Windows into Illustration: Rebecca Cobb

Rebecca Cobb’s illustrations with their distinctively childlike style are immediately recognisable in books from The Paper Dolls to Missing Mummy. As she explains in this Windows into Illustration feature, she found much to suit her illustration style in Mariesa Dulak’s text for There’s a Tiger On The Train.

I hadn’t realised how much time I spent looking at my phone until the day our children stuck a picture of a mobile with a red line through it on the kitchen wall and said that they were making a new rule – no phones at mealtimes. So when I read Mariesa’s brilliant story There’s A Tiger On The Train, I knew I had to illustrate it!

One of my favourite themes in picture books is the contrast in the way that children and grown-ups experience the world. To emphasise this, I wanted the illustrations to take over more of the page each time so that you get a sense of the boy’s imagination growing as more and more animals board the train.

I have chosen this page in the book to talk about because it is the point when the scene becomes a full double spread: almost all of the animals have now arrived – while dad continues to focus on his tiny phone screen, oblivious to the increasing chaos.

I was excited about how much of the story is set inside a train carriage because that meant that I could really play around with looking at the same setting in different ways. To help with this I built a cardboard carriage that I could photograph from all different angles. I then chose photos of the model that I thought would suit each page, depending on how much text needed to fit in or how many animals were going to be in that scene and made drawings from them.

I made my train carriage model have the right number of seats for the boy and his dad and all the animals in the story and then I worked out a seating plan of where they were all going to sit so that I would be able to keep it the same in every picture. This took me a few attempts because it was a bit of a juggle trying to make sure that the right animals would be the focus on the page where they were introduced in the text.

I always notice the fabric patterns on the seating of trains and buses and it feels like a big part of the way that they look so I wanted this train to have its own pattern on the seats. I thought that it would look good if it was quite a busy pattern, but I decided to limit myself to using one colour so that it didn’t become too distracting or overwhelming in the pictures when the focus was supposed to be on the characters. After experimenting with a few ideas, I drew a pattern of lots of little train wheels.

I worked entirely on paper for the final artwork and used a mixture of coloured pencils, watercolour and gouache with acrylic ink for the line. I always use the end of a paintbrush or a bamboo skewer that I carve into a nib shape, to draw with ink because I like the inconsistency and variation in the thickness and density of the line that you get that way.

Mariesa’s story is a lovely, timely reminder to live in the moment. I hope that readers enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!

There’s A Tiger On The Train illustrated by Rebecca Cobb and written by Mariesa Dulak is published by Faber Children’s Books, 978-0571368341, £7.99 pbk.