New Year Reflections on 2016

Well it has been three years since I actively started blogging and as it is January it is a time for reflection upon what I got up to in the last year.  In general I have blogged less this year, probably due to returning to the world of work after an extended maternity leave, but I have still endeavoured to become a picture book Author and Illustrator, which is what my blogging aims to document.

So this year I started my Instagram account after hearing that it is how a lot of illustrators get spotted by agents.  I like it as a platform and it brings my work to a new audience judging from the likes and follows.  I treat it as a sketchbook showcase and show different work from what I show on my Facebook page and Twitter.  I’ve have not been approached by any agents yet though.



Speaking of agents, after going to the brilliant SCBWI Workshop; Getting Your Picture Book onto the Page with Elizabeth O Dulemba, I chatted with Sheila Averbuch about how she found Writer’s Digest Webinars (the live ones with access to editors and agents) very valuable in her path to publishing.  So I decided to try one and bought How to Write a Picture Book That Sells complete with a critique from a US agent .  While I found the webinar itself to be just okay (useful content but delivered by reading from slides) I was more interested in getting a professional critique on my current ‘best’ manuscript.  For the money I paid, I was initially disappointed with the four lines of feedback that I received.  The first two lines were positive and then I read these comments;

“I wish there was more of a story, though.  The picture book market is so competitive 
that I wonder if this story has enough in it to make it stand out from the rest.”

I couldn’t believe it, especially as I had just added more conflict to my latest draft, in truth I felt a bit despondent and stopped writing for a little while.  A few months later there was an opportunity to have a 121 session with Skylark a UK literary agency, organised by SCBWI BI NE.  So I got that manuscript out and read it again, I still thought it was good until I analysed it using Alayne Kay Christian’s Art of Arc self-study exercises .  The agent was right there wasn’t actually any story there at all.  It was a bittersweet moment of realisation that I need to revise that manuscript more before I can send it out for submission again.

So I didn’t submit this Picture Book manuscript to Skylark as it obviously wasn’t ready and because they are mainly Young Adult and Middle Grade agents.  Instead I decided to submit an old comic script that I had recently re-drafted.  And I was very surprised to get great feedback from Joanna Moult. Find out what she said here in Em Lynas’s write up of the event.  So I now feel encouraged to continue working on the both the comic a bit more and the picture book.

This year I have increased my volunteering duties for SCBWI, not only did I hang the SCBWI Illustrator Showcase in Seven Stories again, I am also now co-Network Organiser for the North East alongside Marie-Claire Imam-Guitierrez.  You can read an interview with me about the role in SCBWI's Words and Pictures, online magazine.  So far I have learnt a lot from watching Marie-Claire organise the wonderful Creating Believable Characters Event and I will be organising an Illustration event in the next few months.

The SCBWI BI Illustration Showcase at Seven Stories


My artwork output has diversified this year and now includes Caricatures and Comics!  Both as a result of doing Inkotber. I’ve done three Inktobers now and for Inktober2016 I wanted to do something a bit bigger to grow my audience.  I thought I’d draw and ink a page of my comic manuscript everyday but realised how ambitious that would be in the timescale of a month.  Instead I adapted Kate Bush’s song Under Ice into a 16 page, one panel per page, minicomic.  I am a massive fan of Kate Bush and was lucky enough to go to a concert of hers during her 2014 residency at the Eventim Apollo.  Under Ice is a song from a suite called the Ninth Wave on her 1985 album Hounds of Love.  It is a very visual suite of songs that I interpret as being about a woman falling overboard a ship and slipping in and out of consciousness before she is finally rescued.  Each song is either a dream or an account of what is happening.  As you can see from my  drawings, I imagine the song to be about Kate skating on a frozen river when it cracks and she falls in the water and dies, the ending sequence is her seeing herself under the ice and emerging as a spirit.




So did this grow my audience?  Yes it did!  And if you follow this blog you will find out when my next post is live, and I will tell you how.

01 - Spread Of Wonder: House In The Night

This post marks the first in a monthly series! I’m calling this series Spread Of Wonder and I’m going to talk about spreads* from picture books that I admire because it will be nice to share with you and because it will help me in my quest to become a Children’s Picture Book Author and Illustrator.  You can’t make picture books without reading them and really looking at them so this series will help me do that and analyse what makes a good spread.

 * - two facing pages of a book, see my Anatomy of a Picture Book video if you need more clarification

The first spread that I am looking at is the 8th spread; “all about the starry dark.” from the gorgeous, Caldecott-winning “House In The Night” written by Susan Marie Swanson and illustrated by Beth Krommes.  The copy I have is a board book that was published in 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the UK and I bought it from the Seven Stories bookshop where it just jumped off the shelves as being so striking.

The House in The Night - Spread of Wonder

The story, on its simplest level, is about a girl going home to her bed, reading a book and going to sleep as night falls.  It is so much more poetic than that, with beautiful language.  The girl is shown as reading the same book as we are, but for her the bird in the book comes to life and carries her through the night.  In fact that is what this spread shows.  In the top right corner we see the girl riding the bird as it spreads a blanket of darkness over the land.

As the book is about dark and light, day and night, what better way to show this with the bold black and white scraperboard technique, picked out accents of yellow?  Where Krommes needs tone, she makes lots of little marks. The closer the marks are together, the lighter the tone.  

Detail of The House in The Night - Spread of Wonder

I know from experience how difficult it is to work in scratchboard, not only physically in making tiring, little scrapes in the inked clay surface but mentally in how you have to draw in reverse, scraping the highlights of an object onto black.  It is also hard to repair the surface if you make a mistake and it is a nightmare to reproduce with lots of postproduction required.

"This Crooked Way" Scratchboard by Claire O'Brien
"This Crooked Way" Scraperboard by Claire O'Brien

Formally, Krommes has flattened the perspective of the landscape, describing the hills as overlapping semi-circles.  The roads curve slightly over the hills to describe their 3D form.  She disregards diminution, things only get slightly smaller, the further away in the scene that they are.  This is a clever device as it makes the image full of detail for a child to immerse themselves in.  The blanket of dark is drawn over the landscape with an undulating outline and creates a beautiful contrast with the light ahead of it.  In the dark, the stars, house lights and car lights are picked out in yellow and in the light ahead, the yellow also accents the bird’s song, a washing line, car, roof, flowers and a sign.

How does this spread aid storytelling?  The direction of the bird is moving from the left to the right which is the norm for Western, linear story telling, so the spread moves us forward in the story.  If we look at the preceding spread we see that it follows a close, dynamic shot of the bird and girl flying out of the window, which shows a clear change in location and makes them two very different spreads. This is unlike the following spread, where, although seen from a different angle, the bird is practically in the same position, same size and same location as it was before.

The House in the Night - Preceding and Following spreads.


What can the aspiring illustrator learn from this spread of wonder then? 
  • The physical Direction of the action contributes to the narrative of the story
  • Perspective - simplification and lack of diminution aids creating detail
  • Limited Palette - The black, white and yellow are very striking

You can see Krommes’ working method here and read Carter Higgins’ feature on the book in her Design of the Picture Book blog

There is just so much for a child to look at and for an adult to admire in this beautiful book.  Please comment with your own thoughts on this spread, or make a suggestion for a future Spread of Wonder candidate for me to analyse and don’t forget to follow this blog to receive a notification of my next post.  Thanks for reading!

Introduction

Welcome to my blog, it will document my quest of becoming a picture book Author and Illustrator.  I am an Artist, Teacher and Mother with a couple of manuscripts and picture book dummies on the go.  I expect that Blogging will help me learn things, share more and give me accountability for anything that I say that I will do.  Most importantly it will help me connect with the friendly and helpful children's book (kidlit) community as I embark with them on the following online adventures:

  • Start The Year Off Write - Shannon Abercrombie's kidlit writing challenge lasting 21 days, beginning on January 5th.  It features authors and illustrators sharing insights into their practices and writing prompts and exercises to complete, all with the opportunity to win prizes.  (I started it but life with two little ones got in the way) 
  • Julie Hedlund's 12 x 12 which runs all year round beginning in January, where the aim is to write twelve picture book drafts in one year, one per month.  

And possibly:
  • Meg Miller's ReviMo, a week of revising tips from authors and illustrators.  I signed up for this but didn't complete it, next year I will after all of the work I produce this year : ).
  • Paula Yoo's NaPiBoWriWee a challenge to attempt to write seven picture books in seven days which runs in May

I'm also a member of:
  • SCBWI, the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators, a fabulous support network for published and unpublished children's book writers and illustrators.  They provide lots of essential information and events relating to the industry.
  • CBI, the Children's Book Insider, a paid subscription website and Facebook group all about writing children's books.  If I am honest this website is a bit of a let down for me as I find that lots of their pages are randomly offline.
  • I have also just successfully completed PiBoIdMo, Tara Lazar's Picture Book Idea Month which runs in November where the challenge is to come up with 30 picture book ideas in the 30 days of November.  I'm pleased to say I achieved it on this, my second attempt.  I am now using some of these ideas to draft up for 12 x 12.
  • At least once or twice a month, you can find me in Seven Stories with my two children, I used to work at this wonderful place that is the National Centre For Children's Books. They have fabulous exhibitions, author/illustrator events and a wonderful bookshop.  It is also the venue for the SCBWI crit group that I belong to. 

My interests that I will blog about are:
  • Picture book creation
  • Picture book analysis and study
  • Picture book apps
  • Art and drawing process
  • Education and training
  • Books on the craft of creating picture books, writing and art
  • Recommending good online resources (linking to things I like and that have helped me)

Other things that may crop up could be:
  • Freelancing
  • Productivity
  • Parenting
  • Venice (my favourite place on earth, where I lived for a while)

I've learnt so much from blogs, websites and communities online over the years, maybe My blog can help someone else too. I will not openly commit to how often I will be blogging yet but I have made sure that I have started with a few posts already written.  Perhaps you'd like to subscribe to be notified of my next post where I will ask whether you need a degree to become a professional artist.  If you'd like to connect further with me you can like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and add me on LinkedIn and Google+ and I will happily do the same for you.

Thanks for visiting, please post your own comments below as an introduction to yourself so I can follow your blogs too.