green thumbs

I have downsized. Thumbnails help me get back to basics and review how the book works as a whole. The tiny size is also useful because it makes me focus on the flow of the pages and how the spreads relate to one another rather than get bogged down in the details. This one is made up of the roughs and visuals I've done so far, but I have several blank versions ready for scribbling on too and already I can see where I want to make some fairly radical changes.

seedling changeling

Ok, please bear with me here. I know this blog has been a mass of stop/starts, changing roughs and long periods of total silence. It's basically the book blog equivalent of being hopelessly lost on a country road without a map. Probably in the dark. Near a sinister tree. With an owl.

The trouble is that's a truthfully accurate reflection of how this book's progress has been in my head. If it's frustrating to read about it, believe me it's 100 times worse living it!

Anyway, here's how it goes. I see the finished images in my mind, I sketch what I think is a fairly faithful representation of that in thumbnail form, then I sit in front of a pristine, super scary sheet of white stretched paper, start working, and *poof* it disappears!

This image is a good example. Here's the rough:

And here's the finished illustration:

See? Somewhere between visualising it, sketching it and painting it, it got fussy and somehow completely lost... What? I don't know. The essence of it, I guess. As an image on its own I still like it, but... it's just not what I meant. Not what I meant at all. I wish I could be more specific.

Now granted, what follows might seem like a blatant promotion for my shop, but it's really not (honestly!). There was something strangely uncomfortable for me about seeing all my work together in one place. It prompted me to stop and take stock in a massive "that's not what I meant at all" type way. I'd even go as far as to say I've been experiencing something of a mild creative crisis of sorts. (You can read more about my angsty midnight mini cheddar munching over here if you're that way inclined).

So while I've been gone from this blog for some time, over on Scribbles in Ink I've been experimenting with a much simplified, stronger and graphic way of working (like the cow print above) and think I'm finally ready to start The Growing Boy take three.

As a result, I've revisited the first rough I did (first time round and subsequently replaced by the book carrying boy above - I told you to bear with me, right?):

Which has now become, in very rough form, this:

growing ideas

The Growing Boy has been in the back of my mind for some time now, but unfortunately everyday life has a habit of interrupting my train of thought.

I see things that remind me of the story and file them away, ready to use when I finally get back to it. Today I gathered my doodles and scribbles, my notes and collected images, and later will try to make some sense of it all.

[lino]cuttings

Oh dear, the neglect of the poor growing boy is now bordering on abuse... I'm like an evil, wicked character from a Brothers Grimm tale, and he's been shut up in a silent, dark cupboard for months! However..... maybe it's the fact that spring is round the corner, maybe I just needed to mull on it for a bit, but I am starting to work on the book again, albeit in a slightly different direction (yet again!). Thanks for sticking with him in the empty dark days, hopefully the growing boy will be growing again soon... (if you want to know what dastardly deeds I've been up to meantime, see above and here).

distracted by a giant turnip

You might think I've been neglecting the growing boy a bit of late... and you'd be right. I do have some new roughs which take the story in a slightly different direction, but for now I'm busy beavering away on illustrations for a book of children's dramas. You can see what I've been up to here.

plant a pumpkin

Things are growing slowly, slowly, slowly... The design job stretches on and on, the original deadline of tomorrow has moved and looks set to keep moving through no fault of my own. Very frustrating when I have other projects I'd like to work on. Meantime I am trying to squeeze the Growing Boy into the small spaces between other work. This is a tiny detail from the illustration I'm working on (with the tomato juggling) - a pumpkin plant and tomatoes and a snail (almost).

new gardening tools

Since they arrived last week my new watercolours have lain, unopened, until today. It has taken huge restraint on my part, but I have had to ignore them while I got on with some urgent design work (it has been hell - I could see them out of the corner of my eye the whole time and I would much rather have been messing around with paints, brushes and water than formatting text!).

I finally got my chance tonight and it's amazing how having new tools can make you work in a more exciting way. My trusty old watercolour box has been with me since my college days (a long time!) and I guess I am just in a rut with them. They're like a comfortable old pair of slippers and I use them without thinking really. I've been opening all the new little foil wrappers and laying out the colours like jewels, testing them out and playing around - each one is more fabulous than the last! It has made me think more about the feel of the book and the mood of the illustrations, rather than just reaching mechanically for my old favourites. More importantly, I'm having fun with them!

The new illustration is still in the early stages, so nothing to show quite yet, but I'm pleased with the way it's turning out...

sun dirt water

The pressing need to focus on other work (in this case the puppet festival brochure with a fast approaching deadline, gulp) ensures that I am pulled towards developing the Growing Boy instead. I am completely predictable in this respect - you can guarantee that, whatever I am actually supposed to be doing, I will be irresistibly and inexplicably drawn to do the exact opposite. (The only time I really worry is when I get the overwhelming urge to clean the cooker, this is procrastination in its ultimate form!).

Knowing that my time is pretty much spoken for for the next week or so at least, I pulled myself away from my sketchbook and treated myself to some new watercolours and some waterproof pens in sepia and black, in readiness for when I can work on this again (by which time I expect I will have noticed some other urgent household chore that needs doing immediately...)

growing [again]

I have been visiting with the growing boy again and playing around with words. He has become like my own child now with a life of his own - the story has changed so much since it first began (and I notice too that he is beginning to crop up in other work when he has not been invited!). In my head the words mesh together to make this wonderful, magical world where he gets from start to finish and it all makes perfect sense (to me at least!), accompanied by fabulous, quirky and luminous illustrations of course! In reality, it is a little trickier to get it moving smoothly from one spread to the next and still work as whole... and it doesn't flow yet, it is still far too clunky. Lots of writing, scoring out, moving things around and, still, not quite there yet.

The story has become more surreal too, I'm not sure yet if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Only time will tell.

like a hardy perennial...

[edit: maybe try one with added mischief!]

Growing boy / greetings card! All is explained here

garden view

The joys of illustrating and the mystery of the stairs that go nowhere... Who knew a degree in architecture would have come in handy for this book? Unfortunately for me I do not possess such a qualification.

I've 'flipped' the rough for this next version. I want to head out to the garden in the next spread so this way round makes more sense. However, I still need the boy on the stairs and a door out to the garden and at the moment, despite my best efforts (including constructing a wall outside!) I cannot see where these stairs can possibly lead! Time to get out and about with my camera for reference, methinks!

Aha, or maybe the addition of a landing midway up the stairs...

sprouting again

I haven't forgotten about my little growing boy, he's just been a bit neglected of late. I found time to sketch some tiny, tiny thumbnails, trying to work out the stairs spread. It's proving trickier than I thought, as you need to also be able to see out to the garden somehow...

can you dig it?

The thumbnails are coming thick and fast, I'm finally working out the exact details of how the beginning gets to the middle and the middle to the end...! It seems obvious I know but, while the bare bones of the story have been quite clear to me for some time it hasn't always been so clear how to say everything I want to in each spread. Although the text is quite minimal, the pictures have to convey much more than the words themselves.

Plus, I have a tendency to go to the dark side, I blame all those fairy stories from my childhood when Grandmama actually did get eaten by the wolf... It's probably why I love Maurice Sendak's work so much too. I like being a little bit scary with my work and I think kids like being a little bit scared, but in this case portraying the situation too realistically (as in the old visual above) was beginning to resemble a story of child neglect. I think adding a more surreal reason for his family being disinterested (with the line up of daredevil portraits on the stairs) works better.

preparing the ground

I'm finding lots of inspiration for the Growing Boy in the garden, especially in my little greenhouse, perhaps that's why I have suddenly found the enthusiasm to look at the book again. Looking forward to a weekend of sketching tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and onions...

Meanwhile, I have a literal blank canvas prepared to work up the first visual. I deliberately used the board which the old spread languished on for a year - a clean slate.

pruning

Now I've started again almost from scratch, it has become much easier to see which parts of the book were not working - and how to fix them. I'm not nearly so unhappy about losing spreads that I had become attached to (and stuck with) and I can see already how the new pages have become so much more lively. The book had clearly been stagnating for some time but the changes have renewed my enthusiasm for it!

green shoots

I'm finally finding time to work on this and I think this blog is going to be extremely useful for me. Having a space (less cluttered than my sketchbook!) to organise, collate and review my ideas, combined with a 'diary' of my thoughts - very handy. It will also be interesting to see how long I can keep the gardening references going for the post titles!!

My first thoughts for the boy character are above but, having procrastinated and struggled with it for nearly a year, as posted earlier I eventually had to admit defeat. The book wasn't working and definitely not developing as I saw it in my mind, so I have started again. The decision, once made, was something of a relief!

What I have in my head is much cleaner, with simplified lines and very expressive body language. I want to concentrate on the changes to the character's environment as it develops and not get bogged down in irrelevant detail.

My 'Wind' illustration was done fairly quickly and as a very personal response to Wordsworth's poem, Surprised by Joy - Impatient as the Wind. I was very moved by the poem and its expression of loss, and I think that's one of the reasons the image works.

One of my weaknesses as an illustrator (and this has always been so), is my tendency to overwork things long after I should have stopped, losing the immediacy and emotional power of the original roughs. So, now I will try to keep the immediacy for the Growing Boy illustrations - tricky when I've been living with them in my head for so long!

Thumbnail and first roughs above. The devil will be in the rendering of the final artwork! I have to work up one spread at least, to find the best medium and style to achieve what I am seeing in my head. Will post the progress...

from tiny acorns

the growing boy, take two...

I've begun the new roughs for the growing boy book. Tiny, tiny thumbnails to start with, trying to get a feel for how the book is going to work as a whole. I'm not sure I want to stick with realism though, I have a feeling it might yet be quite everyday with a hint of the fantastical - my favourite kind of mundane.