The CLUB
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Article for AuthorZone Magazine
Making Picture Books Again This Year?
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PLAYING FOR A LIVING
This article first appeared in Waterstones magazine
I have two fantastic jobs: writing children’s books and illustrating them. My wife came up to my studio at the top of our house last week and found me cutting, folding and sticking pieces of card to create a paper engineering version of the dashboard of a truck belonging to a Duck. I had spent all day finding a way to have the movement of a tab change the gears, raise the needle on the speedometer and the engine temperature gauge. She looked at me as I sat there, tugging at the tab - driving my make believe truck and said: "You just sit up here and play all day."
How I spend my time now is not that dissimilar to how I spent it as a child - drawing and making up stories. Nowadays however I do it at a desk instead of lying on my belly with my feet waving in the air. Back then, when I wasn’t outside playing football (my other great love as a child) I could be found inside, spread-eagled on the carpet creating a football match in two dimensions with a pen, a sheet of paper and a fertile imagination. As I sketched my favourite players displaying their skills – with correct kits, haircuts and facial likenesses - I would speak the words of the imaginary commentator: ‘it’s Charlie Cooke... just look at him - weaving through the defence... past Bremner, past Peters, and he’s through...’ Then, as I scribbled in the circles representing the distant faces in the grandstand (a trick learnt from SHOOT magazine) I would give voice to the roar of the crowd reacting to Charlie Cooke’s break for the goalmouth.
Later I started drawing my own made up characters using a repertoire of funny voices to express out loud what I Imagined they were saying to each other. Giving them the power of speech added a whole new dimension to the creation; it made the characters as real as they were in my head - and it was a lot more fun.
Using a convention I had learnt from Dennis the Menace in the BEANO I started writing down what they were saying in speech bubbles above their heads. In retrospect I can see that comics were my first teachers on the road to being a children’s book author and illustrator. Comics gave me a graphic vocabulary which I still use today; they taught me how to break up the story into important scenes and how to compose these scenes within a frame. Most importantly I learnt how beautiful a simple black line can be when it is drawn with the confidence to allow a certain amount of relaxation.
As I grew up I used every opportunity to practice my love of drawing and story telling. At primary school I remember the excitement of finishing an exercise book because this became a passport to get me into the Aladdin’s cave of the stockroom to obtain a new book. Some artists talk about the fear of a blank page of paper but to me it has always been an exciting invitation to catch with my pen the images and ideas that were floating about in my head.
What I treasured most amongst the pens, erasers and sugar paper were those exercise books which had ruled pages on one side and blank pages on the other. For me these were an invitation to create my first picture books. Now my character’s speech would appear in a block of text opposite the illustrations. I recall Custer, with long flaxen hair and droopy moustache being the hero of one of these early books – the influence of a television series. I don’t recall showing these books to my teacher or parents - they were made solely for my own enjoyment, for the pure pleasure of play.
This same principle applies to the books I create today. The best stories come out of a pure sense of play – without thoughts of how they might be received by an audience. These more grown up considerations come later. The first stage is purely selfish; I’m making a book simply because I love doing it.
Having mentioned comics and T.V programmes as sources of inspiration for my creativity (lets not forget TOP CAT) I would like to be able to reel off the names of many treasured picture books which had enriched my development. The truth is, back in the early sixties there simply wasn’t the array of fantastic 32 page works of art that bookshops are bursting with today. I do remember the poems and drawings in WHEN WE ARE SIX by A.A. Milne (thank you whoever brought that into our home) and a book of riddles by (Bennet Cerf?) illustrated with beautifully simple brushline drawings. Years ago, just before giving a reading to a group of children in a library, I found a copy of this book on the shelves. As I scanned the graceful drawings which I hadn’t seen for decades I realised that I knew every brushstroke by heart. As a boy I had the memorised lines just as faithfully as if they had been lines from a favourite poem. I hadn’t just seen the pictures, I had read them, and the language I had learnt from studying was utilized in my drawings and still is today.
After school I spent three years at Art College – accompanied the whole time by a succession of sketch books. These were whipped out at every opportunity to record the minutiae of student life in drawings. Any interesting, quirky things being said would be scribbled underneath or in a speech bubble. Once again the words helped to bring the picture to life.
I have always been interested in the marriage of words and pictures and it is this fascination which informs my work today. I am lucky in that if I have a story to tell - I have two versatile and complementary tools with which to tell it. With picture books the fun comes in deciding what you tell in words and what is best said in the language of pictures.
In my book Hug it became clear to me that my story was best told by the pictures (I cut the text down to only three words!) This meant that the pictures had to carry most of the story development. The expressions on the character’s faces, the body language, the colours, the compositions all had to work together to give the information which the child would need to engage emotionally with the twists and turns of the story. My central character in the book is a chimpanzee called Bobo (yes, one of the three words in the book). In the story Bobo’s sense of lostness and bewilderment at losing his Mum has to grow page by page. If this is conveyed convincingly then the reader will identify with Bobo and hopefully feel the same sense of joy and relief as he does when he is reunited with his Mummy (you may have guessed the third word by now). The emotions on Bobo’s face are therefore crucial to the story. When you consider that the raising or lowering of a line describing a mouth by as much as a millimetre can radically change an expression (and therefore the emotion of the character) things can get a bit scary. If I thought about this sort of thing too much I could never put pen to paper.
When you are writing and illustrating for children you have the pleasure of knowing that you have the most attentive audience for your work. Even if children are not yet able to read the words they are nearly always fluent readers of the pictures. They will read the lines and interpret the expressions on the faces. In this respect they are often better readers than their parents - who will miss many details that the child is instinctively picking up on.
One of the things I love about being an illustrator is that there are so many different materials that can be used to make pictures. For me to use only ink and line in my illustrations would be like a musician only ever playing one type of music. Why play just classical when there’s jazz, blues, boogie woogie and many other styles to explore? In my book Some Dogs Do I used gouache paint with no line at all and in Guess What Happened at School Today (a collection of my poetry) I used coloured paper to make collage illustrations. By ripping, cutting, sticking, splodging, scratching, and scrawling my way through varied mediums I find that I get to express different aspects of myself as an artist.
So I confess, it’s true: I do play for a living. I’ve been getting away with it for twenty years now and no- one’s blown the whistle for playtime to end yet!
Jez Alborough
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READING TO YOUR CHILD
When you read to children you become a vital link between the book and the child. It is your job to bring the two together, so that through your presentation, any ‘magic’ within the pages of the book will reach out and cast its spell on the child.
The physical act of reading sets up the background for this ‘magic’ to happen; you are giving your child your undivided attention, you are sitting together, breathing together and you are sharing an experience. All you’ve got to do is make sure the experience is as good as it can be.
The best books, with their rhythms, rhymes and fantastic characters to give voices to, almost demand to be read out loud. They invite you to throw away inhibitions and go for a real no holds barred performance. The more you are willing to do this - the easier it will be for the child to ‘get into’ the book. And the great thing is, while you are both having all this fun together they are also learning to read. That is why buying quality picture books is such an investment- because if the magic is in there, no matter how many times you read it, it never wears out. With each reading the child is going further into what the book has to teach it about sounds, shapes, colours, words, feelings - you name it!
So what gives a book that magic? For me there are two parts to this. Firstly a book must express something which is true. Whether it’s the grumpiness of a Grinch or the innocence and Zen like wisdom of a Pooh Bear what is important is that the observations of the subject are true to how life is - so the book has that ‘I know how that feels’, or that ‘I know someone like that’ factor.
The second part is how well those observations are simplified and caught on the page using the two complimentary tools all picture book artists have at their disposal: words and pictures.
When all these ingredients click together then the magic can happen. You will know when it has because as you read you will become aware through their gasps, their mesmerised eyes or their attentive silence- that your audience is feeling all kinds of feelings.
Of course it helps if you (the adult) enjoy the book as well. Somewhere inside us is the same wonder at the world which children have in abundance. The best picture books speak to that part in us- whatever age we are. So sometimes you may find yourself feeling things too! It’s all part of the sharing. So enjoy the performance. Happy reading- happy sharing!
Jez Alborough Feb ‘03
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