Hello! It looks like you can pre-order a copy of Thunderstorm Dancing now on Booktopia. And probably lots of other places too.
Plans are afoot to have some celebrations throughout April to mark the release of Thunderstorm Dancing, and I’ll post more on that soon.
Huzzah!
Thunderstorm Dancing by Katrina Germein, illustrated by Judy Watson. To be published in April 2015
Wet your toes!
In fact… you don’t need to have a child. Who says this couldn’t be an aid to writers of any age?
The poster I worked on with Ann James and Justine Alltimes is finished and up on-line for you to download. This is the major project of Australian Children’s Laureate and Senior Australian of the Year Jackie French. I think it’s a great project and will work really well for teachers, librarians and families. It’s open-ended and inspiring.
Concept by Jackie French, illustrations by Ann James, design by Judy Watson
As with any poster design, the challenge is for everyone to whittle the information down to a minimum so that the poster can have maximum impact. In this case, the poster is a calendar, so we had to include at least 12 different chunks of information, and of course there was much more as well.
So half way through the design process, I had to delete lots of little birds from the margins for the sake of the poster. I loved Ann’s little watercolour birds so much that I had sneaked them in all over the place, having conversations about this and that; chipping (or chirping) in with their suggestions. Follow a story, hatch a story, feed a story, dream a story… and so on. (I’d love to see how many variations kids could come up with on that theme.)
Some of Ann’s little birds who flew off the poster.
The illustrations were all done by Ann, and fiddled about by me. We used patterns from the V&A pattern book series, which we were only able to use because this is a not-for-profit project.
from the V&A pattern books © Victoria and Albert Museum. Cannot be used except for personal or non-profit projects.
So this page of delicious doodles by Ann,
Ann’s delicious doodles – trying out both brush and pencil. We weren’t sure what we would use at first.
Became this.
Then this.
Then this.
Scrumptious red dirigible with inky sky blob. Check out Ann’s pencil work.
Then this, because there was too much red down the right hand side of the poster.
Although several people so far have mistaken this dirigible for a submarine, it is a magnificent machine either way and it doesn’t matter in the least which it is, for the purposes of NAVIGATING A STORY. Yaay!
Some people may notice a lingering love of Thunderstorm Red and Thunderstorm Blue…
I’m not sure why my book projects seem to happen at the swimming pool. Pippa who modelled for Thunderstorm Dancing was at the pool, and many of the sketches I did at the pool while the boys were having swimming lessons fed into the book.
Here are some from that time, that have been posted before.
Today I took the boys to the pool because it was pelting rain and they were stuck indoors. And there I happily began doodling for Leonard Doesn’t Dance, my new picture book project for HarperCollins, written by Frances Watts.
In truth, I set out to re-read the manuscript and ponder layouts, but I got as far as the first two lines and found I had to turn over the paper and doodle birds on the back. I think it was because Leonard was groaning. ‘Groaning’ is a very suggestive word. It conjures all sorts of pained expressions, and it wouldn’t wait.
The first bird at the top is about to groan. Or has just groaned. He may have been groaning for some time. But after this, the others became more cheerful. I’m not worrying about style at the moment. Just going for Galumphing. That is my brief. It’s a brief brief.
It’s not hard to see the inspiration for these particular Galumphers.
Rose in the foreground… just in case the camera is edible.
Lily looking for something to trip over
Here are Rose and Lily, the Terrible Pteranodon Twins (Araucanas) and Lily in particular, is the most impossibly clumsy bird you could ever meet. If you were to put a champagne glass in the middle of a football field and let Lily go and graze in that field, the first thing she would do would be to trip over the glass and spill the champagne. Here she looks like she is marching, but she is really galumphing.
My Leonard bird will, I hope, not be any species of bird in the real world. There will be plenty of those in the book, but Leonard I think may dispense with such restrictions.
In the next drawings I started to exaggerate the trousers on the bird, a thing that I’ve done before with my blob birds. It occurs to me now that if we choose to make Leonard a young bird person, his trousers might be shorts. These three fellows seem to be older bird persons.
Here is a younger bird person wearing short trousers. And that is not a codpiece. (The bird tails might be tricky in some instances…)
And this drawing raises the question of whether Leonard ought to be more of a Bird Person, or a Person Bird. He will have to fly at one point, but he prefers cupcakes to cockroaches. He’s a multi-layered Bird Person. I’m sure there will be many more bird doodles in the coming weeks.
By the way, my advance copy of Thunderstorm Dancing arrived on my doorstep while we were at the pool. How appropriate, given that the rain had been bucketing down all day. We have all been looking through it with pleasure this evening. It is a very advance copy though. The book won’t be in the shops until April, I believe.
A Thundery book in the cloudy evening light.
I’m excited to have two new projects to work on over the summer. One is another picture book with Frances Watts called Leonard Doesn’t Dance. The other is the beginnings of my own picture book with the working title Trudy and Dodds.
I’ll be posting here about both of them as I go along. Leonard will be about birds… something I shouldn’t have too much trouble loving! I’ve posted a couple of very early ideas about Leonard already. And you can follow the images alone if you want on my Pinterest page here. The more wordy stuff will be on my blog. (…rambling, rambling…)
Trudy and Dodds was a concept I had just come up with at the time I was offered Thunderstorm Dancing and to my surprise, I received a grant from the Australia Council to get the project started. But I found I could only focus on the one big (Thunder) project, and so Trudy and Dodds was put on hold. Now is the time to revisit it, and I’m really excited to be booked into a masterclass in mid February with editing maestros Jane Godwin (Penguin) and Erica Wagner (Allen & Unwin) along with book design maestro Sandra Nobes. I’ll be taking my dummy book and manuscript along to that masterclass as a part of my grant project to get some feedback and help.
So, in the meantime, on with birds and…. dog-monster-thingees. Probably.
Hello! I’ve been a bit absent! Thunder is finished and off to the printers! I’m looking forward to seeing an advance copy in early January. It’s taken a few weeks to just get myself into drawing again. That’s not something I anticipated. And there are a lot of other things that I need to catch up with now that I’ve finished that mammoth project… including Christmas!
I had a great day with Ann James and Justine Alltimes last Monday, designing a poster for Jackie French, our Australian Children’s Laureate. Her project Share a Story will revolve around the ideas on the poster/calendar which will be available for free download by Christmas.
Ann James is a well known and skilled Australian children’s illustrator. Justine Alltimes is one of the hardworking and capable Laureate Project Managers. When the three of us get together, the ideas ping about like pinballs. After Ann had drawn and painted some images, I was able to alter them digitally to make new, and hopefully intriguing combinations, that will work well together on the poster and spark the storytelling imaginations of children, teachers and parents. The challenge was to avoid the literal interpretations of words like Slurp a Story and instead to come up with images that were open-ended or suggestive. We want starting points for stories, not stories in themselves.
More on Share a Story when the poster is released.
Other work in progress includes an illustration of Phar Lap for the front cover of a colouring book for the Melbourne Museum to match the dinosaur one I did a couple of years ago. As always with work done for Museum Victoria, I learn heaps along the way as I research the topic! Glad to find out that Phar Lap was probably not deliberately or even accidentally poisoned. Not that it made much difference to the poor horse, but he most likely died of colic related to a rare disease of the intestinal tract.
The 52 Week Illustration Challenge forges on towards the finish, but will return next year. I wasn’t feeling like drawing for this either, for a couple of weeks. So I’ve missed Week 47 New York, but I may go back to that. Although drawing New York itself holds little attraction for me, the New Yorker and its famous cartoons hold enormous appeal for me. So I think I need to do a New Yorker style cartoon. But of what?…
A page from ‘Tim and Tig’
Above is an illustration I did for Aussie Nibble – Tim & Tig many years ago. I illustrated Tim and Tig just after receiving a copy of the Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker; a fantastic book that had a powerful influence on my drawing! Many of the illos in Tim and Tig, I’d wish to do again and much better, but this one I still like.
Now that I think of it, I did do some quick doodles for Week 46 Circus. (Oh dear. What a rambling post.)
The Twisted Princess tidies her tresses
This doodle was on the bottom of a Thunder illustration. You may see a wee peek of the washy water top right, and it ran completely off the page. It started as a doodle and then I got mesmerised by the leotard pattern. Actually, this led my mind off in the direction of a series of paintings I’d like to do…
This brings me to last week’s theme. Week 48 Fox. In a shocking twist of fate, I found that the topic had long ago been changed from Chicken to Fox! Horrors!
I did some fox doodles while I was waiting for the kids to get out of drama class and below you can see them.
Deadly Maggie
This was a fennec sketch in an old book. I added some digital colour experimentally (even though fennecs are creamy in colour). It’s not entirely successful but there are elements of it that I like, including the scratching into top layers of colour; a Thunder habit that may continue for some time. Perhaps lead into interesting new areas.
A very innocent young blob fox.
By contrast, this little blob fox is not deadly. This was my protest on behalf of my chickens.
Contortionist fox
I liked the tail hatching on this one, and also the two tone retro feel, but it was certainly rushed. Not what you’d call finished work.
The Fox with the No.6 Tattoo
Lastly, this fellow. The fox with the No. 6 Tattoo. I liked his eyes and expression. He seems to have a canny and sophisticated air about him. I added some very flat colour panels in Photoshop trying to keep it sympathetic to his stylised and simple form and I like the result.
The Scribble Cornish of yesterday, became a fully drawn and painted Cartoon Cornish after dinner last night. I started out to do an inky depiction, with wet edges, to suggest the fuzz, as per all of my work this year really. Fast and loose… But strangely I found myself taking the unprecedented step of using a sharpened Prismacolour pencil to draw in some detail, as the Prismacolour Artstick was frustrating me by going off rather too wildly on its own tangents.
And although, this picture is not exactly as I would want it, I have to say, I quite enjoyed being careful… relatively careful… for a few moments :-)
Anyway, Mr Cornish salutes you.
This afternoon I finished the second last illustration for Thunderstorm Dancing, which I should add is yet to be approved as the editor is not in the office today.
All being well, I’m now working on the last illustration for the book. I can hardly believe it. Wish me luck!
This is not from Thunderstorm Dancing. This is a scribble-of-joy.
Okay… so this Scribble Cornish may exhibit some slight exaggerations of conformation… but the rest is true :-)
Less is More in many things, and in picture books for the young, this is often the case.
With books for the very young, there are good reasons for this, relating to a small child’s ability to focus, learn and enjoy their experience of a book. For older readers, it can be more about style and composition.
piano stool colour sketch
Many of the pages in Thunderstorm Dancing will have complex layering. Often this is about providing a contrast with the more spare, dramatic, or still places in the spreads. This piano stool for instance, rough-hewn as it is, has a pleasing simplicity for me, but it will barely be seen amid the deliberate clutter of an interior scene in Thunderstorm Dancing. On this spread, the left hand clutter will contrast the right hand spareness, and mark a transition from real world to fantasy world.
Hopefully all this will work in the finished book. But I also look forward to a time in the near future when I can make a book that stops here; with the stool and the scrubby smear of shadow, the flash of colour. All on a plain or very minimal background. Something about this kind of simplicity works so well with the printed word on the page, and picture books are one of the few places where we can enjoy this bold, sweet and simple effect. It’s a big part of why I love picture books so much.
Yes! I have just delivered the title page illustration for Thunderstorm Dancing.
It’s not the last picture to finish, but it feels significant.
Here are some Cornish Rex cats in the grass; working sketches for the title page group.
And a fragment of the finished image. Tommy, bucket in hand, off to play on the sand dunes with brother, sister, dog and cat!
It’s understood that only picture book Cornish Rex cats and Whippets will play on the sand dunes in windy weather with a storm on the horizon.
Thanks goodness for my hard-earned Picture Book Licence. :-)
Judy Watson 