My work space

It seems that lately a lot of illustrators share pictures of their studio, desks and other workspaces. As I am way too messy, I think I'll spare you the photographs, but will share my workspace with you in the way that I experience it in a little silverpoint concertina book I made a few months ago.

"How does this thing work?" you might ask. The idea is as follows. In the basement you'll find the heart or soul or whatever you want to call it. The pure being without any influences. Then in the next room up there is all the knowledge and insight gained from everything you see and experience around you and from being with friends and family, pets and nature. 

You might think: "Two rather empty rooms..." The reason for that is that everything needs space to grow.

All the stuff from those rooms get mixed and processed in my brain and comes out as stories, cartoons and illustrations at my desk, ready to be let loose on the world. 

Simples.

Maybe I can explain my workspace better in other words, or rather, found words. Words and sentences written by others, collated to form new sentences and new meaning to express my thoughts. (Poetry or self indulgent drivel?)

The poem was made by scanning in pieces of texts from 1940's wartime newspapers. Then words and bits of sentences were put together in photoshop as I did not want to cut up 60 year old newspapers.

If you find it too difficult to read, you can find the text typed out for you below, or you can click on the image to view it at full size. 

It kind of expresses my thoughts, feelings and impressions when I am drawing and writing. Not sure if that is of any interest to anyone, but whatever your thoughts are about that, I think the text still conjures up some nice images and feelings which might make it worth reading. So here we go:

"MOON: Rises 2:39 pm; sets 6:12 am

"This is the story of the changing world

When it was summer

Day and Night the sun was blazing with pleasure

You can see

The New, Clean,

magnificent Gift of Beauty where it is most needed

this exquisite happiness in the duckpond, a garden of apple blossom, chaffinches and bees, and

beyond the river WAS WORTH WAITING FOR.

This space is Home

free from control

It binds us together in all our common joys and sorrows,

caressing ululations clearing the air gleam with radiant new beauty

Take extra care, rejoice in the art of freedom, light as a feather

it is wonderful to feel free and united in one

Don't just say freedom is an ideal

say "Let's Go" free

you'll see the SKYLINE

the swallow will be there,

with radiant new beauty, but now

LIFE Breaks all the Rules "OLD AND TRUE"

please be patient

It is wonderful to feel free. In the brilliant spring sunshine of a perfect day"

The name which is shall remain 

anonymous"

In the brilliant spring sunshine of a perfect day life breaks all the rules.

Conference

Last Saturday the 14th of April, I had the pleasure of attending the national conference of the Federation for Children's Book Groups. I presented 2 seminars on the topic of Children's book apps at the conference, but also had the opportunity to attend other speakers' sessions and visit all the publishers' stands. Needless to say, it was a fantastic day!


The first treat of the day was a session with Axel Scheffler in conversation with Eileen Browne. It was very interesting to hear him talk about his work and it was great to see him in action, drawing us a giant Gruffalo! He made it look so easy! After Axel Scheffler, Nick Lake spoke to us about his latest teen novel, "In Darkness" an interesting talk, touching on how our mind can mix reality with dreams and how this was used in his novel.


The break came along with coffee, tea and the most delicious hand baked cookies. And whilst the next talk was on, I set up the seminar room for my own talk. I thoroughly enjoyed delivering the talk, especially as the audience was truly interested in the topic and had lots of interesting questions. I started the talk with explaining how we made the Fierce Grey Mouse app which you can also read in my blog post from a few months back. 


I then moved on to talk about the difficulties and opportunities there are with marketing an app book or buying an app book if you are a customer. There are thousands of book apps about, how do you know what is a good book and how do you as a publisher get people to notice your book apps?
I finished the talk by letting people play with the available iPhones and Ipads to give them a sense of how much fun children's book apps can be!


For me the most inspiring talk of the day was by Matt Dickinson about his expedition leading a film crew up Everest and the books he wrote as a result. His latest book is "Mortal Chaos" and is the first in a new trilogy.

Next I decided to visit all the publishers' stands, which was a great idea. So many wonderful new and old books to see! From beautifully illustrated picture books to exciting new YA books, the whole range was presented. And best of all, they happily gave proof copies away for free for us to take home. Their generosity was overwhelming. I came home with 3 bags full of the most fantastic books and am enjoying reading them all and sharing them with friends and family.


Receiving the proof copies gave me an interesting insight in what publishers use to advertise new books to book sellers and what as an aspiring author you might want to be aware of. On the backs of the proofs it listed things like: author available for talks, extensive social media marketing (twitter, blogs, FB), 1st in a series of books, author has previously sold x amount of books and comparisons of the book with well known classics.


More coffee, tea and cookies was had and after a thoroughly enjoyable day it was time to go home again and go back full of inspiration to writing and illustrating my own books and cartoons!

Second World War

What a hectic weeks recently, all sort of exciting stuff happened: the video of me drawing Fierce Grey Mouse and demonstrating the Fierce Grey Mouse picture book app came out (am still so proud of it!), the free app Fierce Grey Mouse lite came out, I designed and illustrated a series of Christmas cards for a greeting card company, am drawing the daily Old Uncle Horace cartoons , and am working on 3 (!) new children's stories. 


Two of those are picture books I am developing together with David and one is a book for older children about WWII. It is that last one that I would like to write a bit more about today.


When I was growing up as a child, my mother and grandmothers on both sides of the family would tell me things that happened during the war (WWII). They always intrigued me. They were the stories of ordinary people doing extra ordinary things. Silent heroes, like so many, that never talked much about the help they gave to others and the lives they saved thanks to the help they gave. 

 

my grandmother and a friend (unfortunately I do not have a picture of my other grandmother from that time)

In the book I am writing, I am pulling together all those little snippets of stories and am knitting them together as one story. A story of an 8 year old girl living in occupied Holland during the second world war. I am concentrating 5 years of stories into a period of 6 months that takes place during the 'hunger winter' of 1944/1945  to give the story more pace. Although the book will be a work of fiction, the things that happen in the book are based on real life events. I think it is important to tell these tales as my generation was given them first hand and it might give later generations an insight and maybe inspire a little bit to stop war and evilness. Although that might be a bit much to wish for.


To give you an idea of what the hunger winter was like, I found this video on youtube. I found it quite upsetting to watch, but it brought a lot things I was told about to life.

Holland experienced the war very differently from the UK or the US. As we were occupied by the Germans and were waiting for the allies to save us. So it is not a story of heroic soldiers. It is also not the story of Jewish people in hiding or about concentration camps. Instead it is the story of an ordinary girl, placed in extra ordinary circumstances and the dilemma's, situations of danger and acts of heroism that come with that.


Although I am an illustrator, it will not be a picture book. But it will be a novel for children that will have pictures in it. I am thinking of using simple pencil drawings and possibly a few full colour illustrations. A bit like how books used to be when I was little. You had some black and white illustrations and then big colour prints on a different type, a somewhat shiny, paper. Maybe I will illustrate it a bit like some of the sketches I did for Mark Ellis' stories recently:

The first chapter has been written and has been reviewed by the writers' group I am a member of. It is ready for a rewrite and the start of chapter 2 has been made. but a lot more research needs to be done, including getting an understanding what children today know and don't know about the second world war in occupied countries.

I leave you with a little picture of a cat sleeping. Just to get all the war things out of our heads. See you in the next blog of maybe before on the Fierce Grey Mouse cartoon blog!

Stardom at last!

After a day of filming (and upsetting the dogs in the process with all those strange items appearing in their house), another day of animating and a week of editing by David, I am very proud to present Fierce Grey Mouse, The Movie! It is a little one minute (and 5 seconds) video clip introducing the Fierce Grey Mouse picture book app and showing me illustrating the mouse till he comes alive at the end of the clip. I am so pleased with the video and hope you enjoy it just as much! The version here is only small. If you would like to view a high definition, full screen version of the clip, you can click here. That will take you to the link on youtube.

What other things have been happening recently? Well, I am delighted that the greeting card company who asked me for 8 Christmas card designs have approved all 8 designs without any changes. Now I can start the real illustrations for those designs, which is the part I enjoy most. Whilst working them for real, you see them grow and become more and more alive with pencil shading and watercolours. 

I am still working on 2 fun children's books full of humour with David and am hoping to put in quite a few hours to the illustrations for those next week. And I am writing a book for older children, based on stories told by my mother and grandmothers when I was little, about their experiences during WWII. The book will be from a child's point of view and knits together events and stories from both sides of my family into one story. Although all individuals in the book are fictional, the stories are based on real life events. 

Next to the range of  Uncle Horace Greeting cards, I have started designing a little gift book using the Old Uncle Horace Cartoons. It will be "Old Uncle Horace's book of Great Friendships" and another one called "Old Uncle Horace's book of healthy living and fun". Still quite a bit to be done on those, but it is starting to take shape. To give you an idea of the type of cartoons for the gift book, here two samples:

(to see a full high res version of the cartoons, just click on the images)

I hope you enjoyed the video we made about Fierce Grey Mouse and am looking forward to seeing you in the next blog post! Till then: "Take care!"

Idea generation...

Last week I accepted a new commission for 8 Christmas Card designs. It is funny, my whole being is yearning for spring, which seems just around the corner with daffodils and snowdrops blooming everywhere around me. But I'll have to get myself back into the Christmas Spirit and try and get some new and original Christmas card ideas whilst surrounded by the beauty of spring! It will be fun though.

One way to generate new and original ideas that really works for me is word association. And that is probably where I will start tomorrow when I start sketching my designs (after I have put a Christmas CD on, lit some candles and made a cup of Christmas tea...). This works as follows:

1. You start writing down all the words that you associate with the topic you would like to create a piece of art, illustration or design on. In this case: Christmas! So there will be words like:

• snow
• tree
• reindeer
• Santa
• elfs
• food
• baubles
• candles
• light
• angels
• singing
• birth
• mistletoe
• sharing
• etc. (There will be many, many more!)

(light, birth, baby reindeer, elf)

2. Then you make a secondary list. You take the words from that list that speak to you most. In this case I really like reindeer. And I make a list with words that pop up when thinking of reindeer:

• animals
• fur
• bells
• fast
• strong
• sleigh
• antlers
• hoofs
• flying
• etc.

and I like the word mistletoe:

• plant
• kiss
• love
• touch
• berries
• up high
• hug
• green
• pale white with pink blush
• druids
• oak tree
• friendship
• etc.

(reindeer, snow, mistletoe, animals, kiss,)

3. You then go through the same process again. Pick a few words from the list and create new lists of words. You can continue this until you have a list of words that are original and fresh but are still linked with the original topic. If they are too far removed then it looses the link, but often you can easily do this 3 to 5 times and still have a clear link to your topic whilst coming up with something really original.

You can also take 2 or 3 words from your different secondary or tertiary lists and combine them in your design, piece of art or illustration. You'll get some fun themes and with a bit of luck something different.

(food, berries, animals, friendship, sharing)

Not only is word association very useful for new ideas, it is also a fun thing to do with others. Their word associations can trigger your mind with a whole new range of different ideas that you never would have got on your own.

Next time you're stuck for ideas, give word association a try. I would love to hear about your results! 

And now for something completely different. Some of you know that every weekday I post a daily cartoon from Old Uncle Horace's book of Great Wisdom on this blog . Ten of the most popular cartoons have been printed as greeting cards and are for sale on my website which you can find by clicking here. Hope you like the cards!

And in case you have not yet seen any of the Old Uncle Horace cartoons, here a few samples. Enjoy!

Children's picture books and Children's picture book apps

This week I read a very interesting article in Digital Book World called "Are children's e-books really terrible for children?" and a blog response from the Curating Book App Mom called "Ignore the discussion on book apps versus print apps". Both are well worth a read and express a lot of concepts that I have been thinking a lot about lately (ever since my first book apps Fierce Grey Mouse and Finn's Paper Hat came out and of course now also with our app No-dogs allowed, which I illustrated and was written by Phil Fryer).


When I talk to people about the apps, it is seems they don't really understand what they are. People tell me about the loveliness of a printed picture book and how it could never be replaced. The feel and smell of the pages, reading it together with children, the lovely hand drawn / painted illustrations, etc. And I agree with all that. I love books, I love the feel, smell, look and everything about them. In fact my house is full of books. But there is a bit of extra magic that we give in the app books. And it is not until I show people the apps on my iPad that they finally understand. They are often surprised to see that the stories are illustrated by hand and have the same look and feel as a printed book. They are surprised to see that they are "proper" stories that you can read with your child together. They also thoroughly enjoy the magic when they can make things move, add pictures, shake the iPad for effects, make stars appear, hear funny sounds that make the characters come to life, etc. Often by the end of the story I need to make sure they don't run off with the iPad, they get so enthusiastic about the whole thing!


Then there seems to be some prejudice against books on iPads, that they somehow should be bad for kids. That the iPad becomes some sort of "babysitter"for lazy parents. I personally don't think it becomes any more a 'babysitter' than a tv or computer game does. But there is a totally different side to this too. You can sit together with your child, switch off the narration and read it yourself and explore the interactivity together. There is an extra layer of play and fun that you can enjoy together with your kids  when reading a story on your iPad or iPhone. And yes, on long journeys or visiting your grown up friends, or if you are sometimes terribly busy, children can play with the app book on their own and listen to the narration and play with the extra's that most publishers give with the story.You can upload your iPad with lots of story book apps and still only need to take one device along on your trip, not a heavy mountain of books!


This brings me to another point, you get so much value for your money! Most, if not all, app books are cheaper than the printed books and usually you get extra games or colouring in pictures on top of the storybook! Still there are a lot of people out there that seem to think that apps should be free or cost next to nothing. How do they think we can continue to make the apps if we give everything away? Writers, illustrators, animators, developers and publishers are all humans and need to eat too! A lot of time and effort goes in the creation of the app books.



Maybe I am somewhat biased as my children's books have been published as apps. But I am truly proud of them and I think that together with Tizio BV we made something really special. There are such lovely children's app books about and so many truly creative people making an effort to create something wonderful and full of magic with every app book they make. 


Well, I get off my soap box now. I'm done with my rant. Thank you so much for listening (or rather, reading). Both "Are children's e-books really terrible for children?" and  "Ignore the discussion on book apps versus print apps"phrase it all a lot better than I have in this blog, but this has been on my mind a long time and reading the article earlier this week made me realise I had to get it off my chest!

And if after all this you would like some light hearted reading to recover from my rant, have a look at Fierce Grey Mouse's Uncle Horace's vintage book of great wisdom, my new cartoon blog.

The art of art journal making and good beginnings for 2012

Happy New Year everybody! Hope all your dreams for 2012 will come true and my best wishes for lots of health, happiness and good fortune.


The last few days of 2011 were very exciting for me as my Fierce Grey Mouse appeared in 3 best book apps of 2011 lists:

• http://www.kirkusreviews.com/best-of/2011/book-apps/
• http://teacherturnedwriter.gillrobins.com/?p=89
• http://digital-storytime.com/wp/?p=988

A big thank you to all the app reviewers that helped make Fierce Grey Mouse a success. It does make me really happy that people like what we created, that they get joy from that little fierce mouse! 
In the mean time that Fierce mouse has started a life of his own. He now tweets, you can find him tweeting as @FierceGreyMouse and he recently started a daily cartoon blog with little scraps of wisdom from his Old Uncle Horace's vintage book of great wisdom.  He blogs mostly about friendship, but also about healthy, natural eating and exercising. The mouse is very happy that his cartoons got featured in Forbidden Planet, in Ladies making Comics and in I am the ship. A good start for a new cartoon blog! To give you an idea of what it all looks like, here a few recent samples from Fierce Grey Mouse's blog:

Well, I hope you like Fierce Grey Mouse's blog and hope to see you there sometime!

And now for something completely different: ART JOURNAL MAKING. As that was what this blog was to be about. The start of a new year is the perfect start for a new journal me thinks! 

Keeping an art journal is fun for all ages and creates a very exciting and personal record of those things that are meaningful in your life. But how do you start?

The first thing to do is to get the book to keep the journal in of course. You can go out and buy a sketchbook or one of those beautiful journal books that you can get nowadays. However, those lovely journal books can sometimes be so beautiful that you feel hesitant to start drawing and painting in it. You might feel tempted to keep the book pretty and neat and therefore loose any freedom and expression in your art journaling work. What you can do instead is to use an old desk diary, old exercise book or any other book in which you can draw, paint, glue, cut, stamp and more in. A book that tempts you to do something exciting and personal to its pages.

You can also create your own book. There are easy bookbinding techniques you can find on the web http://world.std.com/~deanb/zgg/book_5st_1.html. The 5 stitch book is one I particularly like as it is easy to do and strong enough to hold a big fat art journal. But you can also think of books in a wider sense. Why not get a box in which you can place loose pieces of paper and the box becomes your journal. The great advantage of doing it that way is that you can use different types of paper to create your journal pages on. Or think of a concertina book, where when you unfold the book it becomes your time-line in art. There are many things you can do once you start thinking beyond the boundaries of what we consider a book is.

The second thing you need is “stuff” to create your artwork with. These are of course your normal art materials like pencils, paints, crayons, coloured pieces of paper, etc. But there is one very important thing that you need on top of that. This is your “BOX OF INTERESTING THINGS”. This box is full of essential ingredients for your art journal and consists of “stuff” that you gather over time. This can be all sorts of “stuff”. These are some examples of things that I collect in my box of interesting things:

• -      labels from new clothes
• -       coloured and decorated tissue papers that they often wrap new clothes in
• -       postage stamps
• -       envelopes with nice handwriting on them
• -       pieces of maps
• -       papers from old diaries, ledgers, accounts etc.
• -       photos of friends and relations, pets, yourself or anything else for that matter
• -       buttons, little safety pins, pieces of twine
• -       interesting post cards or advertisement cards
• -       ribbons
• -       rubber stamps (letter stamps are great)
• -       interesting business cards
• -       feathers you found
• -       stencils
• -       bus or train tickets
• -       expired membership cards
• -       pieces of material / cloth
• -       patterned paper bags
• -       pieces of interesting text from newspapers or magazines
• -       etc. etc. etc.

The list of things you can put in your box of interesting things is endless. The key to what goes in the box, is that you found and collected it, because you felt it was beautiful or had special meaning to you or inspired you I some way. It is not about buying pretty  things to fill up your box and stick in your journal. Then you get into scrapbooking and although lovely too, scrapbooking is a quite different art from art journal making. Art journal making is not necessarily about making pretty pages full of memories. It is about making pages that have special meaning to you, tells us something about who you are, how you feel, your opinions, what you find interesting, what happened to you and those close to you.

So, now you have your new book and it is full of empty pages and you have a box full of interesting, beautiful and meaningful things. Oh no! Panic! What to do with all of it?

Well, fear not. There are ways to get you started.

The first step is to have a rummage through your box of interesting things. What things are especially appealing to you today? And is there a reason for that? Select all the things that you feel a strong attraction to and arrange them and see how they fit together. Is it telling you something? Is there a theme? What do you think it is all about?

Here an example. I selected a range of items that I found in a room and I arranged and re-arranged them. After looking very carefully at the different arrangements, it became clear to me that there seemed to be a central theme of “sea” in the compositions. This got me thinking, why the sea? What is so meaningful in the sea for me? And then I realised what it was. I was born in Holland, in the polder (land reclaimed from the sea) and so were my ancestors. We were all born on the bottom of the sea. So I decided that over the next few days my theme would be around my ancestry and my early life. So I started with gluing pink tissue paper on the page and painting the rest of the page blue (nothing stifles creativity more than a pure white page!), cut out my ancestors from pictures and gave them mermaid’s tails. I also found some text that expressed what I felt about them. I took the theme further and gave myself as a baby a tail too and next I gave myself wings to symbolise leaving home. In your journal you can be anything you want to be!

This is where I started:

The resulting series of art journal pages look like this:

What you will often find when you start art journaling is that theme or idea leads to a whole series of pages and often leads to the next idea!

Another thing you can do is to take your journal on a journey or walk with you. In advance you write on each page what you are going to record on that page. For example:

• -       What do the sounds on your journey look like? Are they short and dotty or long and wavy? Is there rhythm or a pattern or are the sounds all over the place? Try to draw the sounds. Do they have a colour?
• -       You can make rubbings (frottage) of interesting things you see
• -       Count to 10. Then draw the first word that comes into your mind. Take 10 steps and count to 10 again and draw the next word. Do this 10 times. Then look, what do your pictures tell you? Is there a story or a theme that you can build on in your journal?
• -       Draw the weather. What does the wind look like? What does the warmth of the sun look like?
• -       Draw with something that you found on your walk or journey
• -       Draw your mood, use lots of colours that express your mood on the journey
• -       Listen to a conversation in a restaurant or in the bus and draw something from it or select a picture or item from your box that reflects the conversation

Whether you are walking in nature or through a city or town or even a journey through your house or garden, any journey is a great opportunity for finding new things for your box of interesting things. There often are feathers, coloured leaves, pieces of paper, tickets, lost buttons, cards with advertising, little metal bits and pieces and lots of other things to be found if you look closely enough. Don’t just collect any bit of old rubbish though, but gather things that you find beautiful or meaningful in some way. 

When you have enough items in your box of interesting things you can start journaling! Get your paints, glue and pencils out! Get your interesting things out of their box and get them on those pages in a way that feels good to you. Just keep working and painting and drawing and cutting and sowing and glueing till you are happy with the result. The more layers, the more interesting your picture often becomes. 

To help inspire you here a few links to my favorite art journal artists:

Lynne Perella - http://www.lkperrella.com/

Corey Moortgat - http://coreymoortgat.blogspot.com/

Karen Michel - http://www.karenmichel.com/

I hope this blog and especially the art of the above listed artists inspire you to start your own art journals. It is a great thing to do. Creating art journals gives a huge sense of satisfaction and gives great joy and release of inner thoughts and emotions. I love it!

Happy journalling!