Frances McKay Illustration

The Folio Society Book Illustration Competition 2016

I'm delighted to have won The Folio Society Book Illustration Competition and a commission to illustrate War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. The result was announced by Michael at The House of Illustration in London on Thursday 25 February, and a very good evening it was too.

With The Folio Society’s reputation for excellence and some beautiful entries from the other illustrators, I was chuffed even to have made the longlist. Here’s a link to the list as featured in The Guardian.

The Folio Society makes lovely, covetable books. Quality of binding and paper and reproduction are, rightly, important to authors and illustrators, as well as to readers of course. But I went into the competition because of the choice of book. War Horse is a great story and its themes obviously still resonate.

The central relationship of Albert and his horse, Joey is key, as are the expectations of the time and the industrialisation of  war that took men and horses for fodder. For me it’s not the horses that are difficult to get right (though I could always do it better), it’s the apparatus and devastation of war that is hard to fathom. Barbed wire, for example, has a particular way of contorting; a calculated menace.  Together, these elements create a tension for both the narrative and the pictures.

It’s a terrific commission; it’s one of those jobs where I think, ’this is what I’ve always wanted to do’... actually, there are one or two more Michael Morpurgo stories that I'd love to illustrate. 

 

Alan Marks

Red Hair and Black Leather

This is a first for me; I’ve recently completed a sleeve and a label design for a vinyl record. Vinyl! For a child of the sixties and seventies that’s quite a big deal.

The O’Keefe Music Foundation is a non-profit organization in the USA that gives children the opportunity to record their musical performances for free with professional equipment and engineers.

The sleeve is for covers of Richard Thompson’s ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ and ‘The Worst’ by The Rolling Stones. It’s a very grown-up children’s venture and, as the vocalists are female, the lyrics have been given a feminist slant. In the wrong hands, though, these recordings and the accompanying videos could be a disaster; there are so many possible pitfalls – think ‘The X Factor meets Playschool’ perhaps. But Aaron O’Keefe, who runs the organization, must be a brilliant teacher and enabler because these kids are seriously good. There’s no fuss; it’s for and about the music and I think the foundation gets help from a music industry that recognizes this.

Not surprisingly, the O’Keefe Music Foundation recordings are getting a lot of attention on YouTube: Check out the Vincent Black Lightning video here: Vincent Black Lightning and lots of  other videos here: O'Keefe Music Foundation

 

Alan Marks

 

 

Animals ABC

A is for anthropomorphism

That is attributing human characteristics to things that are not human; and it happens a lot to animals in children’s stories. And why not? Some of the best characters in children's literature are animals with all the complexities and foibles of humans. The white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland is a classic example. Lewis Carroll takes the nervous nature of the rabbit and gives it human reasoning; ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ And he adds the natty clothes and the pocket watch to imply fastidiousness. Beatrix Potter also mastered this and had a great understanding of animal anatomy too. Think also of The Wind in the Willows and of the animal characters that Pinocchio encounters; the fox and the cat; the talking cricket who Walt Disney turned into Jiminy Cricket... and perhaps of the puppet itself; a toy given human feelings.

B is for biophilia

Biophilia is the idea that there is a bond between humans and nature; that we have an innate love of animals. Not all people love all animals and we could probably do without mosquitoes, but the bond is real. We might live more removed from nature now but people and pets work together and we are drawn to David Attenborough’s brilliant TV documentaries and other wildlife programmes.   

C is for conservation 

This matters; loss of biodiversity; loss of habitat; loss of the iconic, the unconsidered and the yet to be discovered species will affect us all. It seems that we value only what we understand, so books might still have a role in widening our understanding of the world around us. Biophilia and bibliophilia ought to play an important part in conservation.

Oh, and C is also for cute.

 

Alan Marks 

More Biro

Unlike Ellie I favour a Bic fine point and for many years this was my preferred medium. When I was a child one of the best things you could get to draw on was a shirt card, (the stiff packaging that used to be in new shirts), but it was too shiny to take pencil satisfactorily, so biros, readily available but frowned upon for writing, were the perfect answer. The medium is not as unsympathetic as it might first seem. With changes in pressure, crosshatching and the like it is possible to achieve a terrific range of tones including a very rich black.

 
At college I was a bit shy of using colour, so I carried on using biro, together with water-soluble fibre tip pens, on heavy watercolour paper. And these were large pieces, imperial or A1, so I spent a long time honing the technique. From college I began working for magazines. The biro work really suited the dark editorial subjects that I tended to be given. At this time, still working on watercolour paper, I didn’t do roughs so would often make holes in the paper by repeated erasure and redrawing; a technique that went out of the window with the introduction of laser scanners, which didn’t know what to make of holes.

I was, strangely perhaps, given my first children’s book through a designer who saw one of my large college pieces in an exhibition. Storm, was, as Shirley Hughes put it, my “first essay into colour, at this point elegantly restrained”.  I had to scale things down a bit from the college work but, essentially I worked in the same way. The very restrained colour came by way of a drop of watercolour wash and the (I thought brave) addition of red and green biros in the cross-hatching.

I now work in variety of mediums, whatever suits, and I really enjoy colour. There are though still times when a bit of biro is just the job.

Alan Marks

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Biro

 
To follow in the vein of Temujin's and Allen's previous blogs, here's one of my roughs. This one is about four years old and whilst my method has changed the result is the same.

My roughs are always drawn in biro, a hang up from when roughs had to be faxed to a client and pencil wouldn't show up. I'd draw lots of elements separately, enlarge or reduce them on a photocopier, cut them out, move them round the page, tape them down, clean up with correction fluid and draw over the top until the page couldn't take any more. Then I'd photocopy the page and continue or fax it off.

Now I can do most if this in Photoshop but occasionally I still jigsaw it around by hand for the fun of it before scanning it, cleaning it up and emailing it off. Which inevitably leaves me scrubbing the correction fluid off my arm and pealing off one of the disregarded, taped, elements of the drawing stuck to the sole of my shoe.

As for the biro, the black Bic Cristal Medium Biro is the only one I use. The others have no talent at all! 

The Bic's Amazon reviews are a chuckle.

Cheery biro,

Elena Gomez

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To enlarge the illustration click on the image.