GREAT AUSTRALIAN PICTURE BOOKS TO USE IN THE YEAR 4-7 CLASSROOM
Presented by FCLC Director, Lesley Reece
and Illustrator James Foley

See picture books come alive before your eyes as you work with the original illustrations and discover the stories behind the books. Explore exciting and invigorating ways to use quality Australian books. You’ll find the day inspirational and gain unique insights from the presenters.

Friday 18 November 2011
9.00am – 2.30pm
Suitable: Year 4 – 7 Teachers, Teacher-Librarians and Pre-Service Education Students

Session 1
Presenter: Lesley Reece
Flood by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley
Water Witcher by Jan Ormerod

Session 2
Guest Presenter: James Foley, Illustrator
James will demonstrate and then guide you through creating a comic strip story. These strategies are guaranteed to enhance your students’ narrative and visual skills. Comprehensive handouts included.

Session 3
Presenter: Lesley Reece
The Great Bear by Libby Gleeson and Armin Greder
plus a selection of FCLC staff’s favourite for this age group.

Cost: $140 (inc GST)
Morning tea and light lunch included
Booking is essential.
To register, please phone 9430 6869

If you’re a teacher, bring your class to see copies of preparatory sketches, character designs, clay models, final pencil work and colour prints. Call the Centre on 9430 6869 to see if you can book a time.

If you’re a member of the public and would like to see the artwork, then the Term 1 2012 Open Day is your best bet. A date has not yet been confirmed, but when we know, we’ll post it on the blog.

The Lit Centre ladies have done an amazing job putting the exhibition together- Norm and I were ecstatic to see it, me especially. It was surreal to see my work on the walls of the Centre, where previously I’ve been able to see the work of my picture book heroes.

The Lit Centre is selling copies of The Last Viking and many other amazing books in their well-stocked bookshop. They’re also selling limited edition signed prints of Last Viking artwork, and prints from other great Aussie artists (including my favourite, Shaun Tan).

James and Norm at FCLC Open Day, Term 4 2011

Speaking of which, Norman and I will be visiting Geraldton later week for the Big Sky Festival!

The festival is organised by the hard-working staff at Geraldton Regional Library, and runs from Friday Sept 9 – Sunday Sept 11.

Norm and I are running a few sessions together over the weekend:

• Friday, 9.30 – 10.30am, Geraldton Library (youth session, talking about The Last Viking)
• Friday, 1.30 – 2.30pm, Our Lady of Mt Carmel in Mullewa (youth session , talking about The Last Viking)
• Saturday, 10.15 – 11.15am, Geraldton Universities Centre (talking about the collaborative process behind picture books)

Then on Sunday Norm and I will run two separate sessions at the same time.

• Norm‘s session is called “Appealing to a Young Audience“…
• and I’m running a workshop called “Comic Books: making words and pictures work“.
• They’re both from 11am – 12noon at Geraldton Universities Centre.

You can find the full program here.

This biennial festival celebrates children’s literature and book illustration, and is held at the Mundairing Arts Centre in the Perth hills. This year HeARTlines is dedicated to the memory of the festival’s founder, WA author Louise Schofield. Louise was an incredible woman and it’s an honour to be a part of her festival this year.

I’ll have original artwork from The Last Viking on display in the exhibition, and prints for sale too… the exhibition opens tonight (Friday 2nd September) and closes Sunday 9th October.

I’ll also be running a school holiday cartooning workshop during the festival – here’s the details:

• Friday 7th October
• 10am-12noon
• Ages 9-13
• Cost: $15 ($10 for members of the Mundairing Arts Centre
  or Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre).
• Call (08) 9295 3991 to book your place.

Hope to see you there

The text and pictures would have to achieve a number of things- introduce Nan and Pop, introduce the setting, and show Josh’s close relationship with his Mum and Dad. The text and pictures couldn’t show Josh’s parents leaving in a way that implied they were dumping him so they could go away for the weekend together… it had to be sensitive.

The first and second goes didn’t achieve these things :p

First go

second go

You can’t see Mum and Dad in either of these early versions, which is a problem… they are just a car driving off into the distance. You can’t see how they feel about leaving Josh behind, but you can see Josh’s reaction- so the overall feeling is one of abandonment, which wasn’t what Norman and I were trying to get at. I did try having Mum or Dad’s hand waving from the car window, but that made it worse- it seemed as if they were dismissing Josh.

Norm’s early text here reads,

As Mum and Dad drive away from Nan and Pop’s, Josh looks about warily. Very warily. The river is very close, too close for safety, and the shadows beneath the trees that line the bank look like perfect hiding places for monsters; especially Bunyips.

A different version of this text ended up appearing on the page preceding this scene, set in the car when just arriving at Nan and Pop’s house.

The house doesn’t feature so much in these early versions of the scene, but in the next version it became more prominent- almost another character.

third go

The text has changed in this version- it’s the same as in the final book. This time we see the family reunion, and a goodbye hug between Josh and his parents; we also get a good look at Pop’s house, the design of which hints at his interest in Vikings.

The third version was getting closer to achieving what it needed to- but the pictures were a little disjointed. We needed a way to pull them all together into a more coherent spread.

The fourth version got a bit closer, combining the two pictures on the left page into one image.

fourth go

The colour tests were added digitally in photoshop, using quick strokes  of base colour, then rough shading and highlights to get an idea of the lighting.

Our editor Cate suggested that the page on the right looked a little flat- she liked the house, but thought another perspective might work better. This was around the same time we were mucking around with the bullying scene and it’s continuous background; we thought something similar might work well here.

I did the following roughs for the fifth version of the scene.

fifth go, thumbnail sketches

Here’s a closer look at the bottom right-hand sketch:

fifth go, thumbnail sketch, detail

Here I’ve nutted out three panels with a continuous background. The left panel introduces the house and Nan and Pop; it also shows the relationships in the family. The middle panel has the goodbye hug between Josh and his parents. The exaggerated one-point perspective leads the reader’s eye through the panels from left to right, all the way down to Mum and Dad’s car as it leaves in the far right-hand panel.

Here’s a bigger sketch of the left-hand panel.

fifth go, print-size sketch

After completing print-size sketches, I could trace over them and do the final pencil outlines. I used A3 printer paper and 2B pencils.

final pencils

Then it was on to the colouring stage.

colour, first go

My first go didn’t work out; the digital file became corrupted somehow. The colours of the house didn’t seem to be working with the colours of the characters anyway, so I started again.

colour, second go, part-way through

In this second go, I tried to get the colours of the house to complement the colours of Pop, because the Viking elements of the house design most strongly associate with him. I pulled some colours from Pop’s clothes and hair and left some swatches in the gutter (in the centre of the image) so I could refer to them when colouring the house.

When it was all done it looked like this:

final colours

I was pretty happy with this- I would have liked to spend a little extra time putting more shading into the characters, but I was running out of time by this stage, and things can never be ‘perfect’.

For eagle-eyed readers, the licence plate of Mum and Dad’s car reads DLF-1812, my brother’s initials.

On July 16 and 17 I was in Balingup for the Children’s Literature Festival, with talented WA creators Meg McKinlay, Deb Fitzpatrick, David Caddy and Elaine Forrestal…

…the next weekend saw Norman and I visiting Albany’s Singing Tree bookshop to teach children how to roar like Thor…

…and the weekend after that I was in sunny Kununurra for the Kimberley Writers’ Festival, with fellow Fremantle Press authors Alan Carter and AJ Betts.

Thanks to all those teams that put the events together- Helen and the ladies in Balingup (who aren’t booksellers or librarians, just committed and passionate members of the community- amazing people)… Dianne Wolfer, Andreas and co in Albany (thanks for your generosity and hospitality, and the mulled wine)… and the marvelous Jo and her team of maniacally energetic librarians and volunteers up north (who work 11 months of the year to put the Kimberley Writers’ Festival together- on top of their normal duties. Amazing amazing amazing).

Here’s a few pics from the travels…

The Balingup town hall, main site of the children's literature festival- 8.30am, before the mist has risen

A soldier guarding Balingup town hall- stirling chap

Me with the paddle-pop lion

AJ Betts and myself replacing a flat tyre at El Questro, East Kimberley

The end of the Gibb River Rd and the turnoff to Kununurra- where we had our third flat tyre of the day (pic: AJ Betts)

In this first daft you can see I was ready to head off on several tangents that appealed to my sense of adventure. It was pointed out to me later on when the plot was coming together, by Cate Sutherland, Fremantle Press’s children’s publisher , that the tangents tended to detract from the core of the story. That is the reason that Knut setting off in his head to discover America and trade with the Indians came to a sticky end.  Ironic really, as that is precisely what happened to many of the Vikings that first set foot on Newfoundland. The Native Americans didn’t like them one little bit and fired a multitude arrows in their general direction.

The same thing happened to the scene when Knut and his imaginary band of hooligans decide to attack and burn the monasteries of Northern England. We cut it short and let the reader imagine the consequences of a full-on Viking raid on a monastery full of placid, defenceless monks. Showing monks murdered or being led away to the slave markets and their houses set on fire probably wasn’t all that advisable if we wanted Knut to remain a sympathetic character. Our audience might be a bit young for anti-heroes.

Another long scene that bit the dust was where Josh declares he is going become a follower of the Norse Gods.  I originally had him announce to his Nan, ‘I’m off to become a Pagan.’ Nan looks over her glasses and says sternly, ‘Over my dead body,’ and drags him by his ear down the street to the Sunday School to meet the Vicar, who we based on Dawn French, the Vicar of Dibley.  There were two problems with this. Firstly, we didn’t want to set up a competition between the Pagans and the Christians in a book for children and where a lot of the customers are likely to be Christian libraries. That battle was fought 900 years ago and the Christians won, with Scandinavia converting to Christianity around 1100AD. The second reason is that hardly any kids go to Sunday School anymore. We could just image modern readers asking, ‘Sunday what?’

I often say it is so much easier writing novels where the only constraint on the length and number of words is the boredom threshold of the editor. If you can keep her interest up to when the hero is hanging from his finger nails from a two hundred metre  high ledge,  then you can continue, but the minute the story starts to lag is the time to cut it short.   Like about now.

Having announced that to James, and, unfortunately,  a lot of witnesses sitting close by,  I then panicked and thought I had  better actually produce something for him to illustrate. Hence the late night and the hurried scribble. Had there not  been witnesses I could have told him next morning he imagined it and was having nightmares.

Should you be able to read my writing, you can see lots of elements of the story that ended up in the final draft, although not in any order, because  at this stage the ideas for what Knut  looked like,  what happens to him, what  he  does, and the consequences, as well as a real plot, were still swirling around in my head like a Longship caught in a whirlpool at the edge of the known world, where there be dragons.  Had I known how much work the next two years would entail for me, but especially for James, I might have let the Longship be hurled  off the edge of the world, along with my images of a small boy carrying on like a barbarian in his grandparents’ back garden.

Then you see a sight like this, with all the piles of brand new, shiny books lined up like precious gems and holy books plundered from  the castles and monasteries of  Northumbria,  and they have your name on the cover! And you think, idiot, what ever could you have been thinking?  It was worth every rewritten page, every substituted word, every ditched idea,  every mild disagreement over words OR picture, because you can’t have both,  and every sketch worked, reworked and reworked ten times over.

As you can see in the draft about halfway down, Knut’s shield was to be a Volvo hubcap. That  had to be changed when we made the Gods accidentally drop a shield to Earth from their celestial Longship, so we could hint that the action might actually be happening  in real life and not just in Knut’s head.  I’m still wondering, however, would Volvo Ltd have come after us with a Thing full of  lawyers and a string of copyright  lawsuits for using their logo?

(L-R) Norman, James, Kris Williams, our editor Cate Sutherland, and Director of the Children's Literature Centre Lesley Reece

It was a dark and stormy night…

Actually, it was. Norm and I had been watching the weather forecast all week, wondering what the heavens would bring on the Friday night of our launch. By Tyr’s Day, we could see that rain was likely. By Wodin’s Day, rain was certain. Come Freyja’s Day, when the wind didn’t let up all day, we knew a storm was brewing. Thor was angry. The joke going around was that his invite had been lost on it’s way to Asgard. But maybe that was true, and he thought we were snubbing him… and when you snub a Norse god, you get a once-in-10-years weather event. Thirty millimetres of rain fell in 30 minutes- the precise 30 minutes in which our guests were en route to the launch.

Thus, three hundred drenched but daring Vikings descended upon the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre to celebrate the release of The Last Viking. Kris Williams, literary Valkyrie and descendant of Danish brewers, did us the great honour of launching the book. Norman and I were blown away by the turnout- it was wonderful to see so many of our friends, family and colleagues squished into that room, ready to party with us. It was exactly how I imagine Valhalla would be.

While Norm and I signed copies of books, Normans and Saxons murdered each other on the lawn. All in a night’s fun for the Grey Company Medieval Reenactment Group.

Special Thanks to Cate, Cathy, Claire, Clive and everyone at Fremantle Press; Lesley and all the lovely ladies at the Lit Centre; the gallant warriors from the Grey Company; and everyone who has supported Norm and I as we’ve put the book together.

There’s more photos from the night on the Fremantle Press facebook page. Check it out, and like the Press while you’re at it. They’re always bringing out great Western Australian books from Western Australian creators. Support your local!

So now the book is out- you can buy it from all good bookshops, or from the Fremantle Press website.