Andy Pritchett

Walker Dogs and their sticks!

Here at Walker Books we LOVE dogs (and cats and cows and pigs and chickens for that matter, but especially dogs), so much so that we often bring our dogs into work with us. So to celebrate Andy's new book, we couldn't resist sharing some photos of our furry friends with their favourite sticks! 

Stick! Competition

If you have a dog (or any pet for that matter) that just can't resist a stick, then send us a photo and our favourite one will win a copy of Stick! by Andy Pritchett. Either email us at marketing@walker.co.uk or Tweet us the picture @WalkerBooksUK by Friday 3 May.

Be one of the first to get a copy of Stick! and find it at your local bookshop.

The story behind the shadow

Shadows are magical things; they follow you around everywhere, they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and when you're just a small rabbit they can be pretty scary! Philippa Leathers tells us about the inspiration for her gorgeous new picture book The Black Rabbit...

The main character in my picture book The Black Rabbit originated from an animation I made years ago at college. A small white rabbit only had a small supporting role, but I liked him so much I wanted to use him in a story of his own. The way he was drawn with short, stumpy little legs meant he moved in a certain way. I loved the way he ran, his short legs meaning he comically wiggled from side to side and had to put in a lot of effort. 
 

 
It can be such a long process to get the story right and sometimes I will go back again and again revisiting ideas. Ideas are all around us, but it can be hard to recognise them and after a long time spent looking for the plot idea for The Black Rabbit, one day it just popped into my head. I have my own two little house rabbits who are always together, following each other around. They are easily spooked and can jump at the smallest noises or movements. I had been drawing Rabbit running in different situations when the saying -scared of your own shadow popped up. I then wondered what would happen if there was real danger?


I find it easier to write and illustrate the book together and try to balance the words and pictures. If the pictures show something, this does not need to be repeated in the text, which I like to keep very minimal. There needs to be a good interaction between the two. If the story can be told in a better way with a picture then the text can be as minimal as possible.

Illustrating The Black Rabbit was a bit of a challenge at times as my baby daughter was only a few months old and I had to pick up my paintbrush whenever she napped. The illustrations are drawn with pencil and then painted mainly with watercolour but I use ink and coloured pencils too- anything I think will work best and then I tweak the final illustration a little digitally.

The story The Black Rabbit is about a rabbit who is afraid of his own shadow, seeing it as a large frightening creature who follows his every move.  Rabbit tries to escape this large black rabbit and eventually in the deep, dark wood, manages to do so, only to encounter something more dangerous…. I hope you like it.

Join in the fun and download your Black Rabbit activity sheet here.
Find The Black Rabbit at your local bookshop here.

Bye-Bye Baby Brother! by Sheena Dempsey

This month, we're very excited about Bye-Bye Baby Brother!, a gorgeous new picture book all about new babies, busy mums and a little girl with a very BIG imagination! In the exclusive guest blog post for Picture Book Party, author-illustrator Sheena Dempsey tells us all about how she came up with the ideas for her debut picture book...

Bye-ByeBaby Brother! began as a quick MA project that took only a few weeks to put together, but it was a long journey before it became the final version that it is now. It all started with the idea of a bored little girl at home trying to get her busy mother’s attention and going to all sorts of lengths to do so.

The baby character was introduced early on, without intentionally choosing a universal theme, I thought, how absolutely annoying must it be to have a usurper baby come along when you are three years old? Although I’m the youngest in our family, it’s easy to imagine the frustration. 

My initial draft had some slightly sinister humour and I think that was what attracted me to this idea at first, the scope for mischief. How many ways could Ruby rid the family of her baby brother and have her mother all to herself?

There were several pictures trying out different ideas in this first draft, feeding him to Rory (Ruby’s dog), throwing him away with the rubbish, hiding him in the coal bunker, flushing him down the loo and putting him into the washing machine.

The trouble with this line of thinking is that it’s too risky to depict these things happening in a picture book as some disturbed children may try to imitate the evil deeds in real life and then there would be all kinds of horrible lawsuits and the world as we know it would end. So I had to come up with less dangerous ways for Ruby to get rid of Oliver that couldn’t actually be re-enacted in real life. I drew and re-drew several different scenarios, some were vetoed for still being too dark (e.g. hiding Oliver up the chimney) until we settled on the four that are in the book. The style of drawing changed and became softer to suit the content and the overall result is a much younger book and a gentler story with more emotional depth, hopefully at not too much of a cost to the humour.

On my Masters course, it was drilled into us by one of our course tutors that doing proper roughs is paramount. His refrain for the year was: “Work everything out in the rough first, the angle, the composition, all the details before you do the finished drawing”. However, this vital piece of information just fell out of my head and for some reason that remains a mystery to me, I didn’t really do proper roughs for Bye-Bye Baby Brother! I did very loose, rough ones which didn’t really cut the mustard when it became time to make the final artwork. I was jumping from thumbnail type drawings to final artwork and I made things very difficult for myself, especially as I was so new to illustration. So that was one nugget that I learned about myself and can pass on – if you hand-draw everything, very detailed and finished-looking roughs to work from for final artwork are extremely useful. It’s all a learning curve.

To make my final artwork, I use a lightbox (well, it’s a glass desk and an Ikea lamp which works even better) to trace over my (now-very-detailed) rough drawings. I draw very lightly in pencil on hot-pressed paper and then go over it with pigment liner pens and then rub out the pencil. Then I paint everything in with Schmincke and Lukas watercolours.

I work from home in my flat in southeast London. 

Join in the fun and download your Bye-Bye Baby Brother! activity sheet here. 
Find Bye-Bye Baby Brother! at your local bookshop here.