In about 1984, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, I had thoughts of trying my luck as an illustrator. Unfortunately I’d concentrated nearly all my efforts up to that point on black-and-white pictures, which meant I wouldn’t be much use for children’s books. This became obvious when my mother suggested I illustrate a book for children by one of her friends, the actor Jo Heaton. The book had a colour in its title, and featured characters who are often designated by their colours: red, blue, grey, brass, pearly-white and so on. All the same, I took on the project with enthusiasm, and worked on it for about a year while living with my brother in a one-bedroom apartment near St Pancras. I liked the story very much and was keen to try my luck on a large-scale project such as this one. In the end I produced thirty-six illustrations, and Jo and I went on to hawk the manuscript with its pictures around various publishing houses.
Needless to say, we were not successful. Apart from the basic absurdity of offering publishers a book about colour with black-and-white illustrations, I believe it was unorthodox to present the text with illustrations already attached, instead of leaving the publishers to select the most appropriate artist. I also think my pictures were a little stiff and stilted; a lighter touch would have improved them. The year after this, in 1985, I was asked to teach university classes on Renaissance and medieval romance, early modern prose and Shakespeare. I left St Pancras for Oxford, and the rest is (personal) history: I went on to become an academic, eventually working for thirty years at the University of Glasgow with little leisure to pursue my interest in drawing.
Jo’s book told the story of a young girl called Judy whose mother buys her a music box full of buttons at a charity shop run by a certain Mr Ball. The buttons, it turns out, have personalities, and the story tells how they get to know a new arrival after their journey to Judy’s house. Each button has an interesting back story, but the new button – who is large and red – prefers to remain mysterious about his origins; all they know is that he fell out of an empty sky onto Mr Ball’s head, and that he seems to have travelled further than anyone possibly could have done and to have been existence for about 2000 years. Of course it turns out that this button belongs to a large and rather care-worn person with a red suit and a large white beard, who has been looking for him from the moment he was missed. Red Button recovers his back story on Christmas Eve, and everything turns out exactly as it should in the end, for the girl, for the shopkeeper Mr Ball, and for all the other buttons we have got to know in the course of the narrative. The tale is full of inventive dialogue, and the various buttons and their adventures gave me the chance to picture a rich range of situations, as many as one might find in a book of short stories.
My pictures drew on the work of some of my favourite illustrators. Most prominent among them was Maurice Sendak, who I met around this time at a book signing and who told me with reference to publishers (after I told him I was trying to make it as an illustrator): ‘don’t forget, they need us more than we need them’. That’s advice with a wide application, and I haven’t forgotten it. Sendak drew wonderful Christmas pictures, especially his haunting designs for the Nutcracker ballet, which were incorporated into a picture book – the very one I asked him to sign. Another huge influence was Pauline Baynes, especially those wonderful pictures in the Narnia books and the Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes where she weaves together several images into a kind of cartoon strip, surrounded by a border constructed out of appropriate objects – plants, perhaps, or chains, or river currents. Some of the crosshatching techniques recall another of my heroes, Tove Jansson, especially her comics, which my Dad read to us as children, translating from Swedish as he went along. Now I think of it, Jansson too did fascinating things with the frames of her comics, and I may have been more influenced by her than by Baynes in this respect.Other artists I loved included Gerard Hoffnung, especially his illustrations for Colette’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (the animated furniture in that book is everywhere in my drawings) and early Disney movies, especially Pinocchio and the musical automata in Geppetto’s workshop. Mimicking these artists was an education in itself for an aspiring book designer.
Here, then, as a Christmas offering, are some of the pictures I made for Jo Heaton’s story. I offer them in memory of her, and in want of anything more suitable to put up on this blog for Christmas.
[Nb: click on each picture for a closer view.]
