An early sketch for ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ threw up several questions about the final image. Should it be 3-d somehow? Is it too scary for young children? I’m now experimenting a little more with the treatment of the artwork and it’s so much fun!
Just in time for the Festive season, here are the first four of a set of twelve (yes, twelve) nursery rhymes hand painted or made by yours truly. If you live in the London area the prints can be delivered by hand, in keeping with the hand made theme. They are available unframed in A4 (£10) or A3 (£15) sizes and printed on nice heavyweight art paper with inks that won’t fade with time.
In case none of this makes sense, here’s a pdf with all the details;http://kenwilsonmax.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/nursery-rhymes-by-hand.pdf
A visual for a new nursery rhyme book. ©ken wilson-max 2011
Courtesy of Anova’s Pavilion Books for children (www.anovabooks.com), the vehicle books are making a surprise return to the bookshops this autumn (fall). First published over a decade ago, they were bright, bold and very interactive and proved to very popular with pre-schoolers and their parents. I was pleasantly surprised to see them in the new catalogue!
Ken
“The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill.”
- Peter Ustinov, actor.
Kimane Maruge was the world’s oldest student, starting in his eighties because he wanted to be able to read the bible. His story has inspired millions from his humble existence in Kenya. He showed that when the spirit is will ing the mind and body will comply.
If you live in Europe or the US but don’t come from there, chances are that you will be buying and reading stories to your children that won’t always reflect their background. Publishers in these areas will naturally be targeting the market that will bring them the largest profit so smaller communities, or should I say less financially strong are going to be left out to a certain extent. I don’t believe its a conspiracy or anything, just business.
Business is changing though, especially the business of publishing, and there is a shift towards companies servicing a communities that they have nurtured with the products they want. The communities, aren’t fixed. They they have a multitude of interests and stories that define them so can belong to several communities through the internet and in real life.
What do you if you can’t see yourself in the stories? The answer is simple. Make you own. Share your stories with your friends. Let your community tell its own stories. It’s not always about money, but it should be about how you measure success and how high you set the standard for your project.
Think about the tools available to you; your brain, your work experience, the home computer, video camera, pencil and paper. Make your own definition of a story, and then a book so you know exactly what you are aiming for.
Everyone has a story to tell and a particular way to tell it
I first came across black American (was it Afro-American those days?) entertainment as a child in the 70s. It was enlightening ti say the least. People like me on the TV! We started mimicking the accents, the walk, the dress sense where we could. The power of the media was at its purest; people like me saw that our lives had another possibility, perhaps just like our parents came to realise a decade or two earlier when they also became mesmerised by America’s black culture. We needed to be mesmerised. Life in southern Africa at that time was mapped out for us. There was limited opportunity for people who were not white.
I think the authorities underestimated the power of media. In the 70s many more young people managed to win scholarships to study abroad than ever before and I think they had to have had that idea from somewhere else than school…
MY book always have a bit of the 70′s in them. I try very hard to include the showmanship, flair and slight excess that captivated me as a child. It doesn’t always translate to this new century where media power is much more understood.
I thought of including, for a little while, some of the phrases that made the 1970′s in this blog. Enjoy.
In Baby Ruby Bawled, published by Tamarind books in the UK, baby Ruby will not stop crying. All the grown ups try every remedy they can think of with no success. It is left to her slightly older brother to come to the rescue. The task, as I saw it, was to try to convey the super control being practised by the adults, giving them expressionless faces, or slight frowns. If you are a parent you might know what I mean. This was opposed to the total abandonment of baby Ruby’s bawling which had to be over the top and piercingly loud. A third factor to convey was the eager-to-help expression of Ruby’s brother, ignored by the grown ups (probably because they were too busy trying to stay calm).
This is a typical illustrator/editorial collaboration for an educational illustration project, even though we were continents apart…
The brief comes in; mostly written with a few examples of what has been done already. In this case it was for one illustration for an educational publication.You sketch and send back the first draft of ideas. They are almost always sent back with notes, like a positional guide. You make another round of sketches, this time following the brief more tightly and accurately. For me the second or third round of sketches is the last one and I make the sketches more finished In this case I pointed out where I had placed the required features. If there is time (often there isn’t) I’ll add some colour or my signature black line in the hope of giving some extra assurance that I have got it right (finally). A couple of days later you get the go-ahead to do the colour art (I prefer to sketch and sketch but to paint less). I will have already decided how I would tackle the colour, or been asked to work in a certain way.
