Image Flash-Back- The longevity of favourite childhood illustrations - Garry Parsons

In a recent guest blog post for The Picture Book Den, author Timothy Knapman included an image that he recalled from his childhood. The illustration is by writer and illustrator Tomi Ungerer, whose books for children included “Moon Man,” first published in 1966, and Tim’s favourite “Zeralda’s Ogre,” which was published a year later.

On the last page of "Zeralda's Ogre" we see a picture of the happy family; proud parents Zeralda and her ex-ogre are surrounded by their offspring and Zeralda has a baby in her arms. One of her older children leans over his new-born sibling, apparently adoringly.  But behind his back – visible to us but not to his parents – he holds a knife and fork.

Zeralda’s Ogre by Tomi Ungerer

Tim says, "I don’t know why that image has stayed with me.  I do remember thinking it was funny rather than scary.  I was a ghoulish child, I suppose.  But – more than that – it’s the subversiveness of the image, the feeling that “you’re not supposed to do that!" that was – and remains – truly thrilling." 

Intrigued by the impact this clearly had on the young Tim Knapman, I remembered an illustration from my childhood. Surfacing from my memory, like a ship hauling on deck an unexpected sea monster, was an image of a staggering wolf with his tummy in stitches. 

A quick search online not only brought back the image in all its gruesomeness but also all the feelings I had as a young boy looking at it, as if fresh out of the fridge! 

From The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids. LadyBird Easy-Reading Books 

For me, this image was pure cruelty. His agonising stance, his rough worn knees and pained expression, as he sweated and panted along the track alone, were shocking. All I wanted to do was to rush in there and help him. I remember the sense of his aimless, desperate wandering - after all, who, in this land, was going to help him? - and I was pretty sure there wasn’t a reputable hospital nearby.  And as for the goats who did this to him, I despised them and their self-righteous goodness, their spiteful alter egos, not to mention their bad sewing skills, which, I remember thinking as a boy, were no better than mine.

In the story, based on the Grimm fairy tale, the mother goat leaves her kids in the house while she goes out, but warns them about a prowling wolf and says not to open the door to him if he comes calling. But the wolf tricks his way into the house and swallows the kids whole, all except one who hides in the grandfather clock. On her return, the distraught mother finds the wolf sleeping off his feast under a tree nearby and cuts open his stomach to set the kids free. She then instructs her young ones to gather rocks to fill the wolf’s tummy and she sews him back up. (Having hooves clearly makes sewing tricky, hence the haphazard stitching). Waking from his slumber, the wolf, feeling not so great, staggers and stumbles under the weight of the rocks towards a well, where he falls in to his demise.

From The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids. LadyBird Easy-Reading Books

Looking through the rest of the book, each illustration is just as loaded for me as the next. The baker’s disbelief at the sight of the wolf in his kitchen, the wolf’s enormous and terrifying feet at the window and even the texture and thickness of the dough on the wolf’s foot as he rampages through the goats' house.  

From The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids. LadyBird Easy-Reading Books

I had questions, too, about why the baker is looking slightly to the side of the wolf drooling in his kitchen and not directly at him, and doubts about why the wolf wouldn’t wake up at the jabbing insertion of the goat’s scissors into his belly when she opens him up. In hindsight, some of my interpretations of Robert Ayton’s illustrations as a child were probably not what he had anticipated or intended, my feeling sorry for the wolf being one of them. But I don’t think that matters, they certainly gave me a lot to think about, and the feelings remembered are so clear to me I can’t help but wonder how much influence this subconscious illustration library has had on my work as an illustrator today. 

  

"The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids" (1969), which brought me delight and horror in equal measure, was part of a series of “Well-Loved Tales”,  a LadyBird Easy-Reading Book (though easy on the psyche maybe not!)  that included other gems which I also relished such as "The Little Red Hen and the Grains of Wheat," "The Magic Porridge Pot" and "The Elves and the Shoemaker," all re-told from the original Grimm stories by Vera Southgate and illustrated by Robert Lumley and Robert Ayton, among others.

 

 

The wolf’s tragic story wasn’t the only illustration embedded into my memory, of course there are others. 

Each Christmas I was given a Rupert annual as a gift. I never read the stories inside properly, I only looked at the pictures and from these I would form my own version of Rupert’s escapades. But the images that thrilled me the most were the end pages. These were full scenes, often of Rupert and his chums looking out over a vista, a snap shot in time from one of his adventures, which, for me, somehow always felt like the exciting possibility of the summer holiday I was about to have. I was transported. I was there in the scene with Rupert. I was one of his mates!

Rupert The Daily Express Annual 1974 end papers - signed Cubie

Rupert The Daily Express Annual 1976 end papers - signed Cubie

Rupert The Daily Express Annual 1973 end papers - signed Bestall

Inspired by William Roscoe’s 1807 poem of the same name, Alan Aldridge’s "The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast" (1973) also included landscapes and scenes. For me the background was important, the incidental details were the parts I liked most, and Alan Aldridge’s pictures are crammed full of the essential non-essentials and, as with the Rupert annuals, I never read the text.

 

The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, William Plomer &Alan Aldridge (illustrator)

 

The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, William Plomer &Alan Aldridge (illustrator)

These were, and still are, thrilling and engrossing images and, like the wolf’s story, brought up exciting questions and a lot of wondering. The illustration of Dandy Rat and the Footpads includes a visual game and invites you to find the Stoat’s name hidden in the picture, exciting in itself, but what really interested me as a child was the size of the horse compared to the other characters. Was the horse a special tiny horse or, more exhilarating, were Dandy and his mates the size of an adult human? I loved the badness of this image. These were subversive characters up to no good. 

The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, William Plomer &Alan Aldridge (illustrator)

I like that a child’s interpretation of an illustration can be utterly different from its intention and that stories made up in the mind can be equally thrilling for the individual. What freedom and flights of fancy the imagination can take from a captivating image. Does it really matter where it takes the reader? I think probably not.

I was curious to know what images other authors and illustrators might have fixed firmly in the subconscious or lying latent in the mind, so I asked the members of the Picture Book Den team to reveal them…

Pippa Goodhart

I’m afraid that mine is a horror one as well. I’ve just popped around to my mum’s to photograph this from the book of Edgar Allan Poe stories illustrated by Arthur Rackham. This is from "The Pit And The Pendulum." My big brother showed it to me when I was quite young. He explained that the swinging axe pendulum was coming lower and lower. The picture fascinated and terrified me. I have still never read the story, but I was deeply aware of that book on that bookcase, and, just sometimes, I would take a deep breath and open it. It still makes me feel sick. 

I can remember lots of nice pictures from other books, but this is the one that churns me, taking me right back to childhood.

Arthur Rackham

Jane Clarke

Mine, too, is from a Ladybird Book, "Down Duckling," illustrated by A.J. McGregor, 1942 (!)

It's of Downy Duckling falling through the ice and dragging his friend Monty in with him. (We lived near Wicksteed Park lake which often iced over in the winter, and my parents instilled in me the dangers of falling through thin ice). The image brings back the remembrance of the feelings it invoked - fear and distress - quickly followed by the huge relief of the happy ending. But it's not the happy ending image that I held in my mind's eye, it's this one.

 

A.J.McGregor

Lucy Rowland

I also found the images from the old Ladybird fairy tale books really striking and memorable and looking at them now really takes me right back! My sister and I had so many of the books, so it was hard to think of a single image, but I remember the end papers being a big tree with all the characters on and I must have looked at that so many times! 

 

LadyBird Fairy Tales - end papers

Paeony Lewis

For me it’s usually the theme behind an entire book that I recall, particularly when it resonated with me on an emotional level. However, I’ve always been intrigued by secrets and hidden worlds, so I adored Andy Pandy’s idyllic picnic behind the magical fronds of the willow tree. Later in life I lent the book to someone so they could pick out a weeping willow tree for me at the garden centre – I wanted to emulate Andy Pandy, Looby Loo and Teddy (now I’ve written this, I sound rather pathetic!).

 

Andy Pandy and the Willow Tree, illustrated by Matvyn Wright, early 1960s

Also, I liked to explore the woods at the bottom of the garden and make up stories (this was when very young children went out to play on their own). The thought of a faerie world lurking beneath the ground enthralled me, so I adored this image from the British fairy tale, ‘Kate Crackernuts’.

 

British Fairy Tales, illustrated by Pauline Diana Baynes, 1965

Mini Grey

I just got thrown into Ladybird Book Central and ended up buying the Ladybird Book of Understanding Numbers because of my fierce memory of those currant buns. 

In this image (from The Princess and the Pea, also a LadyBird EasyReader ) the princess is SO extremely wet and shiny and the green dress is unusual – is it a pea premonition? What is she up to running around in her green dress in the rain anyway? But as a child I thought it was just a really exciting picture of a really wet princess.

The Princess and the Pea LadyBird Easy Reader Robert Ayton (illustrator)

And this picture was very important – it was like the book reaching out to you and saying – yup, it’s all real, come and find me.

But the whole Princess & Pea message is such a stinker – that only royalty are able to be hypersensitive.

 

The Princess and the Pea LadyBird Easy Reader Robert Ayton (illustrator)

What appears notable about all these illustrations is not that they are the most loved favourites from our collective childhoods but more that they have un-apologetically imposed themselves onto our memories. Deep treasures that hold complex thoughts and feelings whether you like them or not. I can't help but wonder if the books we make today are having the same impact on children as these images have - we'll just have to wait and see.

Thank you to Pippa, Lucy, Jane, Paeony, Mini and the young Tim Knapman for contributing to this post. If you have an illustration implanted in your memory that you would like to share, please do so in the comments section.

To read Timothy Knapman's post mentioned earlier in this blog:

http://picturebookden.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-are-we-afraid-of-dark-by-timothy.html

Garry Parsons is an illustrator of many picture books for children but as yet, none with wolves in.

www.garryparsons.co.uk 

 @icandrawdinos

Why Are We Afraid of the Dark? by Timothy Knapman

The great writer and illustrator Tomi Ungerer died this year.  I was very fortunate to see him a few years ago at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, launching a “treasury” of six of his books that Phaidon were publishing. He was in his mid-eighties but still as spry and as sly as ever.  

Gripping his walking stick and looking like an Old Testament prophet who had spent more than his fair share of time in the wilderness, he was full of firmly held and not-to-be-questioned opinions: principally, that anyone who wanted to write picture books should teach themselves to draw because it was imperative that they illustrate them as well.  I’m not sure I agree with him on that, but something else he said did resonate with me.  For years, he told us, he’d been trying to get his books republished but in vain (the Phaidon edition is excellent, but it’s large and expensive: more an exercise in nostalgia for those of us who read him years ago than a practical way to introduce him to younger readers).

I think I know why. I loved Tomi for his storytelling and for his visual style (the éclair-like fingers and pudgy, good-enough-to-eat limbs and faces looked almost like the work of an especially witty pâtissier) but most of all for what we would now call his “darkness”.

Zeralda’s Ogre by Tomi Ungerer

My favourite of his books – one of the few picture books I still own from my childhood – is called Zeralda’s Ogre.  Zeralda is a farmer’s daughter, a girl of pluck and resource who is also a wonderful cook.  One market day, her father falls ill so Zeralda elects to take the farm’s produce to the local town to sell it (the setting seems to be a fairy tale nowhere land in the vicinity of Ungerer’s native Alsace).  What Zeralda does not know is that the town has been living in fear of a terrible ogre who eats children.  Parents have taken to hiding their children away so that they won’t get carried off. Good news for the children, bad news for the ogre, who has had nothing to eat for a long time now.  So imagine his joy when he sees little Zeralda on her cart, heading heedlessly straight into town.  He waits until the right moment and pounces on her.  Only his senses have been dimmed by lack of food and he misses the cart, falling on the road and bashing his head.  Zeralda – not knowing he’s an ogre – takes pity on this apparently poor, injured man, bandaging his head and cooking up some of her farm produce as she nurses him back to health.

The first mouthful is a revelation to the ogre – there’s something that tastes even nicer than children! – so Zeralda cooks him a banquet of ever more wonderful dishes (for some reason, “Chocolate sauce Rasputin” and “Pompano Sarah Bernhardt” always stuck in my memory) until he gives up on the whole being-an-ogre business. The parents of the town let their children out to play safely in the streets again.  The ogre shaves off his beard and, when she is old enough, marries Zeralda.  On the last page, we see a picture of the happy family; proud parents Zeralda and her ex-ogre are surrounded by their offspring and Zeralda has a baby in her arms. One of her older children leans over his new-born sibling, apparently adoringly.  But behind his back – visible to us but not to his parents – he holds a knife and fork.

  

I don’t know why that image has stayed with me ever since.  I do remember thinking it was funny rather than scary.  I was a ghoulish child, I suppose.  But – more than that – it’s the subversiveness of the image, the feeling that “you’re not supposed to do that! How did he get away with it?” that was – and remains – truly thrilling.  It was a glimpse of a world beyond the safe and saccharine fare that comprised the bulk of what was on offer to children then, and is even more prevalent today.

Because - as Tomi Ungerer discovered - there is no way you could get a book like that published now. Public taste in children’s books has turned decisively against anything that might be thought to be in anyway scary or upsetting.  And that is a huge shame – and a great loss, I think, for the current generation of children.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my young readers (it may sound pretentious to say it, but writing is an act of love: it has to be or it’s not worth doing); I don’t want to give children nightmares and I don’t want to upset or traumatise them.  Of course I understand that loving parents want to keep bad and hurtful things away from them.  But it worries me that the books they are allowed to read nowadays deliberately avoid territory that used to be part of the landscape of children’s books, limiting the very important job that stories for the young are supposed to perform.

There’s no doubt that the folk and fairy story collections – by the Brothers Grimm and the rest – that stand behind modern children’s literature are full of robustly bloodthirsty stuff.  At the end of the original Snow White, the Wicked Queen is made to dance herself to death in red-hot iron shoes.  Hansel and Gretel only escape being the main course at a witch’s cannibal banquet by beheading the old woman before she can murder them.  And then there are all those big bad wolves waiting to devour you if you take a wrong turning off the forest path.

One of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Little Red Riding Hood

Of course, these stories were intended, in part at least, to be warnings.  When they were being told in the years before the Grimms started writing them down, the countryside was a dangerous place for children.  They needed to be taught to keep an eye out for the threats that lurked in the dark places of their world if they were going to stand any chance of making it to adulthood.  The perils of the time also accounted for the level of cruelty depicted.

It might be argued that such warnings are no longer needed.  Why ruin a child’s bedtime by telling her a story about ravening wolves if she is going to spend her early years constantly supervised by caring adults who’ll spend their lives driving her from home to school to birthday party to sleepover? And it is true that, while the world is still, for many, a dangerous place, the lives of my readers are (thank goodness) infinitely safer and more enjoyable than those of their many-times-great-grandmothers and fathers who grew up in the shadow of the wolf-infested forest.

But metaphorical wolves can be as dangerous as real ones.  I am writing this on the day of the European elections (which may explain the dark turn my thoughts have taken) and the polling station where I voted is my local primary school.  Its walls are plastered in warnings and exhortations about “school values” and the correct way children should behave towards one another.  You don’t have to study them for long to see that today’s children still have problems to confront – about learning to control their antisocial impulses and cope with those of others: about dealing with the darkness inside all of us – just as earlier generations did.  The difference is that fiction and the imagination are no longer seen as appropriate places to engage with those problems.  There should only be sweetness and light on the bookshelf, at which point the bookshelf becomes a kind of lie because life isn’t like that.

I’m not saying that the principal purpose of children’s books is to tell their young readers how to behave and I know that the time for a book such as Struwwelpeter, with its threat of amputation as a way of discouraging thumb-sucking, has come and gone. I don’t, in fact, like “cautionary tales” except when someone of a particular genius, such as Hilaire Belloc, is writing them, because then you’re not reading for instruction but for entertainment.  Art is art and doesn’t need to be useful to justify itself.  And that’s the thing about a lot of scary books – one of the reasons I think children should read them is because they’re fun!

Some of the fun is obvious, because a lot of scary books are also very funny.  That shouldn’t come as a surprise: fear and amusement are very similar – both provoke a physical response,  be it screaming or laughter.  Also, comedy is an intellectual process: it resists emotional identification and so makes scary things easier to deal with.  Just think of the comedy staple of a man tripping over a banana peel: it’s hilarious providing you remain at a cool intellectual distance from the man and his plight and don’t start to feel for him, and imagine his physical pain and his embarrassment.  As Horace Walpole said, “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”

Call me cool and distant but I think a house is not a home unless it contains a copy of Ruthless Rhymes For Heartless Homes (“Making toast at the fireside,/Nurse fell in the grate and died;/And, what makes it ten times worse,/All the toast was burned with nurse.”).  I’m equally certain that your family will be all the happier for spending time with the family created by Charles Addams.  One of Addams’ disciples at the New Yorker magazine, the appropriately named Edward Gorey, built brilliantly on his legacy.  If you’ve never encountered Gorey’s work, I recommend The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet of luckless children and how they died: “M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/N is for Neville who died of ennui.”  And in Gorey’s wake came Lemony Snicket and his Series of Unfortunate Events (who said Americans don’t do irony? That’s three generations of it).

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

Apart from Snicket (real name Daniel Handler, born 1970), those writers and illustrators belong to an earlier age, and it’s only because some of them are too big and canonical to ignore that modern children have a chance to read them.  On this side of the Atlantic, the great example of that is Roald Dahl.  A reclusive chocolate factory owner who carelessly tortures and punishes the children he disapproves of? A coven of witches plotting to turn children into mice so that their parents and teachers will stamp and poison them to death? Dahl had problems getting published in the 1960s and ’70s, but I think I can confidently say that no writer submitting similar material now would have any hope of having it accepted.  You only have to look at the books of the Dahl-lite David Walliams.  They’re designed and illustrated to look like Dahl, in a clear attempt to place Walliams in a line of succession, but there’s no way he would ever stray into territory as troubling as his infinitely superior precursor.

Quentin Blake’s picture of Roald Dahl’s Grand High Witch doing her worst

Which is, as I keep saying, a shame.  For not only can scary books be fun, I believe that they are also a necessary part of a child’s reading.  I believe that we are ineluctably drawn to the darkness as children – at least in our imaginations – despite the fact that we know bad things await us there.  It’s partly curiosity about the unknown – and human beings have always been unfailingly curious creatures.  But it’s mostly because in the world of the imagination, in the safe space provided by books, we have a chance to practise having emotions: joy and sorrow and envy and wonder, but also fear.  

I think it’s an evolutionary advantage, hard-wired into us, perhaps even the reason we have an imagination at all.  A self-conscious creature such as a human being wouldn’t last long if her first experience of fear was the first time she was confronted by actual danger.  The shock of the strangeness and power of the emotion would disable her and render her helpless in the face of the threat.  I believe that we are naturally disposed to imagine ourselves in many different kinds of danger, so that we can give fear a trial run and learn to master it.  That’s why there’s a strange comfort in seeking out the scary, a perverse feeling that we are actually doing something that we are supposed to when we are investigating that which is always forbidding and often forbidden.

I’m not suggesting that all children’s books should be scary.  Of course books should be places of joy, of course they should be refuges, sources of relief and reassurance.  But they should also help us to live our lives and prepare us for times that are not easy.  We may have left the forest far behind but the wolves will follow us forever.

Timothy Knapman has written lots of books that aren’t in the least bit scary.  There are funny ones, such as Dinosaurs in the Supermarket and Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bogey?; sweet ones, such as Soon, Big Digger Little Digger and What’s Next?; loving ones, such as Superhero Mum, Dad and Gran; adventurous ones, such as Captain Sparklebeard.  Those made of sterner stuff are invited to seek out his Little Ogre’s Surprise Supper and Please Said Percy.  

More at www.timothyknapman.co.uk

Illustrating Water in Children's Picture Books • Paeony Lewis

I adore staring out at the sea, but at this time of year in Norfolk (England) it's too cold to look for long at a grey North Sea (the lumps on the beach are seals, not afraid to bask in the frigid wind). So inside my warm home, I thought it would be intriguing to look at a few illustrations of sea and water in children's picture books, especially as I want to try illustrating the sea.

Looking harder at illustrations is always fun (in my opinion!), although sometimes I am stumped at how the artwork was created. For the first image, I'd never have known if the information hadn't been inside the book.

Excerpt from The Hidden Forest by Australian author and illustrator,
Jeannie Baker (UK: Walker Books, 2005)
The kelp was modelled with translucent artist's clay and the seawater is resin.

In The Hidden Forest I assume the lighting used in the photography mimics the natural reflection of light? However, sometimes simple paint can have the same impact, as seen below in Town is by the Sea.

From Town is by the Sea by Joanne Schwartz, illustrated by Sydney Smith (UK: Walker Books, 2018)
This is the bright, blinding, shimmering sea.
Throughout the book there are many gorgeous, deceptively simple, atmospheric renderings of the sea.

It can be easy to forget how much artistic effort goes into good picture books. I discovered a video where illustrator, Sydney Smith, ponders the illustration of this award-winning book and I thought some of you would be interested in the detail, so here goes…

From childhood, Sydney was familiar with the coast and for the book he visited the mining town of Glace Bay on the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, Canada, to “feel the size of the sea”. He viewed exhibitions too and for the water he absorbed the expressive brushwork of Turner, and the French Impressionists.

From Town is by the Sea, another illustration of the sea by Sydney Smith.
The quiet sea.

Sidney’s principal tip on painting the sea is to decide on the type of sea. In the book there is the bright, blinding, shimmering sea, a choppy sea, a quiet sea, and a dark sea. Then Sidney suggests becoming the motion of the sea with your brush, “dance with your brush,” and don’t worry about detail because the sea is always moving. Be expressive.

Traditional watercolour is used for Town is by the Sea, along with Pentel brush pens and gouache paint (akin to watercolour mixed with chalk) used dry for the white frothy tips of the waves and the light. Sidney paints multiple versions of the sea double-page spreads, and then he keeps the one that seems to be going best. I suspect this is because although a lot of advance planning is needed, the watercolour is fluid and fast-drying, and so much depends on the specific brushstrokes.

Here is detail from the bright, shimmering illustration by Sydney Smith.
You can see the individual expressive brushstrokes
and the white gouache applied over the watercolour.

For the next illustrator, I could only find out that she includes collage in her illustrations. Victoria Semykina is a Russian artist, currently living in Italy. Looking at her picture book illustrations in The Real Boat, I suspect this new illustrator creates her own papers to use in collage (rather like Eric Carle, creator of The Hungry Caterpillar, fills drawers with his painted paper and tissue, ready to be collaged in future books).  In addition, it looks like Victoria overpaints with watercolour or gouache and draws with oil pastels, but I am only guessing and I am sure she  manipulates the 'collage' digitally. Does anybody know more? For me, it's Victoria's stylised, patterned illustrations that make this book .

From The Real Boat by Marina Aromshtam,
illustrated by Victoria Semykina (UK: Templar, 2017)

From The Real Boat, illustrated by Victoria Semkina

A close look at an excerpt of waves by Victoria Semykina
(and see Hokusai's wave later in this post - more inspiration?!)
Does Victoria scan the painted collaged paper and then layer digitally,
allowing some translucency?

The next book is also the first by a new illustrator, and his award-winning book amazed me as it was all done with simple crayon, which gives it a contemporary retro look. If you saw my feeble efforts with coloured crayons, you'd understand my admiration.  It's the narrative non-fiction children's picture book, Shackleton's Journey by young artist, William Grill. Here the white froth of the wave crests and light is simply white, uncrayoned paper.

From Shackleton's Journey by William Grill (UK: Flying Eye Books, 2014)

More from Shackleton's Journey by William Grill
Churning, great waves, and we know they are enormous from the size of the boat..

If you linger and stare at the illustration above, you'll see how there is 'simply' white blank paper separating blue directional lines of crayoned blue, but it's really effective. In an interview William says, “I try to work as loosely as I would in a sketch book… I’ll do it again and again until I’ve got it right, so it looks like I’ve just sketched it quickly.”

Even if you are a world-renowned illustrator, sometimes you discover an Achilles heel, and drawing churning water flummoxed French-born artist, Tomi Ungerer. In a video Tomi talks about Fog Island (then called Fog Man), and near the end discusses his path to solving the problem of the waves.

Tomi Ungerer, talking about Fog Island.

From Fog Island by Tomi Ungerer (UK: Phaidon Press, 2013)

Tomi explains how all his life (born 1931) he had a hard time drawing waves, despite during his later life living by the sea in Nova Scotia, and then on an Irish island. It was with the above illustration for Fog Island that Tomi developed a new technique. When he first attempted the waves Tomi was inspired by Hokusai's wave, but he was told his interpretation lacked movement and looked frozen.

Hokusai's wave

So Tomi Ungerer persevered and developed another technique. You might be able to see in the video image that Tomi uses semi-translucent transfer paper and he explains how green pastel was applied to the back of the transfer paper and pencil and gouache to the front, with extra, darker pastel where necessary. I was a little confused with the explanation, but that doesn't matter because what is inspiring is that an acclaimed artist experimented until the problem was solved, even though he was in his eighties. It was the same with the fog; Tomi assumed covering the drawing with light grey pastel would give the effect of fog, but discovered it wasn't that simple because real fog plays with perspective and he adapted that technique too.

Poignantly, whilst researching Tomi Ungerer, I discovered this maverick, acclaimed artist had died the day before, aged 87 years. My heart lurched.


Another acclaimed, award-winning artist, Leo Lionni (also now departed), used a very different technique for water. I've only just discovered Swimmy by Leo Lionni, and it is now a new favourite, despite being first published in 1963. I first heard of this book through reading Eric Cale and Lane Smith praising the book and it has been recently reissued in the UK. Leo was an artist/graphic designer who didn't start producing children's books until his fifties.

Swimmy by Leo Lionni (UK: Andersen Press, 2015)
The cover is shown large so you can see the texture of the water.

I gather Leo Lionni used a variety of mediums and for this book he used different stamps and printing, wax resist and plastic wrap (clingfilm) on diluted blue tempera paint. It gives such a feeling of loose, liquid, spontaneity. And the seaweed made me grin: he printed it using the ornamental edge of a napkin or doily. Maybe it is a little messy, but there is an innovative joy to the images and it oozes wetness!

From Swimmy by Leo Lionni

Perhaps some of my enthusiasm for Swimmy comes from the fact I've been experimenting with illustrating water on my course and only a week before seeing this book I'd been playing with watercolour and clingfilm. Snap! OK, I know I'm only a beginner, but as has been seen, all the professional illustrators experiment too.

Paeony Lewis, having fun, experimenting.

And finally, here are a few more examples of water from different children's picture book illustrators. I know how the first was produced (expressive linocuts), but can you guess how the others were created (and do let me know!).

Extreme close up showing the linocut printing in The Little Black Fish,
illustrated by Farshid Mesghali, first published in Iran in 1967,
UK: Tiny Owl Publishing, 2015

Detail from Bear Hug by Katharine McEwen (UK: Templar, 2014)

Excerpt from Roo the Roaring Dinosaur: Best Playday Ever!
by David Bedford, illustrated by Mandy Stanley (UK: Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Excerpt from The Journey by Francesca Sanna (UK: Flying Eye Books, 2016)

Excerpt from The Crocodile Who Didn't Like Water
by Gemma Merino (UK: Macmillan, 2013)

Close up from A River by Marc Martin (UK: Templar, 2016)

Close up from There is a Tribe of Kids by Lane Smith (UK: Two Hoots, 2016)

If you have any thoughts on illustrating water, or know of any great illustration examples, do share. Thanks!

 Paeony Lewis

• Click here for my blog post on illustrating the night
• Or click here for all my blog posts  
• And here is my ancient website, in dire need of a new look