Can you paint lying down?

Mini Racer on track: near the Museum of Childhood & down the road from the Olympics

The sun shone on my first ever children's workshop in London - in the Gallery Cafe Garden, near the Museum of Childhood yesterday.

As ever, the kids proved to be great readers of pictures.  They spotted all the red and green flags - and plenty of other details I had almost forgotten myself, as I read Kristy Dempsey's words.  

As time was short, I'd prepared a quick activity - a choice of vehicles I  printed onto card, for them to colour, fold in two, & stand upright on the track.

One boy and one girl chose Motodog.

At least five girls wanted DottyDog and family.  

One chose the speedy Carrot Car.

And the smallest person there, chose the smallest
racer ...




We made a track with left and right turns
with this tape.

Mini Racer go go go!  

We cheered the Mini Racers on, one day before David Weir won the Paralympics marathon gold medal down the road.

Today I whizzed down the Strand on my bike to catch the tail end of the closing Olympic parade, dodging the crowds through central London.

The bus with the Olympic medalists was WAY too far ahead.

Oh well.  Doesn't matter where you are on the track.  

There's always something to appreciate...

Children's Book Garden Party, Gallery Café St Margeret's House, near the V&A Museum of Childhood

Are you in London and do you have kids?
Why not take them to the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green next Saturday September 8th?
Then after 1pm, just cross Old Ford Road, a few steps north, for the first Children's Book Garden Party at the Gallery Cafe, St Margaret's House!

A bunch of us authors and illustrators from CWISL will be running some fun workshops and storytelling until 5pm for free - while you eat cake!

Nicholas Allan will be performing his magic  with the Queen's Knickers.
Margaret Bateson-Hill will get your child making a duck hat.
You can meet Karin Littlewood and her Eskimo Immi,  Judy Allen and her Catnapping Cat.
And I'll be making little cars with kids from my star-review illustrations to Mini Racer  (read Juno magazine's review here) to race on our very own track.

If you're children are budding writers they can get some feedback and story-doctoring from older-fiction author Sam Osman. (Buy a signed copy of her book Quicksilver before it goes global as a film! ).

Also don't miss award-winning author, Sarah Mussi new book Angel Dust is hot off the press with brilliant new publisher, Hot Key.  (Sarah's top writing tips appeared in the Guardian recently).

If you're not in London, and don't have kids, well, you maybe can still spread the invitation around - thanks!

Notes from Shaun Tan & Quentin Blake in Conversation, a Comica event hosted by Paul Gravett

A big thank you to Paul Gravett and Comica for getting two great artist-illustrators, Shaun Tan and Quentin Blake, who had never previously met, to talk together in public this evening in London.

http://www.comicafestival.com/index.php/site/news/shaun

I'm sure there'll be other fuller records of this interesting meeting with its unexpected bonus of a joint live drawing session.

Here are just a few things that grabbed me, which I want to get down while it's all still fresh.

What interests Quentin Blake in the process of drawing is finding out what he's drawing will look like.   "You'll have fun or trouble with this one"  is a thought he likes to have when he starts, avoiding easy, formulaic answers.

Both Shaun Tan and Quentin are happy to alter even their final drawing if needed.

They also both talked about the problem of a drawing being "too good".  Shaun has even sandpapered over a painting that feels too slick, too real. Likewise Quentin said, the important thing is not to get to the answer too easily.  You have to believe in it as a drawing, and if it's too real, too polished, perhaps it's harder to believe.  (This by the way, reminds me of something Matisse said about a painting needing to have a chink in it, some corner or bit that was troublesome, something not quite right that could give you a path into looking at it.)

Shaun nevertheless fights what he feels is his natural tendency to be too controlled.  He likes to work on a messed up surface - using collage, some colour or paint dribbles to break it up a bit.  The trouble with the computer, he says, is that you don't get suprised by accidents in the way you can drag a palette knife laden with paint and find something surprising emerge.  That said, he has to work digitally at some point for things like his film work. The real ideas start for Shaun when he 'stumbles over his own consciousness' at some point after all the emails, and worries about artistic failure (!) , visualizing things in tiny thumbnails, the smaller the freer.  He then blows them up on a light box, being too scared, he says, to work large...After working on it some length of time - he'll start to be convinced by it .  There's a certain stage of work when the conviction comes, a kind of leap of faith.   It's not there at the outset.

Quentin Blake talked about there being a lot of acting in drawing. And like an actor you can identify with your characters while maintaining a certain detachment, even if you are grimacing or growling.

Shaun standing, Quentin sitting to draw

Both started out studying English literature at university, and in Shaun's case, art history and theory but it was the apprenticeship,  the 'doing', getting small drawing commissions, both from aged 16 that taught them the most about drawing.  

For Shaun drawing is an emotional thing.  He focuses on it feeling right. He can intellectualize about it afterwards.   Words, Shaun Tan says, have a set speed (he had a nice image of the the movement from words, like throwing pebbles into a still pool, that he didn't want for The Lost Thing) The wordless visual sequence in Blake's Clown or Tan's The Arrival, means the pace can be slower, so your eyes can bounce back, move around the page, at your own pace.

Another advantage to not being too realistic, removing certain descriptive details - is that it allows for more open-ended readings.   Shaun was touched by one interpretation of his book The Arrival,  about an immigrant arriving in an unfamiliar country.  One boy told him he read it as about going to school.  So the trope of immigration can also be about transition.   That open endedness is fine.

Shaun joked that from his uneventful life in the studio he can struggle with people facing situations that he would never want to face in real life.  Similar Quentin said the people he draws are active to make up for his own laziness (!).

Lazy?  Well I'd say both Shaun Tan and Quentin Blake worked hard this evening,  talking about their process, actively drawing a few subjects the audience gave them at random, and signing books for a long line of admiring illustrators and comic book creators.

Shaun Tan and Quentin Blake starting off on the subject of 'Disguise'

Quentin's interpretation left and Shaun's right of 'Gluttony' (sorry the angle's not great!)

A London day, rich as a fruit cake

sketch for Tiz & Ott project 

I've had to lay aside my Tiz and Ott stories for the umpteenth time this year, to finish the cover for the Belles Histoires wolf story mentioned earlier.

Still, yesterday I got distracted by a  London day as rich as a fruit cake.
First I took time off in Clerkenwell Green, to draw 2 lunchtime sketches for the artist and writers Summer Solstice Scrawl Crawl.

Inspired by this man in the rain, though without that umbrella, I too had a glass of wine, before cycling back to the studio and then home to Brick Lane to work on the computer for a bit.

Two hours later, back to Clerkenwell, this time to meet my Storybox editor Simona Sideri.  Alongside books and other commissions, I've had a small regular job since 2005, illustrating her riddles on the back of each monthly Storybox magazine. Occasionally my illustrations to a full length picture book are republished there too.   Simona has worked as an editor on both sides of the Channel for various big publishing houses and we had a great time nattering about English and French publishing, and the mixed origins that lie behind our English education.

Leaving Moritos we walked past my favourite bookshop Clerkenwell Tales and saw a talk going on inside by artist and author Rachel Lichtenstein, whose fascinating book On Brick Lane  taught me a lot about where I now live.  She was launching her new book about the diamond street of London, Hatton Garden alongside none other than the great biographer of London, Iain Sinclair.

We were too late for their talk.  However we ran into Victor Keegan there. Victor is,  among other things, author of the  app, Gems of London.  I can really recommend it as a  delightful way to wander off the classic paths through London, and dig up some surprising discoveries.  We had previously met  in same shop, enthusing over the amazingly rich and stimulating blog Spitalfields Life.

Spitalfields life is so packed with goodies, people, pictures, stories. Although I follow it regularly, I've barely scraped the surface. It's like London itself. But how to work when there are such wonderful distractions all around?

Time is all I need right now.
This weekend I drive off to France for a lightening trip.  I'm giving students an day intensive on colour mixing at Parsons Paris School of Desin, and I'll catch up briefly with my former life in Senlis.
Back to the wolf cover first!

Sneak peek 3 or spot the difference!

At last! I sent off all the final spreads to Bayard's Belles Histoires yesterday, after well over a month of tweakings, snipping and snappings.  

I started this story, due to be published in October, with pencil and brush pen...scanned everything in, then decided that, to save time, I'd do the colour in photoshop.  Big mistake!

The problem with Photoshop is  - second thoughts, and third and fourth thoughts...

You can carry on revising at infinitum, until there are no more thoughts at all.  Then before you kill the picture altogether, you find yourself going back, to hunt out whatever it was that lurked in that first simple sketch that made it feel alive. 

 

And then you re-sketch, and re-scan and re-draw.  That done, you'll print out and detect a small inconsistency from one spread, to the next.  So you go over everything again, hoping to make every character believable across the whole world you've shaped and every action fresh.  Aaargh!

You wonder if anyone else will look at it as hard as you have done.
I can't help thinking that children will.  They are so much better at looking.
In fact I remember how annoyed I was as a child by visual inconsistencies.  A glaring one was on the cover of the old Rupert Bear annuals.  Why oh why did my best friend Rupert have textured brown fur on the book cover when inside he had white fur?  The fact that this was an accepted tradition in Rupert Annuals, with only one exception  - the cover of 1973 meant nothing to me as a child.

By the way in this story, young wolf frees the rabbit, bravely explaining to his wild wolf dad that he prefers potato pie with a sprinkling of thyme on it.
A very French story with food at its heart, written by Céline Claire whose story Une Nuit à L'Ecole I illustrated a while back and is being made into an app. To see the rest of this story, Le Doudou du Loup,  you'll need to be in France and hunt out the October 2012 number of Bayard's prestigious children's magazine Belles Histoires,(which publishes a new picture book story every month) or take out a subscription.
Meanwhile you COULD play 'spot the difference' with my previous sneek peak.
Now, where was I with my own book projects?  
Back to the kitchen to give them a stir!

Sneak peek 2 - a whole new wild wolf, French style

Well, the feedback from my loyal French art director was that the wolves in my first roughs weren't  quite scary enough for small kids.  They want a thrill...at least in France they do.  Which is fun, so I'm working on scaring kids some more. 

Here's wild Mrs Wolf admiring her new born.  Our little hero looks like he's got what it takes, she believes, to a Big Bad Wolf one day, just like Grandpa. 

And here  - almost done but... is a colour version of the rough I showed in my previous post, where Dad Wolf is showing his son how to be a Big Bad hunter.    

I'm still working on the look and feel of all this, 3 weeks before the final deadline. Back to work asap!