South Ken Kids Festival

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Im very very excited about the South Ken Kids festival next month.
The line-up is really AMAZING… have a look… quentin blake / marc boutavant / kitty crowther 
the entire list is really amazing, ive really never seen such an exciting line-up like that before and im very honoured to be alongside those names

 

I will be doing 3 different events. see my events page here. It includes a DRAWING DUEL with Joëlle Jolivet …. Im not exactly sure what is involved but im sharpening all my best pencils in preparation (owl is sharpening his beak just in case it gets nasty)

 

The full programme can be viewed from here

 

PS if you look on the website you might see a stray owl has accidentally fallen in there. we are very sorry about that. myself and owl are working on our professionalism over the next month to make sure this wont happen again.

 

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SOUTH KEN WORKSHOPS
 
We also did some school workshops and invented our own little stories
 
In the original early version of the story owl bumps into animals on the way down when he falls from the nest. So, in the workshops we invented some things that could happen to owl on his fall. Here he bumps into birds/down chimneys and into the mouth of a crocodile! Fold a page in half and do a before and after fall!
 
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By |2020-05-13T12:50:03+00:00October 17th, 2011|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments

A Bit Lost: the making of…

Before I had my idea for my little lost owl story I had actually wanted to do a different story about birds in a forest. The birds in the first story come down from their tree top roosts to the bottom of the forest and meet all the other animals of the forest along the way. They pass all the forest animals who want to eat them and eventually manage to find food near the forest floor. The last spread would then be a panoramic of them back perched at the top of the trees at the end of the day overlooking all of the life of the whole forest. I had the idea because I wanted to introduce all the animals and have the interactions of the forest in a sort of Arne Naess story of deep ecology and interconnectedness.

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This image was the trigger for the story. It’s a screen print I did for the fair trade company People tree. I really liked the image because I had the idea of hiding figures in the complex background (see the little cat in the bottom right)

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An early prototype of the pop-up for People Tree. You can see it animated here. They should be available to buy soon from people tree’s site actually.

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I liked the silhouetted running shapes of the birds. They eventually evolved into the running owl and squirrel in the finished book.

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The birds here hide from a tiger (also a snake and an elephant)

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The birds in their perch for the final image. They look across at the whole forest and see the web of all the animals that we met in the story.

In the end I sort of had to scrap the idea, I didnt like the way the birds interacted with the other animals of the forest. They were not engaging with them as such and it left a sort of lonely tone to the story. I may try it again another time but for this book I decided I wanted to do something that was more engaging and somehow a little like pantomime. Without engaging with little funny questions and cause and effect (Uh oh! is he going to fall off?/ Uh oh! Is it Mummy? etc) a very young audience tends to lose interest quickly.

The breakthrough came when I made the bird fall from his nest. That way he was lost and had to engage with the other animals in a way that wasnt about avoiding being eaten. In order to give the bird a range of expressions, forward facing eyes is much better graphically so I chose an owl instead of a bird. Also owlets apparently have a habit of falling out of their nests. I had imagined somehow that owl babies were cute until i actually looked them up on the internet

In the end my story turned out very different. Although the story had changed, there were a few things that I kept the same. The main thing was for the story to be able to be read without words so that children can understand everything just by looking at it. I also wanted there to be other visual interests in the book that children can find themselves. In the first story there were glimpses of the berries that the birds were looking for all along throughout the story, and in the final lost owl story it is the mum looking for her child.

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The first images of the new owl story

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Although I changed the story, you can see the patterns on the owls were similar to the original birds and I was using all the same colours.

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some character sketches

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i got some character ideas from handicrafts i bought in Mexico (this one was made by Tejiendo Arcoiris in San Cristobal)

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…more bold graphic toys for inspiration…

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a noggin…

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and a bit of henri rousseau.

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I had the idea of doing a leporello (non-accordian) fold-out so that you can follow the path that owl takes as he falls. I ended up dropping this idea too. But there is still a half page where little owl drops on the opening spread.

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Eventually I lost most of the pink colour from the owls too. By now it has now become almost unrecognisable from the original story

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some more colour tests…

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i started going a bit mad with all the trees….

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one thing i like about these is the only white on the page is the white of the eyes of the characters. It focuses attention on them in what would otherwise be a very busy image.

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I did the typeface for the book with help from the brilliant typographer Andreas Pohancenik

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a test for the endpapers

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i quite like squirrel playing peek a boo in this early version of the cover.

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I did half of the book in Korea …it was published first by the AMAZING Borim Press. Check out the post I did about them here. Their set-up is very interesting.

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…and the other half in Mexico ..so i could concentrate fully on it. I had to stop working on other jobs so i was running out of money by now!

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i had some reference images spread out on the hotel floor and was worried the were going to get tidied up.

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the final spread of the owl falling

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in the finished pages you can see the mother hidden in the top left as her child is running around looking for her. the silhouettes of the running animals were inspired by the earlier work with the running birds.

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The panoramic final scene is also based on the imagery from the earlier story

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The final cover as it is now in English

If you want to see more you can see the first few pages of the book HERE

People Tree prototypes

I have just been working on some fair trade soft toys here in Nepal with ACP

We still have to iron out a few things …probably going to shrink them in size a little… but hopefully they will be available in autumn 2011 from Peopletree

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new nepali words of the day: ‘bandha sukya’ = ‘monkey finished’

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By |2020-05-13T12:50:05+00:00June 2nd, 2010|Tags: , , |3 Comments

Beatrice Alemagna and all the amazing picture books we never see

I think if I was asked to name my favourite picture book illustrator working today it would be Beatrice Alemagna. I first saw her work by chance in an Italian bookshop and ever since i have always followed her work and been blown away by her endlessly inventive drawings and poetic and intelligent stories. I was honoured to actually meet her through a good friend at last years Bologna fair, and i was very surprised to find that she has put a link to my work from her site (wow!!!!) so i wanted to return the favour.

I just quickly googled her to add some English links to her books, but as far as i can see most are still not available in English. I think its kind of amazing…. the standard of English language picture books generally i think is so so weak compared to French and continental Europe. Walk into any good bookshop in France or Italy (or Japan/Korea) and you will just be blown away by the quality and creativity of the picture books, they are not simply aimed at children. There is a depth and poetry that can be read on many levels.  Anyone who has ever been to any of my illustration workshops can tell you i love to show Beatrice’s books and images as inspiration, but there are so many intelligent and thoughtful books in that vein that we rarely see.

Publishers like Naive Livres / Gallimard Jeunesse / Editions Memo Autrement / Planeta TangerinaSarbacane / Thierry Magnier OQO / Corraini / Orecchio Acerbo / Borim all that awe-inspiring quality stuff seems like its everywhere in Europe but is rarely translated or very difficult to find in the English speaking world. A few good designy-bookshops in London (Magma etc) now import the French/Italian/Japanese language versions for the benefit of  design savvy fans  ….but perhaps more children would benefit from reading them.  I always wonder why they arent they translated? I’m always blown away by the high standard of the advertising and design in the UK and the English speaking world, in general way ahead of the advertising coming out of France and Europe but in the world of picture books I think we are far behind in imagination.

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The dark shadow in the corner i think is my sock (scusi Beatrice!!!!)

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This is out in Korean but not English? Isn’t that a bit weird?

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>>>>>>>>

UPDATE Jan 2014: 

A LION IN PARIS is now available here in English thanks to the excellent TATE publishing! They do lots of really great other picture books too, many from the publishers i mentioned above.
I was honoured to write a quote for the back of the English version book (wow!!!) and I spoke to Anna Ridley about how the book inspired me here:
http://lookbookreport.com
 

By |2020-05-13T12:50:06+00:00April 2nd, 2010|Tags: |1 Comment
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