Frances McKay Illustration

World of Norm 4: The epic saga continues

2013-06-04T13:07:13+01:00

Very delighted to receive my advance copies of 'World Of Norm 4, May Require Batteries'. Norm continues to battle his way through the minefield that is modern life for young lads, dealing wth nuisance brothers, annoying dads, and the rise of the dreaded pre-teen hormones. This edition of the award winning series scribbled by Jonathan Meres, published by Orchard, and doodled over by me, is out this week so get yourself down to your local bookstore, or just click over into the many online stores this weighty tome is available at.

Weasels up for Awards

2013-05-30T06:32:34+01:00

Elys Dolan's Weasels continue their quest for world domination, and it's started to get them noticed. Very happy to see her great debut book shortlisted for the AOI's latest 'IMAGES' Illustration awards. The shortlist for round two of the newly revamped award can be seen here. We are pretty wary of what these weasels want, but we have our fingers crossed for Elys!

I wandered lonely as an illustrator

2013-05-16T15:24:38+01:00

Poetry, and illustrations, together? Alan Marks gives us his experience on combining these two perfect partners.

I’ve learnt a lot about illustration by illustrating poetry. From quite early on I worked with OUP on many of their excellent and varied poetry anthologies, often in association with the prolific poet and anthologist John Foster and also Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark. I’ve sometimes said that I’ve done everything, from war poems to nursery rhymes. And I enjoyed working on both Peace and War with Oxford and two books of rhymes for Michael Neugebauer. (I plan a separate blog on the latter).

So what’s to learn? Firstly, of course, most poetry doesn’t need illustration. (This might be said of most writing I guess; the pictures being better on radio, but books with pictures are more fun and I don’t want to talk myself out of a job). More than that it’s quite easy to ruin a poem for a reader with the wrong image; character; facial expression; a wrong colour even, and to tread all over the poet’s (sensitive) feet. So poetry teaches sensitivity and, perhaps, that illustrators owe a debt to the text.

I’ve learnt too about design and composition. Poems can make great shapes on a page, and leave some awkward spaces around and between. Composing illustration within the limitations that this imposes often produces fresh perspectives and unusual viewpoints. (This is why it is important also not to rely on visual reference. It possesses your work and gets in the way of character and composition). I now prefer to compose a picture around text. I sometimes feel I’ve failed if the image does not include the poem and just leaves a corresponding white space, (unless that is the brief), not surprisingly, poems about snow are the easiest to illustrate.

When put together, a poem and an illustration don’t just sit on the same page; they share and interact with the space, as with the imagination. I like a balance between the text and the image; a tension between graphics and illusion; a bit like a poem itself. A line sits on the same plane as the text; elsewhere the illustration takes off, bringing the page to life. I should add that this is, or becomes, intuitive; it doesn’t do to think about it, not too much.

Mission: Explore John Muir

2013-05-02T14:57:59+01:00

Tom Morgan-Jones shares with us a recent project he has been working on.

I've just illustrated 'Mission:Explore John Muir', a set of 20 missions from The John Muir Trust. It's supported by Scottish Natural Heritage and Year of Natural Scotland 2013. It's conceived by the people that created the series of Mission:Explore books. It's free as a downloadable PDF or as an ebook on line at Graphically on for iphone or ipad, or it can be found on the TES and Guardian Teacher resources sites too. The choice is yours. There are almost too many really.

So what is Mission:Explore John Muir you might ask. Well, John Muir was a Scots-born American conservationist who loved a bit of the wild. Bit of a legend really. And The John Muir Trust are a wild land charity in the UK who want you to enjoy a blast of air and exploring, amongst other things. And these missions 'encourage individuals, groups and families of all ages to look, feel, walk, explore, draw, think and even dance in wild nature wherever they find it.'...And who wouldn't want that?

The lovely Carol has this to say about the missions: "These missions are great, you can really see the spark they've generated with teachers." Carol Walker, South Lanarkshire Outdoor Learning Development Officer.

I had a blast illustrating them and working on the missions a bit myself. I hope you enjoy them.

Oh and I nearly forgot, If you want even more missions after seeing these,you can find hundreds of free ones here at the Mission:Explore.net site. Happy Exploring and don't let the crocodiles get you ;)

Tom

When a Knight needs a wee!

2013-04-25T09:00:00+01:00

Following up from his recent books for Ravensburger in Germany, Henning Lohlein brings us another cracking book with a curious tale.

The story, from Charlotte Habersack, tells the tale of how a Knight would always have to go to the toilet before a tournament as it's not possible to do so in the middle of a joust.

But Klodwig, the knight, hates it, because he often doesn't have to go.

And because of his toilet break, he misses an important tournament. He swears that this will never happen again.

But when he has a duel with the Black Knight, he really has to go to the toilet...and by the time he has finished the black knight is riding off, bored of waiting for Klodwig. So victory is his!!

Thanks Henning for sharing this wonderful tale that's full of twinkle!

Spy Pets adventure exclusive

2013-04-18T09:00:00+01:00

James De La Rue gets to finally meet the author of Spy Dog, Andy Cope.

"Last week my daughter Amy and I were thrilled to meet Andy Cope, author of Puffin’s big-selling Spy Dog/Spy Pups series I’ve been illustrating now for, oooh, ages. Despite years of mutual involvement this was the first time Andy and I had actually met. He was visiting Round Hill School in my home town so I took the opportunity to put a face to the prose, not least because he was accompanied by one of the heroes of the series herself, Spy Pup Star. I knew Amy, a big fan, would appreciate the chance, to say the least. Thanks for a great afternoon Andy, thanks for Amy’s t-shirt, and thanks to the lovely staff at Round Hill.

At the time of writing I’m frantically finishing illustrations for the new Andy Cope installment, “Spy Cat: Summer Shocker”, before flying off to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. In the meantime, here’s a few tasters from the de la Rue sketchbook. More news from me soon…"

Bologna Book Fair 2013

2013-04-12T10:00:00+01:00

The Bologna book fair was fifty years old last month, and FMI was there along with thousands of illustrators and publishers from all around the world.

Held in the cavernous halls of the Bologna Fiere district, where even objects could be seen far overhead, the fair this year was just as jam packed as previous years. Countless meetings between publishers, agents, illustrators and writers were held, all amongst the hustle and bustle of the masses moving from hall to hall.

There were publishing stands from pretty much every corner of the world, all eagerly looking for the next big thing in the book world, and illustrators from all around the globe looking to be the next big thing. In between all the meetings, a lot of stands and companies held informal functions, including the Irish stand held by CBI, where the whisky was just as free flowing as the white wine.

The bad photo above shows the back of the Irish ambassador launching the pictuír exhibition, a touring show around Europe that includes people like Oliver Jeffers, Niamh Sharkey, Chris haughton and FMI's very own Donough O' Malley. A big surprise for him was seeing the World Of Norm cover so prominent at the Orchard stand.

And to put it into scale, here is the big lug himself standing beside it.

But the fair was not just about meetings and smoozing, there was a massive exhibition of artwork from all around the world, as well as talks and conferences all through the four days of the fair. We managed to catch a quick bit of Paul Thurlby speaking about his fabulous work.

After each day, Frances, and all the FMI illustrators attending, would brave the heaving buses to make it into the historic centre to relax after a long days session of meetings. The old university centre has some pretty amazing scenery, and sometimes you would turn a corner to see something unexpected.

A hectic four days for everyone there, hence the lateness in blogging about it as the batteries needed to rest, but we here at FMI believe it to have been an incredibly positive time with some exciting possibilities. And we hope to share with you, the fruits of the trip to Bologna very, very soon.

The Weasels are here!

2013-04-04T10:13:14+01:00

To celebrate its publication today here's a blog post from Elys Dolan on the making of Weasels.

Finally, today is the day, the Weasels are here! I’m thrilled that my first picturebook, Weasels, is published and I couldn’t be happier that I’m bringing the heady combination of woodland creatures and megalomania to the world of picturebooks.

Weasels came about as part of my final masters project when doing the MA in Children’s Book Illustration at the Cambridge Scholl of Art. In 2010, over the summer holidays, my class decided to do an alphabet book together in which each person would illustrate one letter. I got W, which is a terrible letter, and I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with it. I spent most of the summer wishing I’d got T or S or even a nice versatile vowel. At the last minute and after a lot of faffing I came up with ‘W is for Weasels Plotting World Domination’, which lead to produce the image below for the alphabet book.

That pretty much set up the whole book for me. When we resumed the course after the summer I decide to develop this concept into a book for my final masters project and that became Weasels. You can see how that very first image isn’t too dissimilar to the map room spread from the final book (seen below).

Obviously a few things have had to change. For instance the atmosphere is much darker in the original and there a quite a lot of the Weasels are smoking (to echo the 1960s Bond films that inspired the image) but apparently that isn’t really the done thing in children’s books. The general retro feel and level of detail has endured though.

When it came to doing the artwork for Weasels I started by doing a large pencil rough of each spread like the one shown below.

I’d then take that sketch and duplicate it using a lightbox and coloured pens to create an outline.

Using the pen outline and the lightbox I’d then create the tone using inks.

Finally I’d scan the line and the ink tone into the computer and layer them in Photoshop. This is what gives the images that slight misregistration that echoes printmaking. These days practice has made me more accurate at matching up my tone and line so that they don’t misregister but I’ve become so fond of that look I find myself nudging the layers around to try to recreate it.

One of the things I really enjoyed about writing Weasels was including all the little asides and ongoing jokes that appear through what the individual Weasels are saying. If I had to pick a favourite quote I think it would be ‘Without this drill I am nothing’ from the Laboratory spread below.

Just over a year ago Weasels was picked by the fabulous people at Nosy Crow who helped me to refine it ready to be released upon the world. To be honest we didn’t change it much at all and I was thrilled they wanted to keep the large 30x30cm format. There’s a blog post on the Nosy Crow site here that gives an interesting insight into some of the differences between the original and published versions.

Weasels is out as of today so if you’d like a copy of you own you can get it here, here, here and at many other wonderful bookshops.