Continuing our adventures in writing and producing a childrens’ book over the summer holidays…

What a great summer it’s been. We managed five consecutive weekends camping – four in glorious weather, one in non-stop rain. One amazing trip to a beautiful part of Brittany, two weeks in stunning Northern Spain, and one Ryanair flight home cancelled at the last minute which forced us to spend a bonus two days in Bilbao. But now the summer’s over and the children are back at school. So it must be time to update on the project my daughter Alba and I started so confidently two long months ago – to write and produce a proper children’s book.

In my previous posts (see 1, 2 & 3 here) I explained how Alba and I planned and wrote a story, and how Alba’s four year old brother Rafa  didn’t want to be left out, meaning we had to write another one. In this post I explain how things went with the pictures.

When I first posted about the kids books, several people suggested the children could create the pictures themselves. I listened carefully to this idea, but can’t honesty say I seriously entertained it. As a parent, I’m aware just how much ‘art’ the kids present me with day after day. And while most parents start off amazed by what their children can do, they pretty soon pass through this stage until eventually they become adept at the ‘distract and recycle’ approach to filing.

(That’s not to say there won’t be any of the kids artwork in the book, we’ve agreed to give them the ‘endpapers’ which will be (almost) entirely their own work – more on this at a later date.)

But since the idea was to produce a proper illustrated story, there was only one option for the main picutres. To find and appoint a proper, professional artist who could create illustrations that all children (and parents) would really enjoy and get something out of. When I first decided upon the project, I discovered there were numerous websites where professional children’s illustrators post their profiles and examples of their work. So I thought finding one would be easy. I even thought it would be fun…

I set us up around the laptop, me with a fresh cappuccino, the kids with banana smoothies. We had our printed stories, our sketched ideas, our hand glued ‘books’. We opened a new browser window and went to www.childrensillustrators.com, determined to not stop until we had found our artists…

…And of course it was hopeless. There were hundreds to choose from. For Alba’s story, she seemed to like all of them. Or she disliked all of them, for the most random of reasons. Eventually I worked out she was looking for the actual characters, or scenes for her book, rather than imagining how an artist could use their style to interpret her story. For example, if she saw an image of a cow, that would be a yes because there’s a cow in her story. If she saw a dragon, that would be a no, even if the style of the dragon was a better fit.

Rafa operated on a more simplistic level. He spilt his banana smoothie on the laptop then pretended the table was a cave and hid underneath.

Guess which one has the short attention span…

So we changed strategy. I mopped up the mess, locked them in a cupboard, and spend a blissful few hours whittling down the profiles to a much smaller shortlist of ‘possibles’ for each story. Then I released the children and told them to choose the cheapest. I didn’t really, I spent many evenings going through the profiles then got them to choose their favourites, asking them at different times and moods to see if their views changed. This way we finally ended up with a few artists we thought would work really well.

And while all that was going on I got my calculator out and began to investigate the actual cost. And got a bit of a shock.

I wanted to involve Alba in the business side of the project, and because Alba doesn’t yet really understand money, we developed a new unit of currency known as an ice cream. ‘Two thousand pounds’ doesn’t mean a lot to a six-year-old, but ‘enough ice-cream to have one every day until you’re eight’ is very significant. And the difference between:

Enough ice cream for one every day until you’re eight

And:

Enough ice cream for one every day until you’re ten

is much clearer than the simple difference between £2,000 & £4,000 – or whatever the actual value is (which depends upon the current exchange rate – whether you buy your ice-creams from the kiosk on the beach or Lidl).

Anyway. Without wanting to get too deep into the financials of it all, it turns out you need quite a lot of ice cream to get a children’s book professionally illustrated. My initial estimate that the project might cost a couple of years worth of (Lidl) ice cream was a little bit under. I was OK with this because my last novel Rockpools did quite a lot better than I (and probably anyone) expected. Then I remembered I had to double this figure because now there’s two children’s books. That was still OK, but a bit less OK, if I’m honest, because Rockpools didn’t do that well. But I told myself that this is an investment. Not just a financial investment but an investment in my children themselves. In their very childhood.

I got so emotional I let them out of the cupboard. Briefly.

Then I stiffened my resolve, double checked the bank balance, and decided to press on and contact the illustrators. So what if we end up scavenging our food from supermarket bins, that’ll be an important life lesson for them too right?

I’m going to cut a long story short here. We had a lot more luck with Rafa’s book than with Alba’s. We’ve currently nearly appointed two different illustrators for The Dog that Mooed, and the Cow that Woofd – but not quite got over the line. Illustrators are busy, and apparently wary of working with people with no track record, such as myself. But for The Hole in Casey’s Garden, we’ve had the tremendous good fortune of coming across the wonderful Gill Guile.

The Hole in Casey’s Garden is about a little boy who digs a hole in his garden, and fills it with amazing things. It’s a big hole, and he puts a lot in it so we wanted an artist who could add a lot of detail. Gill has illustrated over 600 children’s books, and written 25. And they’re all gorgeous. I’ve put some examples of her work below, but really they’re incredible. She’s a genius and I don’t begin to understand how she creates worlds in the way she does. But anyway, the point here is that in some of her books she’s used just exactly the style we envisaged for Casey’s Garden (high levels of detail – a bit like in the Where’s Wally books). To my delight Gill was keen from the very beginning, and has not only made a great start on the illustrations, but she’s added a wealth of details that have strengthened the story no end. I’m only going to share one of them here as I don’t want to spoil the story, but here’s one scene that doesn’t give too much away:

Scene from The Hole in Casey’s Garden – obviously yet to be properly coloured, laid out, font decided upon, and generally tidied up…

In fact Gill’s worked so fast that, just before the kids went back to school, I was able to print out nearly the whole book and read it to them as a proper bedtime story. That was a lovely moment.

So as things stand, Rafa’s book is coming along nicely, but things have kind of stalled with Alba’s book. And I think for now, I’m going to leave it like that. That’s partly to save some ice cream, and partly because (now the kids are back in school) I can get back to focussing on the other project, my nearly-finished psychological thriller novel The Girl on the Burning Boat. 

We are proceeding with The Hole in Casey’s Garden though, and even though I’m wary these days of giving myself deadlines to miss, I can say it’ll definitely be available in time for Christmas. And next time I’ll update on how we get on with putting all the artwork together and producing the final book.

One final thing this time around though. Over the summer I’ve received loads of emails and responses to these blogs, and I didn’t manage to reply to many of them. Much of the time I was on dodgy campsite WiFi, or relying on my limited phone data. Or to be honest, I was just plain knackered! So I just want to say a massive thank you here. It really has been wonderful to see that people are interested in what we’ve been up to, and I read each and every one to the children. We all really appreciate it and we’re having a lot of fun.

I hope you had a great summer too, and I hope you’re just a little bit excited to see the final book as well!

Gregg, Alba & Rafa

Here’s just a couple of examples of Gill’s finished work. To see more check this link

This was the image we felt best matched the style we wanted