Book Leaves

A couple of weeks ago I decided to write and illustrate a children's book. This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, something that has always lingered in my mind as a possibility. But the idea had never taken any shape as such, because I never really thought about it seriously for long enough. But two weeks ago I started thinking that I should really work on something that was "real". This was the exact word that my mind used, so then I had to question why writing and illustrating a children's book was more real than, for example, writing this blog or making some work at home. The work I make at home and on this blog has an immediate affect on my close environment and is beneficial to me as a result of that and of course as a process in its own right. So I came to the conclusion that the use of the world real in this case was highly associated with addressing a wider relevant audience and also potentially translating this new way of communicating to an audience (in this case the children's book) into cash.

Once this became clear in my mind I started thinking about the story of the book. Looking back at this, I am a bit puzzled as to why I should start thinking of making up a story rather than thinking of the visual side of the book first, namely its illustrations. I consider myself a visual person, so that came as a surprise, but that is how it happened and the story was more or less completed within a weekend and I was happy with it. Then the most bizarre thing happened as I was completely unable to proceed with the illustrations and I got caught up in a strange place and felt like someone who is holding a pencil in their hands for the first time. I have a large collection of illustrated books for children so I am familiar with a lot of different styles of illustrating, from different countries and different decades. But it only now became apparent that illustrating a book for children was a whole different discipline of its own, one that in spite of my love for illustrated books remained a strange land to me.  

So I flicked through the pages of numerous children's books and made a short, very basic, list of the kinds of illustrations that stood out to me and grouped them into 5 categories. Firstly, there were the books with illustrations which filled the whole page. In these books the pages are full with drawings of great detail, there are hardly any spaces where you can see the blank page behind. These illustrations are busy, detailed and quite traditional. Although they are not overall my favourite, I have noticed that children love observing them and finding all the small things depicted in the pages. Such illustrations feature in classic books like Each Peach Pear Plum and The Gruffalo. Secondly there are the illustrations done seemingly effortlessly, as if on the spot, illustrations with great movement and expression, typically using black waterproof ink and then watercolours on top. The background in these illustrations is typically left blank and they include Quentin Blake's illustrations and Polly Dunbar's in the Tilly and Friends series. Thirdly there are the retro illustrations, more stylised, bold and brightly coloured, reminiscent of 50's design. They are the ones I am mostly drawn to and I have seen some new illustrators working in this way, such as Alison Murray and Bob Staake. On the fourth category there are illustrators who have worked with or included many of what I consider indirect marks (for more on this look here). These illustrations have been made with collage, stamps, different mark making tools and screen prints. Famous illustrators working this way include Eric Carle and Leo Lionni. Finally, in the fifth category I included books with illustrations which incorporated in their design the use of flaps, holes and textured materials. Exceptional books of this style include the French books illustrated by Ramadier & Bourgeau and the books by Petr Horacek.

What this very basic categorisation of illustrations made me realise is, that whichever style one chose to go with, or invent a new one for that matter, they would have to stick with it throughout the book. They would have to be consistent. There would have to be a continuation through the book, so that a young reader or observer can follow the plot and the characters from page to page. That realisation hit me a bit and it occurred to me that this would be the most challenging thing for me to master if I were to indeed illustrated the story myself. The other thing that I noticed, flicking through the book leaves, was that I was not very keen (with a few exceptions) on the illustrations done of human characters. My story has several characters in it and the main character is a small boy who appears in every illustration. Getting that boy drawn so that it is memorable and distinct and also being able to draw it again and again so that it is recognisable as the same boy in different poses, would all be key factors.

So I spent the next week or so trying to draw and design this little boy, again and again. Caught in a bit of a trap by keeping in my mind all the illustrations of children that I had seen and mainly disliked and worse the ones that I had liked. As the days went by and the boy was still nowhere near completed I started to have irrational thoughts. I started to think as I was falling asleep, that there will be ages before I ever manage to draw this boy, if I ever manage it, and that it was inevitable that in the meantime someone would actually come up with the same idea as I had and write the same story. The almost identical book would be published with great success and all because I had left it so long to draw this boy. Then I would wake up laughing at myself for giving this story of mine so much credit; but nevertheless instead of going back to sleep I would start sketching the little boy all over again. As more days went by with no boy, I started seeing clues all around me that directed back to my story. Just like when you are thinking of a song and then you turn on the radio and there it is playing on. So I thought I should leave the boy alone and start working on the enjoyable to me bits of the book, the background and the environments surrounding the characters.

So, as the first illustration includes fallen autumn leaves, we had some fun collecting a lot of them with Aretousa and trying out different ways of making marks with them. After two weeks only the first illustration is done, with more than ten to go, but I did manage to make the boy after I had done the background. I made it to kind of fit the background as I was unable to make him any other way. The words leaf and leaves in Greek (filo and fila) start with the letter Φ (fi), so this was a perfect opportunity to make one more letter for Aretousa. The word φύλλο (filo as in filo pastry-very thinly rolled pastry, as thin as a leaf or a book page) is also used for book pages in Greek so that you would say a book has so and so many leaves. I am taking this as a good sign since I am trying to make a book of my own, although I have to say that the only thing that felt "real" this week was actually making the letter Φ.