We are delighted to welcome author and illustrator Padmacandra to the blog to talk about her new work and new picture book Don’t Be Silly!  A perfect book for reading aloud.  Downloadable resources are available here


Were you always interested in art?

I grew up in Scotland.  In those days it was a little bit strict, it was just an ordinary primary school.  I don’t remember school making a big deal out of art.  It was the same at secondary school but at home my imagination was always important.  I always had a sense of other worlds that you could enter.  I loved how often you get that in books.  I used to go with my younger brother on t explorations to try to find these different worlds.  I remember once thinking if I stand on my bed and turn round three times knocking on the wall, maybe a door will open.  There was a sense of a benign force which was the imagination behind things.  It wasn’t just imagination as made up.  There was some sort of reality to it.  I’ve always enjoyed doodling and making art and wanted to enter different worlds through drawing.

Did any books or illustrators that made an impact on you?

I was very lucky to have quite a lot of books.  There were four of us in the family. My mum was quite interested in children’s books.  She used to read to us which was lovely.  We had a fantastic library up in Broughty Ferry next to Dundee where I grew up. 

I remember going to visit my grandmother, she had all these old books and we were all fascinated with this one called Josie, Click and Bun by Enid Blyton.  Every year we went for two weeks in the summer holidays to the Cotswolds where my grandparents lived.  My granny was Hungarian and there was something of a mystery about her.  We would all rush and look at this book.  It was covered in children’s scribbles because our cousins had also been to visit. 

I also remember other books like the Ladybird Books and was always drawn to the more fictional rather than factual ones. I remember the Sleeping Beauty one which my friend and I used to enact.  Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone did amazing fairy tale pictures with these with wavy hair and shoes that curl around. I remember poring over the pictures and really absorbing them. 

I was very interested in George Macdonald who wrote The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind.  There was definitely an influence from Victorian illustrators and writers.  It ties in with this sense of different worlds.  Narnia was really important too.  We were members of the Puffin Club for a while and that was wonderful.  I remember winning a poetry prize which was so encouraging and made a mark on me.  Ursula Le Guin and Brian Wildsmith and Raymond Briggs I enjoyed.  We had this book of nursery rhymes called Fee Fi Fo Fum.  There was a plum pudding in it which was just so pudding.  Me and my brother were fascinated by it  As a child you are just absorbing these things and somehow they have an influence.  Certain books come at certain times in your life.

Please can you tell us about your route to becoming an illustrator?

It’s strange because sometimes it feels like a sidestep and yet it is a complete continuity with the driving force of imagination as a more real reality.  Whenever I would be making notes for a talk, I noticed I was always doodling.  I didn’t take an art degree, I nearly did, but as I was a fairly introverted young person and wanted something that would bring me out of myself so I went into social work. It felt like I could respond to some of the suffering in the world.

I became a Buddhist when I was in my twenties.  I was always making doodles and in meditation I was taken by a benign sense of something that lay behind things.  I reached a stage where I had enough confidence through my meditation that I thought I could try this and go with it.  I went on a Summer School with Cambridge School of Art.  It was really affirming.  They said bring 500 words and then we’ll play with that.  Very quickly I wrote the text that became the story Don’t be Silly. 

I met Ness Wood who is a designer, I ended up in her little group and she said she thought children would really love this.  I felt very encouraged and went on to do the MA.  The MA focused on observational skills.  People have this idea of imagination being ungrounded, but it comes from the body and the senses.  In the same way we were observing and drawing from life and from noticing.  It’s a gateway to imagination, a grounded embodied space is what allows real imagination to come through.  We spent a whole module going round with our sketchbook.  At the end of the course, Rose Robbins who is an illustrator mentioned my work to Sarah Pakenham of Scallywag Press.  Sarah contacted me and we had a chat.  At the end of the MA I signed a two book deal with Scallywag Press, the first was The Tale of the Whale and the second is Don’t be Silly.

You were shortlisted for the Klaus Flugge Prize with The Tale of the Whale, what did that mean to you?

There are so many books published that it’s difficult when people are choosing books to know what is out there.  It’s difficult too for illustrators to feel encouraged.  Coming to illustration at a later stage in life it meant a lot to get the recognition.  It helps you to feel you can carry on.  Making picture books doesn’t make a lot of money for illustrators, they have to have lots of side-hustles to make it work.  Virtually all of the people I know who are fellow Alumni of the MA, have a secret imposter syndrome.  I find when I’ve come out with a book I’m a bit doubtful about it.  You have to say how much you love it and on one level that’s true, but you also have doubts and feel a bit unsure.  Being shortlisted really helped me recognise that it is a good book for children.

With Don’t Be Silly you both wrote and illustrated the story, what were the differences and did you have a preference?

Don’t be Silly is unusual because I’d written the text before I illustrated it.  It’s often an advantage to be able to write and illustrate together, but I don’t feel I’ve had that yet.  The Tale of the Whale was more straightforward because the words were there so it was a case of doing the thumbnails and having those approved and then doing the roughs and having those approved.  Ness Wood was the designer and she decided which spreads to put the words on which helped.  Karen Swann was talking with Janice Thomson the wonderful editor.  Don’t be Silly had been worked on for such a long time that I struggled to get objectivity, it had been through various iterations.  Martin Salisbury was very positive about it which I think is why Sarah was keen to sign it. 

I still feel that I’m working out how I want to be an illustrator and how I want to create images.  With both books I felt as though I was wrestling with things.  It never felt like a smooth process.  I don’t know whether it will ever get to that stage.  I really enjoyed working with the team, it’s a small team, but there’s a lot of experience there.  It’s lovely to think you can just get things done in a meeting without going through lots of departments. 

There are lots of details to explore in your illustrations were you conscious of creating something exploratory?

I did want it to be very rich.  Initially I wanted a baroque feel because of the castle.  I don’t know how much that was achieved.  I was influenced a bit by Ronald Searle with the castles, and characters with big noses.  We used to get annuals when I was young and you’d really pore over the pictures.  I wanted that feel.  The secondary characters like the cat and the mice, fulfil an important function by indicating an extra layer of what the book is saying.  There’s one of the pictures where the children are running into the characters, but the cat is looking worried because it can see the football and what might be about to happen.  The mice that are doing all the antics are communicating the playfulness of the children and an anarchic atmosphere.  In a way they just come out as a natural thing.  We did add the hens, it was partly the editor’s ideas as she is very keen on hens! 

Were there any characters you particularly enjoyed illustrating and writing about?

I drew Bo and Smudge so often, I really got a feeling for them.  I enjoyed the cat too!  I really enjoyed doing all the portraits and looking at portraits in galleries and on the internet.  There’s often a pompousness in how and what they are trying to communicate about themselves.  A lot of the art is quite pressured in some ways, but this was just fun.  There is a secret hidden in one of the paintings which echoes something that happens later on in the book!

Bo and Smudge try on some of the adult outfits, it feels a bit of a metaphor for how we try on it different guises throughout life…?

I remember being on a retreat and watching lambs jump and I wondered why the sheep weren’t and what had happened.  You rarely see an adult running o skipping along the street.  Sometimes I’ve gone jogging and feel I have to put a uniform on to show I’m not just running about, but am jogging.  The whole thing is about the importance of the spontaneity of playfulness.  The things that we put on in life, the children are putting them on in a playful way.  It’s like being able to see things through different perspectives.  It’s important to do that creatively as well.  One creative writing idea from Natalie Goldberg who writes about creative writing is to put a funny hat on or adopt a different posture to place yourself in a different point.  If we over identify with what we wear – like the judge who wears his outfit – we get stuck.  There’s something essential about me which is not about the clothes that I wear, the age that I am, what I’m saying to you at the moment.  There’s a freedom about this and a playfulness in this.

Does Buddhism influence your work?

In my best moments yet, but it also gives me perspective in my less good moments.  Most creators experience an emotion when they are starting to create.  You start by making a lot more mess and there’s a voice that comes in that says this isn’t going very well, you can’t do what you did before.  It’s not even words like that, it’s just a mood.  It’s really got nothing to do with the creative process, we have to try to let go of these ideas and let the pen and the paper get on and happen in the moment.  Being able to be creative consistently is about recognising the stories and doing it anyway.  Playfulness is such an important part of this.  Being on the MA gave a space and an opportunity to experiment.  It’s a bit like improvisation.  If we can live our lives in that way, it’s a much more resourceful way of being in the world.  We’re now living in a world that feels particularly precarious.  You might say we need to be very serious in the moment, but I think there’s a much better outcome if we can adopt a playfulness and a lightness to give perspective.  I don’t mean laughing at serious things, but being more spontaneous so as to open up possibilities.

Do we take funny books seriously enough?

I have noticed that there’s a lot of stories which have a message and for bloggers and that sort of thing it’s much easier for them to talk about that, not necessarily in a bad way, and for that to be a good thing.  It’s more difficult to talk about Don’t be Silly because there’s more of an experience through the rhyming rhythm and images.  Playfulness is important and we mustn’t lose that and be doom-scrolling and serious the whole time so that becomes the only influence on ourselves, on children and on all of us.  There’s a bigger perspective that can come through playfulness and joy!

What is next for you?

I don’t know what’s coming next.  I would love to do something about poetry and particularly about the approach you need to write a poem.  When I was at school, I was very invisible and shy and disappeared into myself.  There were moments though when things woke me up a little bit.  We had a visiting person in RE and they did a whole lesson on haiku, and something awoke within me.  I love the Chinese and Japanese poets.  They have certain words for certain aesthetics.  I’d like to bring a sense of atmosphere and magic to books, which I suppose brings us back to the idea of other worlds!

Thank you to Padmacandra for the interview and to Scallywag Press for the brilliant opportunity.

On the eve of publication for Hotel Flamingo: Carnival Caper, the third book in the brilliantly inventive, witty and whimsial series, we are delighted to speak with author and illustrator Alex Milway.

(1) How important do you think children's book illustrations are and why?

As a young reader, illustrations were the first thing that grabbed me in a book - yes, hang my head in shame, I judged books by their cover. Looking back, I think that because I loved animation so much, this was the way I connected books to the world of cartoons. If it looked like it might make a good cartoon, I was in!

So I think illustrated books provide an entry for readers that don't immediately get drawn in by words, for whatever reason. Looking at it another way, I think the illustrations and 'branding' of books are more important than ever, and younger fiction depends upon it, especially if they're to compete with all the other media industries that vie for kids' attention. 


(2) What books did you read as a child and what do you feel created their appeal for you?

This is a toughy! I remember a few books vividly, but I wasn't a huge reader. I spent way more time playing football, drawing, building LEGO models and coding on my Spectrum 48k. But I do remember devouring The Witches whilst on holiday once. I read lots of comics weekly, like Whizzer and Chips. My love of stories really kicked off in my teens - partly on the back of wanting to write stories like I saw in animated films (Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky was immensely important to me, having chanced upon it on ITV one Sunday afternoon when I was about 13/14.) As with many kids of my generation, I read a lot of books like 1984 and James Herbert's Rats when at secondary school. YA didn't exist, but those fantasy/dystopian/horror classics worked fine. 

(3) Can you tell us how you came to create 'Hotel Flamingo'?

I saw my youngest daughter playing with a crowd of her cuddly toys, putting them to bed, teaching them, feeding them, and I thought it would be lovely to somehow get that into book form. A story about a child playing the adult, I guess, caring for others. Animals were an obvious choice for characters, but I didn't like the notion of it being a zoo - I don't think humans have any ownership over nature - and a hotel popped into my head. 

This world of animals became a place where Anna, the main character, could meet everyday human challenges head on in a gentle setting. All the problems of social cohesion, community and fairness are there for her to deal with in Hotel Flamingo. (Not to mention all the fun, very animal-centric problems, too, such as a rock band of nocturnal animals that have to practise at night!)

(4) There is a delightful sense of imaginative play in the models, animation and songs you create, does this help create a connection with young readers and what kind of responses does this get?

Yes, it really helps! I often find that children think the songs are the best bits of my events. I even had one lad ask for an encore! I blushed! But seriously, I love making things, from models to songs, and it's such a privilege to be able to bring that into schools and show what I do. It definitely helps with some children, making my books less like work, and more like fun. Which I obviously know reading is, but you know how literacy is these days!

(5) There is a warmth and wit that belies the stories, is the role of humour in children's books underrated?

Absolutely. I could go on for hours about this, but when a class full of children are laughing, you know immediately that they will remember your visit as a positive experience. That works with laughing when reading in your head, too. Humour linked to words is one of the most powerful tools we have for building and keeping young readers. 

(6) What animal would you most like to see visiting the hotel and why?

Beavers! I have been reading a book called Eager, by Ben Goldfarb, and I'm now a Beaver Believer, as they're known. I wish I'd written a story about a visiting beaver damming up the swimming pool... MAYBE I WILL?!

(7) Can you tell us anything about what you are working upon next?

I'm working on the illustrations for Hotel Flamingo 4 right now. Once those are complete, I have a lot of thinking to do... So many ideas, so little time. But there may be some adventures in the wilderness involved.