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.
