To any illustrators, especially professional illustrators and designers who are looking to get more into picture book illustration or illustration in general I would highly highly recommend taking a week out to visit Spain for Ilustratour a week of workshop and talks. I was asked to give a workshop and talk at Ilustratour last year and I was blown away by the whole experience. I would have got a lot from visiting these workshops as a participant. It is a 5 day course and then a weekend of talks. Last year Oliver Jeffers, Kitty Crowther, Nosy Crow, Marc Boutavant, Axel Scheffler and David Weisner among others gave talks and workshops amongst others in the beautiful town of Valladolid. A really lovely week of meeting new people and seeing inspiring new work. Here is one of my students Alejandro’s post. Follow them online and book a space for next year’s Ilustratour in July 2014.

also check out this amazing work, there is also a pic in there of myself and Oliver Jeffers in a drunken rendition of ‘The Wild Rover’ we only knew two verses (!!)

ilustratour.es

I was very happy to finally properly meet and stay with my amazing Spanish publisher Milrazones / Pepa Montano. Milrazones has a very interesting story as a publishing house, it began life as an illegal publisher with Jesús Ortiz printing anti-Franco flyers on a stolen photocopier!! After Franco, Jesús continued publishing, mainly left-wing political writing and non-fiction. Myself and Jesús share a similar taste in books and it was fascinating to hear stories during Franco’s Spain. Jesús teamed up with Paz and Pedro who run a beautiful children’s bookshop called Libreria Gil, an incredibly active bookstore in Santander, in fact it has just won ‘National Award for Cultural Bookstore 2013’. Amongst many other things Libreria Gil welcomed the Irish president (and a huge hero of mine) Michael D Higgins while he was in Santander.

Paz has a great eye for interesting books and together they brought Jon Klassen and lots of other great authors to Spain through Milrazones. Thank you for the wonderful time in Santander and for bringing my books to Spain. I could not imagine a more inspiring publisher and bookstore.  Gracias Jesus, Paz and Pedro!

libreriagil.com

milrazon.es

It was quite funny how this came about. I was booked by Edinburgh festival last year and then subsequently was asked by the organisers what my children’s event would entail. I told them in a rather garbled email i will do a reading and also i have ‘some puppets for sale’. I was terrified when i saw my printed event billed as ‘Puppets with Chris Haughton’ and not only that but it had already sold out!! Not wanting to be booed off the stage by a crowd of angry 2-4 year olds I set to work training George for his stage debut… his routine only lasted for a few minutes and we got some assistance from a 4yo puppeteer from the audience who was the real star of the show. No one was more surprised (and relieved) than me at how well it went down. We completely got away with it. Well done George!

He is going back again this year to Edinburgh and will hopefully tour around with us on our book tour around England and Ireland in March 2014.

A Bit Lost has won the Andersen Award in Italy. It won the picture book category award and the ‘Super Premio Andersen Award’ for best overall children’s book in Italy in 2012. I got to illustrate the cover of the Andersen magazine and they ran an article in Andersen Magazine.

premioandersen.it

I was approached this year by Nicholas Drofiak, a Phd student who is working on a very isolated language in Siberia. Ket is a language with fewer than 500 speakers, many of whom are now elderly and the language is sadly expected to die out in a generation. It is taught in 5 schools but the children’s first language is now Russian. What is fascinating about Ket is that it is related to the asian tonal languages but seems to have split a long time ago and shows an isolated early form of tonation, it is also related to some North American languages. It may be the last surviving branch of one of the linguistic groups which traveled across the Bering straight many thousands of years ago to populate the Americas. It is so sad to see any language die but Ket sounds like it is a very important language to linguists and it seems such a shame to lose such an incredible piece of history. Nicholas spent the autumn learning from the Ket people and as part of his fieldwork he had my book, A Bit Lost, translated into Ket. He had twenty five copies printed and presented them to the schools and speakers. It is so humbling to think that a picture book could be used in this way, to connect the generations together, the elderly speakers to their grandchildren who cannot and help them understand some of their language. It really made me think again about the role of children’s books and about language, I feel very very lucky to be involved in this project.

Thanks to everyone in Walker books who worked hard to supply the correct formatted files all free of charge for this. Heinrich Werner translated the text and the books were very generously printed by Nicholas with his own money. Thanks to Zoya for the beautiful reading of A Bit Lost in Ket. Unbelievable, what an amazing project.

Here is the audio of the book being read by Zoya:

I’m very proud to have helped set up a new screen printing facility and designs with Kipepeo cards in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. 

I met Rachel the founder of Kipepeo at an event in the People’s Supermarket which we were both speaking at. Kipepeo was set up as a Christian project which, as an atheist, is something i would usually run a mile from, but i was so taken by Rachels generosity and enthusiasm that i felt it was something really worth working on. They have set up a project in the Kibera slum which has grown to 30 women, they make handmade paper cards from waste paper, Rachel works at this as a full time unpaid volunteer and from her stories I could see she had nothing but the womens’ interest at heart. They are working in very basic conditions without running water and have overcome huge obstacles, including being held hostage at gunpoint but still she stuck at it with a smile, I really respect what she is doing.

However, despite all the good intentions the project was not actually funding itself and was only running because of all the hours Rachel was putting in. The cards themselves are lovingly hand painted or collaged from materials like old cola cans and sweet wrappers. Some of them are very beautiful but as cute as they are, I think its fair to say they resemble more of an school art project than something that might compete on the shelves of stores, they were also very time consuming and so costly to produce. Mainly the cards were bought by church groups who are affiliated to the project or know the backstory rather than the general public looking for an eyecatching card. We discussed this over a coffee and I had the idea of using rubber stamps to cheaply produce colourful designs. I did some tests but the card was too rough to hold the ink. I suggested screen printing but it would require a lot of training and equipment and because the area doesnt even have running water it would be a very tricky undertaking without a hose. Rachel was keen to try anything to make the cards more saleable, so in the end I suggested we send Marcroy, a screenprinter who set up peopleofprint.com. Marcroy had been helping me at the time to organise the NODE Design Museum show. I designed 6 two colour screenprint images as a test batch. With a £1000 donation to Kipepeo, Marcroy was then sent off to Nairobi armed with 12 screens and a squeegee. The results of which you can see see below.

If you would like to order these cards for personal or wholesale please contact Rachel or visit the Kipepeo shop here
kipepeodesigns.co.uk

Also, the intention with setting up this screen print facility is to be able to produce many other new designs, if you have some saleable designs which you would be willing to volunteer, I am sure they would be gratefully received.