Update talks to Shirley Hughes, winner of the 2003 Kate Greenaway Medal, about creating and illustrating books for children.
‘An important part of my job is to try and slow children down a bit, give them an opportunity to make their own leisurely exploration of an unfolding narrative, long before they learn to read,’ says Shirley Hughes, who has just won CILIP’s Kate Greenaway Medal for the second time, after an interval of 25 years.
She thinks that, surrounded by moving electronic imagery ‘from the cradle,’ we are in danger of becoming punch-drunk. ‘We are so quick on the uptake that we miss half the point.’ Her life as an illustrator and creator of books for children, on the other hand, has been built on observation. She travels everywhere with a sketchbook, so that she can capture people spotted anywhere: in the street, on park benches, having a coffee. ‘You draw very fast … it is what you put in your sketchbook that is your source material.’ It is also memory training, she says, and if you have sketchbooks full of images drawn from real life you can go back to them again and again. It provides the inspiration for her illustrations. ‘All these things are done out of your head but are based on the real thing.’
Shirley’s winning title, Ella’s Big Chance, is a re-working of the Cinderella story with a most unexpected twist. This version is set on the French Riviera in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. The illustrations are inspired by the great French couturiers of the period and the dance sequences in the RKO Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. But ‘the Cinderella convention is reversed.
Instead of having the ugly sisters, I have bean-pole tall, icily beautiful, fashion-model-like sisters, and Ella herself is round and sturdy. Little girls do get rather keen on these fashion models!’ There is a happy ending, but it is not at all the conventional one we have come to expect.
Inspired by film and theatre
Her concern about the ubiquity of moving pictures is interesting because Shirley herself is inspired by film and theatre. For her a picture book ‘unfolds in my head like a movie for a very long time before I start to write.’ She is much influenced by Edward Ardizzone’s observation that a book is like a little theatre – you open it and up goes the curtain. Only when the text is complete does she start to make a rough that is the essence of the book. ‘Each page is worked out. You could have many – almost unlimited – ways to work out a page to suit this particular story.’
If the book she is working on is a picture book, all the pictures are designed, and the design is dictated by the kind of story she is telling. For Ella, she wanted to create the glamour of the grand sweeping staircases, and the ballroom with the dancers ‘gliding over great reflective floors’. These Hollywood movies stood for ‘the essence of colour in a bleak wartime childhood’ although they were made in black and white. She knows a lot about the period and, having studied the history of costume at Liverpool Art College, designed the clothes for her characters herself.
Unlike many of her earlier books Ella is intended for the slightly older child. ‘I wanted to take them on from the four-year-old stage, when they enjoy reading about themselves. They go on loving picture books for a long time after they have learned to read, right up to 10 or 11.’ This means that you can take a more sophisticated approach, something she has done with the design of this book. By dropping the text into tall upright boxes, she found she could move the panels around. ‘I could have big spreads with glamorous colour. I put the panels on either side, rather like curtains on either side of the stage.’ She is thrilled that winning the Greenaway again ‘at this late stage in my career’ means her experimentation with picture books for the older child has been noticed.
Each panel of text also includes a black and white line illustration, which amplifies the plot. These line drawings ‘act as counterpoints to many illustrations, and carry the story along.’ The opportunity to include them meant a lot to her. When she was growing up, numerous books, including many for adults, were illustrated in this way. She thinks that ‘a good illustrator’s presence in a book is always going to be a strong one.’ She describes the impression made by John Tenniel’s images in Alice in Wonderland and Ernest Shepard’s in Winnie the Pooh as ‘indelible’. Her four greatest heroes are William Nicholson, William Heath Robinson, Edward Ardizzone and Shepard, but she pays glowing tribute to many others – Arthur Rackham, Anthony Gross, Lynton Lamb, Leonard Rosoman, Ronald Searle, Edward Bawden, Raymond Briggs, Charles Keeping, Victor Ambrus… Her own career has spanned the 1950s, 60s and 70s when illustration was still largely black and white, as well as the explosion into colour of children’s publishing from the 1980s.
She drew throughout this time, taking on commissions of all kinds. (The only one she turned down was one to illustrate, retrospectively, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. ‘I must have been mad!’) She has paid tribute (in her marvellous autobiography A Life Drawing) [1] to ‘a kind of apprenticeship which emergent illustrators find hard to get now, done without any publicity or artificial response, like a young actor’s experience in a provincial repertory company.’ When she drew for her children’s generation, she was drawing for the last children not to have had TV from infancy – ‘not that we knew it at the time’.
The ironic thing now, she says, is that although there are so many images around, pictures – in a sense the reward for learning to read – are suddenly withdrawn from children’s books. But she is sure that children’s books do need pictures. ‘I have been watching several grandchildren growing up. They want a fully ventilated page – they get quite daunted by close print when they’re still young. It takes a really reading child to leap into a long text with no illustrations.’ She thinks that not having pictures creates a barrier to what should be a natural progression.
Teaching the child to imagine
Ironically, for adults (who can already read) there is often an illustrated version of the book – the big screen or TV adaptation. And therein lies a danger. One of the roles of early reading is to teach the child to imagine. But you have to develop this capacity when being read to or listening to a tape. In fact children will listen to stories that they are not confident enough to read by themselves. ‘It encourages them to have pictures in the head – the best pictures you will ever see.’ But by moving straight from a novel to the screen, with Harry Potter, say, you interfere with the internal creativity.
‘Those images are very powerful – they stay in your head. The special effects are all there. The magic is done for you. So there’s nowhere to go. Of course, it’s very entertaining, but we need the chance to develop this other faculty.’
That’s why the early experience is so crucial. She thinks it is important to write for shared experience, and to get back to the text. It has to be beautifully written – which is harder, if you are writing a shorter text. ‘It has got to be palatable to be read (again and again!) by a parent or older sibling.’
The glory of her books for younger children, such as the series about Alfie and his little sister, is that they capture something universal about childhood. ‘I am dealing with bedrock things that are always absolutely central to the world of very small children – it’s very different from a fairytale. They are seeing themselves – this is what grabs them.’ So Alfie Wins a Prize, forthcoming in paperback, ‘is about winning or not winning – the whole business of whether to have prizes, because it’s a bit annoying if everyone else gets something as well!’ In this case there are only three, and a consolation prize. Reassuringly for devotees, Alfie and his sister provide endless inspiration. This is a rich seam: ‘There’s lots more to tell!’
Her illustrations, too, capture the essence of childhood. ‘When I do library visits or book events, people say: “That garden where Alfie is to have that party – it reminds me of Bedford, where I grew up.” The trick is to make people believe that it is real.’ She has been creating Alfie books for 20 years, but time has stood still and the books have not dated, a feature of the best books for children. ‘When I was a child I read [Joyce Lankester Brisley’s] Milly Molly Mandy and believed in it. Now my little grandchild aged four has it every night. She hasn’t noticed it is somewhere else. And My Naughty Little Sister [by Dorothy Edwards, which Shirley illustrated – her ‘breakthrough’ book], is incredibly dated really, but it doesn’t seem to worry anyone, the situations are so real.’ She thinks that this kind of story-telling, ‘a different take on fantasy’ is culturally incredibly important.
Acute visual memory
Shirley paints her scenes tonally, to open up a page three-dimensionally. ‘I draw to set a scene. Even if it is a park scene or a street in the Alfie story – you step in and inhabit it in a very intimate way. Children do that with these pictures. It is marvellous if you can set that up. Also, if for the adult you can unlock some memory of their childhood, something pleasurable they had forgotten.’ Long years sketching and observing have taught her that children minutely examine and absorb the images in books, returning to them over and over again. She has noticed that young children ‘just out of the board-book stage have a great capacity for absorbing detail. They have acute visual memories and peer into a picture with intense concentration, picking out things which older people miss.’ [2]
Will this last? Shirley thinks her own interest in drawing came at least partly because of growing up and spending her later childhood during the Second World War ‘when there was absolutely nothing to do’. She drew pictures, and read – a lot. ‘I was a cautious and late reader, but I peered into and pored over books more than I read widely. Reading widely didn’t happen until I was 18 or 19. I was one of those people who devoured every book in sight. I moved on cautiously, from one thing to another.’
It was illustrations that provided the initial attraction. In her case, Thomas Henry’s of the perpetual schoolboy in Richmal Crompton’s Just William were the incentive to tackle a ‘proper book’ for first time. That is why, when she appears at literary festivals, she shows pictures on the screen when she is telling her stories. ‘Children come in and sit for a whole hour. They concentrate all the time, all the way through. There’s never any trouble. Story-telling in libraries is vital, even if it means having a projector and a screen. When the librarian tells a story in her own way, she can stop and talk about the picture, asking the children what they think. It is like going through the picture.’
Hope for illustrators
So audiences have survived the electronic age. But what about illustrators? There is hope for them too. A few years ago, she spent a whole day at an exhibition of Goya’s sketchbooks at the Hayward Gallery. There were lots of students ‘drawing with great fluency’. It was a relief for her to see that the ability to draw had survived ‘the great retreat from realistic figure drawing’ at art schools. She was concerned because of ‘the discipline that is central to the tradition of life drawing’. She had it at art school, before what she describes in the autobiography as the coming of the ‘Babel Tower: the dismantling of life rooms and removal of Greek casts, the challenge of tradition in all its manifestations, which hit art schools in the 1960s.’ [3] ‘Something vital was lost’, which now, somewhat painfully, a new generation of students is trying to regain. She stresses that, although illustration, like all visual art, needs to be in a permanent state of change and experiment, good drawing has to underpin colour technique. ‘To create characters, you have to be able to draw people.’
But the young people in the gallery reassured her. They were all studying graphics and animation. So there will be continuity and, in addressing these new challenges, not all the lessons of the past have been lost. When she was a child the narrative illustrators – ‘so well trained’ and so favoured by the Victorians – had a formative influence. Her own work has influenced illustration for children over the last 50 years. Her career has benefited from technology (including cheaper printing), too. Co-editions have helped. ‘At last we are getting into print, and getting a larger audience.’ Her own books, surely, are among the classics of children’s literature. They will survive, because their humour appeals to young and old. They communicate universal themes in a universal language that appeals to parents as much as their children.
References
[1] Shirley Hughes. A Life Drawing. The Bodley Head, 2002, p. 124.
[2] Ibid, p. 177.
[3] Ibid, p. 82.
Ella’s Big Chance, winner of the 2003 Kate Greenaway Medal (awarded in 2004), is published by the Bodley Head at £10.99. Shirley Hughes OBE first won the medal with Dogger, published in 1977. She has published more than 50 titles, and contributed drawings to more than 200 books by other authors.
Updated: 20 January 2005