Learning Curve

As people grappled with the restrictions and realities of COVID some unusual partnerships were born and many inspired projects began. Right at the start of the lockdown I answered a callout on the local online Facebook bulletin board for an illustrator to collaborate on a kid's book. The author was unpublished and so was I, so I figured we could join forces and get published together. This meant the gig was unpaid, but it was agreed I would receive half of the profits, which was very generous in principle. I was going to get a contract drawn up to ensure that part of the deal was locked in but we never got that far.

As you might be able to see from the following images, I can spend hours and hours creating individual elements and working out how best to illustrate just one scene, then spend more time rearranging elements on a page to get the best composition. The retro plane took me ages - I went down a few blind alleys before I got close to what the author wanted.

I 'drew' heavily on my own childhood - the boy looks like an animated version of my red-headed brother as a kid, and the house is a state owned fibro-asbestos dwelling typical of the time. The Hills Hoist clothesline is iconic Aussie backyard paraphernalia. I seem to remember the author wasn't sure about the little girl swinging from it, but as he was Scottish, he wouldn't have known that this was a common activity in the 60s which of course, I participated in (and got in trouble for). The back yard is also typical - generous blocks of land, with a couple of trees if you were lucky, and an expanse of lawn on which cricket and footie (Aussie rules football) were played.

Each element can be a lot of fun to design and create. Me renaming the 'Spludge gun' the 'Spludge-atron' is the kind of fun serendipitous thing that can happen during a collaboration. 

Characters can be tricky because they have to represent what the author sees when he writes about them. The brief for both characters was pretty specific but there was room for me to have some input which is really how it should work if you want the best result. I can appreciate it must be difficult for an author to 'hand over' their characters to the illustrator - they are probably rarely going to look exactly as they see them in their mind's-eye.

The author and I communicated well at first. He liked my style and I thought the story and the characters were interesting enough for me to translate into some nice illustrations. Things broke down a bit when I realised he didn't understand he needed to provide me with a finished story. I did a couple of mockups, like the first image above, to show that the text had to be finalised before I could work out what went where,  how many pages were going to be illustrated, which parts of the text I was going to illustrate and how they would be placed on the pages. 

COVID lockdown ended and the author got back to what he loves doing best - jazz singing. He apologised and agreed to rewrite the story in a format I could interpret as an illustrator. I left him with it but have heard nothing for about a year. I doubt I ever will.

Collaborations are often difficult, especially when there are 2 creatives working together. I think we did really well and I'm very glad I went through the process. I learnt a lot.

Images: Concept by story author, James Flynn. Illustrations by blog author trading as 'Mad Fish Designs'.