Early Years Niagara award Canada
By Chris Haughton|2020-05-13T12:50:02+00:00January 26th, 2012|Tags: abitlost, amntibrilliant, awards, littleowllost, mamakwijt, unpeuperdu|0 Comments
Oh No, GEORGE!: The making of…
FINALLY…! this book has been two years in the making…! This post is just to show where the idea came from, and how the book took shape. its also quite useful for me to put together this post because its always such a long process that i kind of forget where the ideas came from to begin with.
My first idea for this book was a cause and effect sequence called Oh No!… it was an idea for a sort of elaborate circular accident… i may come back to that idea in future in fact…
I was toying with that but was reluctant to settle on it. Another idea was ‘Bad duck’ about a duck who was bad at being a duck.. swimming and quacking etc… its was a bit like a version of the Ugly Duckling and was sparked by seeing a worried looking duck in London who seemed to be swimming about 2 inches below the water level of his friends
A third idea featured ‘clown man and clown dog’ which i think also could be quite good in the future…
i didnt realise it at the time but all these ideas revolved around the idea of characters somehow messing up (which i thought would make entertaining drawings) I realised its a lot funnier if there is intention from the character to not mess up, so in the end i scrapped clown man and sort of fused all three ideas to make the dog the comic lead character.
One part of the picture book i try to make use of are the page-turns.. they can be great fun when reading aloud if there is bit of a build up so i decided to build up to a page-turn where the dog messes up somehow… that was how the basic idea came about … i jotted it down on 3 pieces of A4 which it turned out hardly changed at all from this first sketch.
I usually draw from my head without using much reference but i found myself googling ‘guilty dogs’ to see if i could find some good material. It turns out there’s a lot about this on the internet. the video below is really worth watching if you havent seen it.
most of this work was done while i was in kathmandu. I went over to get more involved in my fair trade work and ended up staying between there and India for more than 8 months in 2010. I was lucky to work on some super projects there which was the main reason i was very late for my book deadlines. In fact this book was 9 months late and was supposed to have been out last august (!)
I did most of the sketches for george from this room..
and i sent the bologna draft from this internet cafe (the monks were on facebook)
this is me trying to finish it off the last images in the airport on my way home, i had to meet my editors deirdre and lucy the following week and i hadn’t done half as much as i had said i had… (!)
This is the part of the book im most proud of.. the first page builds up in three images to a large close up of george with the text ‘what will george do?’ When the page turns the following double page spread tells us exactly what george has done.. OH NO!!!
as you can see george does some pretty terrible things, but all is forgiven in the end
the end-papers are a kind of before and after
i quite liked having a little quote on the title page for A Bit Lost. i decided to go with this one from the stoic philosopher epictetus for George.
the final proofs and tweaks were all done in a very intensive few weeks with the help from deirdre and dan when i got back to the UK (my room was being lived in so i did all this from my next door neighbour’s place!)
Oh No George is out on the 1st March 2012 or available for pre-order in these countries, im told there are more to follow soon
Oh No, GEORGE! IRE/UK here
Oh No, GEORGE! USA/CANADA here
Stoute Hond Netherlands here
Oh Non, GEORGE! France here
Oh Nein, PAUL! Germany here
Voi Sinua SULO! Finland here
¡Oh no, Lucas! Spain here
Oh no, Charlie! Catalan here
…………………………………………………………
Reviews
Kirkus Review USA
The Guardian UK
Childrens Book Council USA
Oh Nein Paul! smitzjunior.com Germany
lenifiants
milrazones
AWARDS
GERMANY
Nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2-6 category
FRANCE
Winner of the 2013 ‘Je lis, j’elis‘ 2013 Award for picturebooks
UK/IRE
Nominated for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize
Nominated for the UKLA Awards
Nominated for the Irish Book Awards
Nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway Medal
Nominated for the Waterstones Prize
Winner of the Junior Magazine Picture Book of the Year
Nominated for the CBI Awards Ireland
Nominated for LoveReading4 kids Reader’s book prize 2013
Nominated for the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards
US
Amazon.com’s top 10 picture books of 2012
Winner of 2012 ‘Little Awards for Big Books’ Picture Book category
SWITZERLAND
Nominated for the Carouge Story Book Award
The making of ‘A Bit Lost’ is here
Nationale Voorleesdagen
Im in shock at all the events in Holland! The dutch version of A Bit Lost, ‘Mama Kwijt’ won the Dutch Picture Book of the Year 2012 and as part of the Voorleesdagen (read aloud week) there are many amazing events across the country. It was awarded by CPNB, a read-for-fun/literacy non-profit equivalent to Booktrust or CBI. Each year they choose a book for its read-aloud qualities and on the 18th Jan they celebrated by hosting ‘reading breakfasts’ (complete with pancakes!) in libraries and schools across the country. Its the 9th year of this award you can read more about it here Im so proud of the book’s success in holland as im a huge fan of dutch design and dutch picture books
Many celebrities were pictured taking part for the press including Princess Laurentien from the Dutch royal family and prime minister Mark Rutte (!) In the last photo there is even a real owl at the school!!!!
There was even a reading at Schipol Airport Library
There are puppet performances too. The second to last performance was by Ton Meijer in the oba library (the little girl in the picture is pretending she is a sleepy owl about to fall) and the last was by Pagetti jeungdtheatre
It was interesting to see how the story was adapted to performances and to see how each adapts it differently. One of the performances is of Oma Kwijt (I lost my granny!)
theres even a Mama Kwijt song…(!!!)
I did some press events too, on thursday 19th I opened the amsterdam stock market!!!!!! i had drawn ‘99%’ on my t-shirt in black marker and unzipped my hoodie right before i gonged (!) 🙂
At the moment Mama Kwijt is the best selling BOOK in the Netherlands #1 in the book chart (!!!) and also no.12 as there are 2 versions. The bookshops also got involved and there are amazing shop window displays as well as little hand-puppets and bags. 60,000 finger puppets were made by CPNB to be given away free with the books, we really tried to have the finger puppets made fair trade (thank you CPNB) but the cost and timescale sadly could not work out. Then 7 bookshops emailed me and clubbed together to make an order of the fair trade owls too..! Thank you to all the bookshops who supported this!! You can see some of them on sale below…
This last few days in holland has been INCREDIBLE! im in total shock. To have my book at the centre of such wonderful events promoting literacy and reading for fun in public access libraries is all i could have ever wished for, i cant tell you how honoured i am. I was amazed by the thought, care and humour that went into these events and the quality of the other beautiful children’s books and events that I saw. The time and resources that go towards childrens events seem incredible to me, the Dutch certainly seem to be really focused on all the the good things. I have met amazing people in the last few days. Thanks to so much to everyone involved in this amazing project, in all the libraries, Gottmer and CPNB. Hartelijk bedankt!!
De Drvkkery: a little exhibition in Holland
I have a little wall of my sketches/prints and rugs from Mama Kwijt in De Drvkkery bookstore in Middelburg take a look here it runs until the end of January.
Camden Food Co.
i did some of the branding for the Camden Food Co’s new stores in US and Canada. Here’s the Toronto store. The beautiful art direction is by Adam Gallagher at the excellent zeroG studio in Dublin. They do some really amazing work, thanks for getting me involved!
Owl bag
this awesome owl bag and owl seat(!) were made by hilde de rooij in the netherlands who makes items based on childrens drawing.
They were drawn by the very talented Merel Goud age 8 and were exhibited in the local library.
merry christmas
hope you all have a nice break and very best wishes for 2012 x
Getting your children’s book published: Offset 2010
Myself, Niamh Sharkey and Childrens Books Ireland had a discussion at Offset in Dublin last year under the heading Getting your childrens book published: from idea to publication
For more videos have a look at offset’s video page theres lots of great speakers. Hopefully see you at Offset next March. They have another great lineup and i think ill be doing something smallish in the second room.