Picture This
In the first of a new Books for Keeps series, Nicolette Jones puts three picture book illustrations in the spotlight.
A piece in the trade magazine The Bookseller (Zoe Knowles, 22 April) recently drew attention to the UK’s top-earning illustrators, and also to the fact that bestseller lists do not identify artists, so research had to go a roundabout way. Sarah McIntyre, whose #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign has long agitated for illustrators to be named when their work is reproduced in the media, pointed out that the publishing industry was missing a trick by not tracking its most lucrative creators.
Illustration, I suppose, is overlooked because it suffers from the multiple stigma of being for children (an undervalued audience) and enjoyed by them (although made by accomplished adults), not being Fine Art (however skilled, and however much it evidently owes to that tradition), being commercial (as if fine art never is) and responding to text (as if there were no creativity in depicting something someone else has already described). If this last principle were valid, a Cezanne would count for nothing if someone else had already said to him: ‘paint the apples on that table’.
I am now Tweeting daily a #NewIllustrationoftheDay, an image chosen around publication of the book it comes from, or to tie in with an event or an award. The intention is to highlight the skill and the range of such work, and to explode the idea that it is undeserving of the attention of grown-ups, or even easy to make. And also to encourage people to look at and reflect on the creativity, as they might if they saw each image in a gallery. I have long thought that picturebooks would be perfectly legitimate ‘texts’ on the A Level syllabus, not only because of the very many subtle decisions that go into their making but also because sophisticated critical analysis can have any subject. (I had a friend who taught a course at Yale on Toy Story.) The visual can certainly be just as much dissected as the verbal.
Looking closely at the 50 or so pictures already posted has brought some thoughts home to me, which I would like to share by examining three single images from picturebooks that already appeared in my Tweets. The first does not qualify as a new illustration, but appears in a newly published edition of work by the late Shirley Hughes: My Very Busy Day.
This image is, like all Shirley Hughes’s work, entirely handcrafted, so every pen- and brushstroke is individually executed. Sadly, this skill is going out of fashion in the age of Photoshop. The picture also has depth – again an attribute increasingly eclipsed by flat computer graphics. You can always walk into a Hughes picture in your head. I think it helps children to be absorbed by story, if they can enter the illustrations like this. Look at it long enough and you will hear the crunch of dead leaves and the chatter of the adults, and smell the autumn air.
The figure of the child stomping through the leaves reminded me how much Shirley Hughes’s many years of filling her sketchbook with drawings of small children at play in the gardens behind her home taught her how they move and stand in different circumstances. It is also now very rare in children’s books not to summarise the action of a child with a simplified symbol of a child running or jumping but instead to offer a truly observed and convincing representation of balance, stance and motion.
This led me to think too about how Hughes drew faces. Each child was distinct. (Picture Alfie’s face, and Bernard’s.) That too has become unusual in illustration. Most illustrators now adopt the formula of two dots for eyes, an angle for a nose and a line for a mouth. Some use their own trademark features: round eyes with sidelong looks – circles with dots to the side (Axel Sheffler), or a surprised expression – circles with central dots (Olivier Tallec), or a big nose or a pointy one for all the faces. At the very moment when we are at last focusing on inclusivity in children’s books, and depicting faces in different colours with various hairstyles, and, say, children with physical aids (a wheelchair, a hearing aid), we are also reducing the variety of human features to a formula. The faces of animals in children’s books are now often more particular than the faces of children themselves. On top of this, given that we are now seeing fewer photographs of children because of important safety concerns, and the pictures that appear on social media may be enhanced, perhaps we are limiting children’s acceptance of what we all really look like. Should we be drawing from life again? It certainly takes a good deal of craft, on a par with Shirley’s, to get right. I remember from several years of judging the Macmillan Prize for unpublished illustrators, that a common failing among the submissions was that children’s faces looked creepy.
Another Illustration of the Day which was popular on social media was by a practising, established artist: Sarah Massini. The spread I chose from The Girl and The Mermaid (with text by Hollie Hughes) demonstrates the variety of media and techniques that might go into one illustration, and the purposes these serve. The artist revealed that ‘It’s made with: pencil, crayon, watercolour, printed textures – all pulled together in Photoshop, like a big mind-boggling puzzle!’
A focal point, against a light field, is Alina looking into the face of a wooden pirate figurehead, who seems to look back at her. This interaction, and her gesture of surprise, injects comedy into a book which involves sadness (a grandmother’s dementia). As in all the best picturebooks, the image tells its own story.
The printed textures seem to include the wood grain of a sunken ship and the watery backdrop, but there is also loose brushwork for torn sails, sketchy pen depicting damaged rigging, blown ink on a coral reef, splashed speckles that evoke foam or bubbles, and what looks like a sponge print making the honeycomb scales of the mermaid’s tail. Although there is precision in the drawing of the figurehead and the ship, elsewhere free strokes suggest movement in the underwater plants, and the mermaid’s floating hair and the seaweed wrapped around her.
A dozen different varieties of fish are grouped or scattered, facing both ways, to decorate the scene and balance the pretty colours: orange, pink, yellow, blue and green, notably including a pink shoal of slivers of fish, offsetting the turquoise-y blue of the wreck, and reminding us that even the mast is underwater. The green fish have white bands that are slightly wider than their bodies, in a way that implies that the stripes glow.
A green seahorse gives the undersea landscape focus and, vivid against a dark ground, echoes Alina who stands out against the light, though its tail inverts the position of her legs.
The mermaid’s tail, meanwhile, reaches towards Alina, along with her right arm, her hair and her face, linking left and right pages of the spread and making the heroine not seem alone – which is very important to the story. The figures are drawn with some elongation, looking slim and delicate, thin-armed and oval-faced; the mermaid is like a Simone Martini Madonna but with shorthand features, and the sweep of her body recalls his Annunciation.
It is a rewarding image, and, like Hughes’s, somewhere for a child reader to escape into.
Happily, choosing for this daily post has also drawn my attention to illustrators I did not know. Plaudits to Greystone Kids, just honoured at the Bologna Book Fair, for the strength and range of their artists who work around the globe. (And similarly to Pushkin Children’s Books and Gecko Press.) Walker Books is sourced less eclectically but maintains its reputation for quality. Which is not to say that truly impressive artwork does not come from many other houses as well.
An Iranian artist from Greystone Kids was new to me, but also struck a chord with many, who responded to the image by Reza Dalvand from his picturebook Champ (with text by Payam Ebrahami). The book is about high family expectations, and this spread sums it up.
The impact of course comes principally from the use of scale: from drawing the father as a giant stabbing his finger at his tiny son. Also from the posture: the great curve of the father’s body sweeping down like a tsunami about to wash the boy (Abtin) away. The big body is enough – the rest of the page can be blank: Dad is all there is to think about. And the minimal colours are just right: grey, like a concrete mass, and light-swallowing black. And that red face (and hands and ankles) that suggest he is boiling, apoplectic with rage. The dangling medal is bigger than the son’s face – ‘in-your-face’ evidence of achievement to back up the injunction. And the shoes that look like slippers, and Abtin’s vest, suggest that home is where the pressure is.
Meanwhile, drawing the eye to the corner of the spread are the tiny details that show the son’s dreams. The minute pencils, pot of brushes and discarded pictures, including one hidden behind his back, reveal that he wants to be an artist. The paintings on the floor suggest where the family thinks they belong. And a spot of red on his cheek expresses the intensity of Abtin’s emotional response. The nub of the story (and of a lot of people’s experience) is all in the one spread.
These thoughts just touch the surface of these three pictures. Imagine how much there would be to say about the complete books. The moral: never underestimate the complexity of children’s illustration.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times, and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned:
My Very Busy Day, Shirley Hughes, Walker Books, 978-1529519310, £12.99 hbk
The Girl and The Mermaid, Hollie Hughes, illus Sarah Massini, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 978-1526628107, £12.99 hbk
Champ, Payam Ebrahimi, illus Reza Dalvand, Greystone Kids, 978-1778401190, £12.99 hbk