SCBWI Workshop Report - Getting Your Picture Book onto the Page With Elizabeth Dulemba

Last weekend I escaped my duties as a Mother and took a train up to Edinburgh to join the South East Scotland SCBWI Network for a Picture Book Workshop with the wonderful Elizabeth O Dulemba.

Sketching at the station

Elizabeth is an amazing writer, illustrator and teacher from the US, who we are lucky to have access to here in the UK (and the North especially!) as she has recently moved to Edinburgh to further her studies. Watch her inspiring TEDx talk about how she sold or gave away nearly everything she owned to pursue her dreams. 

I had heard of Elizabeth before this workshop by listening to Katie Davis’ Brain Burps About Books podcasts; the one about how she turned one of her books, Lula’s Brew into an app and then a later one about her lovely historical fiction middle-grade novel A Bird on Water Street.  She is a prolific blogger and provides many useful resources for writers and illustrators and weekly colouring in pages for children.  I have previously mentioned her on my blog in relation to my Picture Book Anatomy tutorial.

The Workshop

It was a really useful and productive workshop, with a mixture of exemplar picture books, story analysis, folding paper, lots of folding paper, writing, pitching and drawing.  There was a lot of information crammed in and I was surprised to find that by the end, I’d roughly storyboarded the manuscript that I took along.  It was a pleasure and enlightening to see the collection of professionals’ storyboards that Elizabeth showed.  I now want to check out the gorgeous work of Ruth Sanderson whom I was previously unfamiliar with, click on that link, you won’t be sorry that you did.  Elizabeth brought along some of her own picture book dummies (mock ups) which were exquisite.  Sadly we ran out of time at the end to make our own dummies but Elizabeth has a pdf resource on her website to help.

Folding a zine

My Storyboard

So what I will take away from the workshop is a way to look at my texts to define the essence of them, then break them down into four key structure parts, and from there into a further eight parts and then finally seeing them as a whole of 14 spreads/32 pages to eventually taking them to dummy for reading out loud and page turning in the real world.

Sociable SCBWIs

It was a fun-packed, educational time and as SCBWI’s are a sociable lot I joined them for a post-workshop drink to talk even more about children’s book writing and illustrating and despairing at how long it takes to succeed.  It was lovely to hear about Sheila Averbuch’s journey and her signing with her agent.  Sheila highly recommended doing Writer’s Digest courses with access to editors and agents so I’m strongly considering trying an appropriate one to me, if I do, I’m sure to report back.

Instagram

I haven't posted on this blog for ages!  No excuses, I've just got to get back into it.

In the meantime I've signed up for an Instagram account, I've heard it's a great way to view art.  I'm posting work in progress and sketches that I don't always post to Facebook or Twitter and also stuff I'm interested in such as Boardgames, Minecraft, the Maker movement, LEGO and books that I am reading.  So if any of that interests you give me a follow.

October / Inktober 2015

October is my favourite month of the year as it is my birthday month and because of Halloween, I just love spooky things.  I’ve been working on some portfolio pieces and this one is appropriate for the season; a witch taking a night flight as a swarm of bats spirals by.

Night Flight by Claire O'Brien, 2015, gouache on paper

I took part in #Inktober again this year.  Just to recap, Inktober is a drawing challenge to make one ink drawing a day for the entire month of October.  Inktober was started in 2009 by an artist called Jake Parker, who set himself the challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits.  I am pleased to say that I made a drawing every day except for the last.  

Doing Inktober was as fun as last year, I even took some requests this year for subjects to draw which added to the challenge. Inktober really motivated me to draw every day and the quality of drawings ranged from throwaway sketches to not bad, I even sold some prints and have been commissioned to draw in my ink style.

You can see all of my Inktober drawings on my Facebook page but here are are some of my highlights:

"Playing in the Garden" by Claire O'Brien

"The Gentleman" by Claire O'Brien

"I Found a Fox" by Claire O'Brien

"Kate Bush - Before The Dawn" by Claire O'Brien

"Halloween" by Claire O'Brien

There was also lovely a meet up of some sociable SCBWIs, Top, 2016 Carnegie long-listed, YA author Teri Terry was in town for writing research so a gang of us had dinner and viewed the SCBWI Illustration Showcase exhibition at Seven Stories.

Geoff Lynas, Maureen Lynas and Janet Foxley outside of Seven Stories

Teri Terry, Geoff Lynas, and Maureen Lynas

"Maureen and Teri" by Claire O'Brien

Up month is Tara Lazar's PiBoIdMo - Picture Book Idea Month a where you come up with an idea for a picture book every day of November.  

Sociable SCBWIs - Rebecca Colby

I have written before here and here about how how friendly the world of children's literature is and I am going to do it again in this post.  Last month, when I asked my online friend, fellow SCBWI member and brilliant picture-book writer; Rebecca Colby, for some advice for things to do with kids in her hometown, she not only responded with some great ideas, we also decided to meet up and had a lovely time eating ice-cream and talking about writing.

Rebecca and I

I love Rebecca’s latest book "It's Raining Bats & Frogs", it is really well-written with some lovely poetic refrains and is a great example of picture book plotting.  I adore the art and have enjoyed reading illustrator Steve Henry’s blog posts on his working process on this book, covering concept design, final art and I especially love this post about layout.

For the aspiring children’s picture book authors and illustrators reading this, you must check out Rebecca’s guest Sub It Club blog post about querying agents.  She reads between the lines of her successful query letter for "It's Raining Bats & Frogs" to show what your letter is  actually saying to agents about you and your story.  It has certainly helped me craft my own query submissions. 

I know that we can expect a few more picture books from Rebecca in the future and you can also get her debut book "There Was a Wee Lassie Who Swallowed a Midgie" .  "It's Raining Bats & Frogs"
isn’t available in UK shops yet but it can be ordered pretty quickly from Amazon, I highly recommend it to you and if you get the chance to meet Rebecca, I recommend her too.

03 - Spread Of Wonder: The Robot and the Bluebird

Welcome to the third post in my ‘Spread Of Wonder’ series where I talk about spreads from picture books that I admire, I look at them and analyse why I think they make a good spread.  This month’s spread is the 10th spread of David Lucas’ “The Robot and the Bluebird” which was published in 2007 by Andersen Press.  

I do not know if David Lucas is a picture book superstar, but I personally, did not know of him until I recently came across this book in my local library.  It is a beautiful, whimsical story of an old, broken hearted robot who is put on the scrap heap but finds new purpose and friendship when he shelters a weak, migrating bluebird in the cavity where his heart used to be. It is illustrated with dip pen ink lines and coloured with watercolour, somewhat a traditional media in children's picture books.  

In this spread, the robot is at the hardest part of his journey, carrying the bird in his heart over a mountain.  He is moving left to right in direction, moving us through the story just as we have seen demonstrated in my previous choices of Spreads of Wonder.

What is great about this spread for me is how the illustration of the setting contributes to the storytelling.  The robot is crossing a mountain, a difficult thing to do at any time but even harder when it is raining and snowing like Lucas has drawn here.  Again Lucas uses direction in the diagonal lines of the falling rain and snow, pelting down against the robot's back.  Lucas has drawn grey thunder clouds that look like symbols from TV weather forecasts, with jagged arrowed, lightening coming from them, they are not soft and fluffy, they have hard outlines and their shading shows their solid form.  The mountains are also pointed and jagged, as are the trees with their icicle spikes and bare twig branches suggesting danger everywhere.

Lucas use uses a limited colour palette to great effect in this spread using only washes of blue, black and red against the white of the paper.  He uses the cool and muted blues, blacks and whites in the environment which contrasts starkly against the warm rust red of the robot.  Apart from the clouds, as already mentioned, and perhaps the robot, Lucas hasn't really used the colour to describe the form  of objects through shading, instead he applies colour as a bodycolour wash and uses the pen line to describe form.  This seems to be an often-used technique in children's picture book illustration and I wonder if it just adds to the clarity for children?    

What can the aspiring illustrator learn from this spread of wonder then?  This spread teaches us mainly about using illustration to contribute to storytelling. 

Storytelling - make the environment show the feelings of the story 
Direction - Use physical direction of the action to move the narrative forward, left to right and show hardship and struggle with right to left direction
Use Contrast of colour temperature to highlight a character.

Please comment with your own thoughts on this spread, or make a suggestion for a future Spread of Wonder candidate for me to analyse and don’t forget to follow this blog to receive a notification of my next post.  Thanks for reading! 

Promotion

I have had quite a fun-filled children’s book-related month so far, I have been to some promotional events, I have even been promoted myself and there are some great opportunities for more promotion to be had, not just for me but for other aspiring children’s picture book author and illustrators too!

Promotional Events

First up was Seven Stories’ Jodi Picoult talk and signing at the lovely Tyneside Cinema.  Jodi and her daughter, Samantha Van Leer, have co-written a YA (Young Adult) novel “Between the Lines” that is a book about a book, a fairytale book, with characters coming out of the page.  Jodi and Sammi gave a great talk, the pair of them in conversation, no compere!  The book also features striking illustrations by Yvonne Gilbert and enchanting silhouettes by Scott M. Fischer.  Let’s hope we see more YA novels with illustration adorning their pages in the future.

  

Next up was the launch of Gabrielle Kent’s Middle Grade novel “Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle” at Stockton Library.  I’m so excited by the book because I’m a friend of Gabrielle. We met at Teesside University when she was my tutor and then, when I worked there, my colleague.  “Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle” is her debut and it is the start of a series.  It was a lovely book launch with readings, signings and fun activities for children and Stockton Library looked like a really good libary.  I’m so pleased for Gabrielle and look forward to seeing how her writing career turns out and I know she is cheering me on in my own writing endeavours.

 

The last of the events that I went to were some illustrator talks that kicked off The Festival of Illustration in Hartlepool.  The talks that I attended were great, they were by Chris Riddell, John McCrea (comic artist) and Sara Ogilvie. The festival has been well-organised by Cleveland College of Art and Design and the main illustration exhibition and is held in the beautiful former church, Hartlepool Art Gallery.  The exhibition runs between the 4th June to the 4th July and it is well worth a look (and a second visit from me) as it features some top illustrators all-round and as well as children’s picture book illustrators.   I attended with some SCBWI friends and it was nice to meet Chris Riddell, little did we know he was about to become the Children’s Laureate, check out his five point plan for the role. 

 

Left to Right: Lucy Farfort, Claire O'Brien, Maureen Lynas,
Chris Riddell, Cathy Brumby and Katherine Lynas

Chris Riddell by Claire O'Brien 

Promotion of Me

This month saw the release of my first ever interview!  It was for the brilliant Kidlit TV who have featured me as their Community Member of the Month for June.  KidlitTV is a great community and YouTube channel that features original Kidlit content, particularly fantastic interviews with authors and illustrators in their ‘Story Makers’ series (a title I came up with).  As well as providing great content, the Facebook group is a mine of information about video creation and marketing, so if you make videos, you need to join.

SCBWI has launched a new email magazine INSIGHT, every month there is a drawing prompt for members, everyone who submits gets included in the gallery and two are picked to be featured in the email itself.  This email will reach agents and editors so it is worth submitting to.  You can see my entry for the ‘Bounce’ prompt here, leave me comment if you look.

Let’s Get Promoted

I have already mentioned being featured in SCBWI’s Draw This prompt, this month’s prompt is ‘Adventure’, here are the guidelines if you’re a SCBWI member and wish to submit, but hurry, the deadline is June 20th.

Another SCBWI opportunity is Undiscovered Voices, a competition for unpublished and unagented children's book writers and illustrators living in the EU.  Submissions are open on the 1st of July and close on the 16th August.  The illustration criteria give the opportunity for drawing some twisted fairy tales 

Here’s a contest to win a critique from talented illustrator, teacher and YouTuber Will Terry and $30 credit to his SVS online courses by submitting an illustration to the prompt of: “Amanda was so excited for her first day at the cottage until…”.  The deadline is 12:00 noon EST, June 25^th.

And just for fun and cool prizes there is Susannah Hill’s illustration contest on the theme of Discovery, you have until the 26t of June to submit.

Good luck with these if you enter, why don’t you post a link if you do, I’d love to see.  Thanks for reading.

02 - Spread Of Wonder: Oh No, George!

This is the second post in my series ‘Spread Of Wonder’ where I talk about spreads from picture books that I admire, I look at them and analyse why I think they make a good spread.  This month’s spread is the 6th spread of Chris Haughton’s “Oh No, George!” which was published in 2013 (in paperback) by Walker Books.  

The cover of "Oh No, George!" by Chris Haughton

The minimal art in “Oh No, George!” could not be more different to the intricately detailed art in last month’s spread from “The House in the Night”.  The main reason that I have chosen it is its excellent demonstration of sequentiality.  If you have been reading my “Creating A Children’s Picture Book Illustration Portfolio” blog posts, you’ll know that being able to successfully show storytelling and characters in sequence is a requirement of picture book illustration and something I’m aiming to get better at. 

The story of “Oh No, George!” is about a dog who is left home alone and promises to be good but he just can’t help himself.  It is beautifully structured with a setup of things that could go wrong, followed by a pause with the 'What will George do?' question, then the page turn reveals the results of George’s actions alongside the 'Oh no, George!' refrain. 

In this Spread of Wonder where George sees Cat, we see three depictions of George across the spread, two on the verso (lefthand) page and one on the recto (righthand) page.  And just like in "The House in the Night" spread last month, the direction of George’s actions are moving us forward left to right, through the story with him either moving to or looking towards the right.  

The spread has a white background with some minimal lines suggesting the location of the last spread; the floor and some remains of cake.  Haughton uses a flat, cutout style with bold colour and strong silhouettes, this is accentuated by him using no outlines (apart from on George’s eyes).  Like most artists working in a flat style he does not use light and shade to model the shadow of three-dimensional form but his colouring is far from flat.  George is red but he has a slightly lighter underside and a purple nose and there is always a pencil scribble somewhere on him.  I think the colouring is digital and rather than using Adobe Photoshop’s gradient feature I think Haughton has used the cutout technique for colouring too, as we see the straight edges where the colour subtly changes.

As I have already stated I have chosen this spread because it excels at sequentiality both within the spread itself and in context of the whole book.  This spread comes after George has eaten the cake that he shouldn’t have and before he chases Cat. The previous and following spreads show George’s chaos in full colour backgrounds which contrast with our spread which has a white background.  Unlike comics, picture books don’t often use panels to show sequence.  George is shown in differing sizes on the white background and this change in scale somehow visually signals to us that is a sequence and not three different dogs.  George is drawn consistently regardless of his different poses, he doesn’t change colour and his proportions don’t change, this also confirms that we are looking at a sequence of the same dog. 

Previous Spread

Following Spread

What can the aspiring illustrator learn from this spread of wonder then?  This spread teaches us a lot about Sequentiality and some of the elements that go into it: 

• Show Contrast - in pose, size and mood when depicting a character in sequence 
• Be Consistent - keep your characters and settings ‘on model’, don't change proportions, colours, etc. 
• Establish a Rhythm - Haughton's example is a setup, a pause and the following results

Please comment with your own thoughts on this spread, or make a suggestion for a future Spread of Wonder candidate for me to analyse and don’t forget to follow this blog to receive a notification of my next post.  Thanks for reading!