Riassunto libro Children's Picturebooks, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura

Scarica Riassunto libro Children's Picturebooks e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura solo su Docsity! CHAPTER 1 We look at aspects of making and reading picture books from the perspectives of those who make, publish and read them. Highlights • Pictorial storytelling paintings on cave can be traced on walls and enjoyed by people of all ages. • For the more minutely you describe, the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the described thing. • Block printing had certainly been around for a while, but in Europe it was the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1430s that opened the way for viable mass publishing. • Much has been made of the levels of cruelty and violence in Hoffmann’s cautionary tales of the ghastly consequences of misbehaviour, but they have stood the test of time in every sense, having been reinterpreted through many and varying media. • Through his work for Country Life, an imprint owned by George Newnes, he was experienced in collaborating with artists to prepare illustrations for reproduction. • We look at aspects of making and reading picturebooks from the perspectives of those who make, publish and read them. Summary Pictorial storytelling paintings on cave can be traced on walls and enjoyed by people of all ages. Some examples in France and Spain may be 30,000 to 60,000 years old. We can only speculate as to the purpose or meaning of this art, but the images would have been one of the most important means of communication at the time. The tombs of ancient Egypt and the walls of Pompeii provide evidence of our long- standing need to describe and narrate visually. The oldest surviving ‘illustrated book’ is said to be an Egyptian papyrus roll from around 1980 B C. The pure chance of its survival, buried in sand, suggests that such perishable artefacts had been around for longer. Who better to introduce us to the historical background to the modern picturebook? The printing of books from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century The invention of printing in the fifteenth century meant that education in the West began to become available to more than just the wealthy few who had access to hand- produced literature. Blake produced Songs of Innocence in 1789, printing and publishing the book himself. His idiosyncratic, visionary visual style was totally original, owing little to anything happening in the visual arts at that time. Thomas Bewick’s emergence in the late eighteenth century must be mentioned in relation to the general development of book illustration because of his achievement in elevating the art of wood engraving to a completely new level. His technical skills – engraving in fine line on the end grain of dense woods such as box – combined with an intense interest in the natural world produced results that took the process far beyond a merely reprographic role. To accompany his nonsense limericks, he created playfully anarchic line drawings that perfectly echo his words. Colour printing in the nineteenth century Until the 1830s, colour was usually added by hand until a process for printing colour from woodblocks was invented, independently of each other, by George Baxter and Charles Knight. Baxter patented his ‘Baxter process’, which combined an intaglio keyplate with multiple woodblocks, in 1835. Much has been made of the levels of cruelty and violence in Hoffmann’s cautionary tales of the ghastly consequences of misbehaviour, but they have stood the test of time in every sense, having been reinterpreted through many and varying media. CHAPTER 2 As Maurizio Corraini writes in the catalogue of the tenth anniversary exhibition: Handled works!!! An explosive possibility which means they can be touched and owned, a chance to come into direct contact with art With the growing interest in the picturebook form, some people ask: ‘Is it art?’ Equally, as a with graphic more stylistic freedom and a greater range of subject matter creeping into the genre, others enquire: ‘Is it suitable for children?’ The answers to these questions vary greatly across different cultures, but it is possible to argue that the picturebook has begun to fill a vacuum in narrative, representational graphic art. Highlights • With the growing interest in the picturebook form, some people ask: ‘Is it art?’ as a with graphic more stylistic freedom and a greater range of subject matter creeping into the genre, others enquire: ‘Is it suitable for children?’ The answers to these questions vary greatly across different cultures, but it is possible to argue that the picturebook has begun to fill a vacuum in narrative, representational graphic art. • As Maurizio Corraini writes in the catalogue of the tenth anniversary exhibition: Handled works!!! An explosive possibility which means they can be touched and owned, a chance to come into direct contact with art. • The question remains: How does the picturebook artist emerge? Can the art of the picturebook be taught? artists are far too unpredictable to allow for easy answers to these questions, but there are many skills – conceptual, creative, and technical – that can be acquired with the right sort of help. • The sight of tourists walking through a historic city experiencing it through their iPads as they film, thereby experiencing a world already translated from three into two dimensions, is an ever more common one that suggests a likely decline in true visual literacy. • Sydney Smith is one of an exciting new generation of picturebook specialists to emerge from Canada in recent years. His growing reputation was confirmed by the award of the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 2018 for his stunningly atmospheric artwork for Town Is by the Sea. • Since the project began with observational drawings, it was natural to rely on observation to develop my idea. Summary With the growing interest in the picturebook form, some people ask: ‘Is it art?’ as a with graphic more stylistic freedom and a greater range of subject matter creeping into the genre, others enquire: ‘Is it suitable for children?’ The answers to these questions vary greatly across different cultures, but it is possible to argue that the picturebook has begun to fill a vacuum in narrative, representational graphic art. The suitability issue is discussed, but the fact that picturebooks are published primarily for consumption by children should not be a factor in assessing their artistic merit, and neither should the context of mass production. This chapter explores the unique art of the picturebook, from the perspectives of both its making and its meaning and looks at the work of a number of individual artists from a range of cultural backgrounds, who describe their experiences and working methods. It may be useful to consider the idea of the picturebook as a work of art and take a brief look at the kind of educational background from which the practitioner of this so-called hybrid art may emerge. Picturebooks as works of art. The very best picturebooks become timeless mini art galleries for the home – a coming together of concept, artwork, design, and production that gives pleasure to, and stimulates the imagination of, both children and adults. An explosive possibility which means they can be touched and owned, a chance to come into direct contact with art. This is a way to begin good habits, especially among children, which leads them to consider art as something that directly affects them and not, as often happens, a distant world that they can visit only occasionally.[1]. Where a unique personal artistic vision combines successfully with an ability to make contact with minds and hearts from the world of childhood, magic can follow. This mysterious ‘remote landscape’ of childhood is one that, in the words of Ilaria Tontardini, ‘... we adults perceive as belonging to some distant part of ourselves’.2. Education and training As discussed in the previous chapter, the artistic giants of the genre have established themselves in the consciousness of many generations of children and adults. Edward Ardizzone was one of the most popular and influential British illustrators of the twentieth century. His formal art education was limited to evening classes in life drawing. In Edward Bawden’s time as a student at Cambridge School of Art in the 1920s there would have been little in the way of a curriculum, let alone multiple assessment criteria and learning outcomes. His days were spent drawing from classical casts and meticulously rendering letterforms – thinking through drawing. The relatively recent absorption of these schools into universities has resulted in an as yet unresolved culture clash, where the world of learning through making, of thinking through drawing, crashes headlong into the world of lecture-based learning, predefined learning outcomes and quantifiable knowledge. It is more than sixty years since the American artist and illustrator Ben Shahn foretold and examined these clashes in his treatise The Shape of Content (Harvard University Press, 1957). This book hopes to bring these worlds a little closer. In Daqui Ninguem Passa (Planeta Tangerina, 2014), Isabel Minhós Martins and Bernardo Carvalho use the central gutter of the book’s binding to represent the line that must not be crossed in this clever satire on authority and rule breaking. Visual communication The term ‘visual communication’ is commonly used to describe the general subject area of graphic design and illustration. We like to put things in boxes in this way, but the boundaries between areas of the arts are inevitably blurred, and Arisman rightly points out that, by Smith’s definitions, many illustrators are fine artists, and many fine artists are illustrators. The increasing incidence of postmodern and self-referential picturebooks means that young readers often enter worlds where the book’s content makes it clear to us that it ‘knows it is a book’, as in the work of Suzy Lee, for example. In these instances, characters can frequently be seen to be playfully interacting with the book’s physical form. The rest of this chapter examines the picturebook-maker’s art through conversations with a number of artists and student artists, touching on issues of visual research, sequential planning, editorial input and the cultural differences and expectations that can impact on the success and/or ‘publish ability’ of a picturebook. Jon Klassen Without question one of the most innovative and influential picturebook-makers to arrive on the children’s publishing scene in recent years, Jon Klassen has taken the art form to new levels with his highly individual, carefully honed approach to visual storytelling. He was the first person to win both the Caldecott Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal for the same book – his 2012 This Is Not My Hat, the follow-up to I Want My Hat Back, published the previous year. Spending time with the younger audience who reads these books, I’m more and more interested in working with tools and shapes that they recognize and feel like they could draw with too. Sydney Smith Town Is by the Sea Sydney Smith is one of an exciting new generation of picturebook specialists to emerge from Canada in recent years. His growing reputation was confirmed by the award of the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 2018 for his stunningly atmospheric artwork for Town Is by the Sea. Smith studied at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax. The interior scenes, too, are haunting in their subtle portrayal of gentle, warming squares of light falling on cool grey wooden floorboards. All of this is contrasted with and punctuated by spreads of great masses of dark coal seams as we see the boy’s father at work deep below the seabed. Smith’s work in picturebooks has been entirely in the form of collaboration with authors. He feels ready to go it alone: Over the years of illustrating the words of others, I have decided to write my own books. Sketchbook studies on location at the book’s setting, the town of Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, Canada, formed a key underpinning process in creating a truly convincing sense of place. Professional case study: The innocent eye Beatrice Alemagna Beatrice Alemagna is one of the most admired artists in children’s picturebooks today. From Bologna in Italy, Alemagna is based in Paris. She is perhaps an example of the kind of artist whose language is untaught or unteachable in the sense that it seems to come so directly from the heart, in the form of a visual poetry apparently untainted by conscious technique or facility. Alemagna tells us about how the idea evolved, her personal influences, the challenges in making this book and, her thoughts on breaking into the English-language market: Discovering the magic that can be found in our everyday natural environment, away from the ubiquitous screen, forms the theme of On a Magical Do-Nothing Day. The idea had been with me for some time since watching my nephew, through the summer of his twelfth year, do nothing more than stay on a sofa in front of his electronic game. The shapes, patterns and rhythms of everyday items and objects are as carefully described as the characters who move amongst them. Student case study: Two wordless books Publishers can be nervous about wordless or ‘silent’ books, but the art of visual storytelling is, by definition, at its purest in this form. Ya-Ling Huang is from Taiwan; Ye-seul Cho from South Korea. Both studied for master’s degrees in England. In both of these book projects, themes related to loneliness and isolation are articulated through ‘silent’ visual sequences. Ya-Ling Huang’s silent narrative includes panoramic scene-setting such as this double- page spread image, as well as the multiple-image sequences shown over the page. At the early stage of storyboarding, I used equal sized boxes, like those you read in Tintin or Snoopy, to tell a narrative story. I later enlarged this scene to a whole spread, and it gave a better result, with a more powerful impact. This approach indicates to the reader where there is a key moment. Were there any particular problems or challenges that presented themselves? The main problem I had at that time was probably the composition in storyboarding, as mentioned above. CHAPTER 3 Two boys are sharing Anthony Browne’s Zoo, roaring with laughter, fingers pointing at favourite illustrations, trying to compete with each other in finding more hilariously funny examples of humans metamorphosing into animals. Study subjects 100 children The converse was also shown to be true, in that some older children made interpretations that were more inadequate than would be expected for their age group. Arizpe and Styles based on their research, on the detailed reactions of 100 children to the picturebooks Zoo (Julia McRae, 1992) and The Tunnel (Julia McRae, 1989) by Anthony Browne, and Lily Takes a Walk (Corgi, 1987) by Satoshi Kitamura; they discovered how discerning even a very young and a bilingual readership can be. There was illuminating evidence of children drawing in response to the picturebooks: what they couldn’t express in words they could often show in their visual work. Summary The picture book, which appears to be the cosiest and most gentle of genres, produces the greatest social and aesthetic tensions in the whole field of children’s literature.[1]. One little girl is gazing sadly at the final spread of John Burningham’s Granpa, which suggests, but does not say, that the grandfather has died. Another is deeply absorbed in Jan Pienkowski’s Haunted House, carefully opening every flap of every pop-up. She is ‘reading’ the book on her own after we have already looked at it together three times in a row. The intensity of her gaze and the seriousness of her scrutiny teaches me that some children need several ‘lookings’ to get a proper sense of a picturebook. It’s the misery conveyed by the orangutan’s body language in its comfortless cage that provokes reactions of sadness and anger. The challenges offered by picturebooks The nature of picturebooks was discussed earlier in this volume, but it is useful to consider the definition by the American academic Barbara Bader, which is the one most favoured by scholars of children’s literature. As Bader points out, picturebooks are simultaneously art objects and the primary literature of early childhood, offering compelling drama for readers through the interaction of the visual and verbal narratives. Gives some insight into the challenges offered by picturebooks today – and, incidentally, the respect the authors have for their young audience by assuming they will work hard to tease out meaning and find the book rewarding. Such picturebooks require advanced skills on the part of the young reader, who has to negotiate meaning, reading between the lines and the pictures. Margaret Mackey, a leading expert in this field, points out that young children’s encounters with digital picturebooks, for example, feature ‘live action’, often last longer, are more interactive and provide more autonomy than paper editions. She draws attention to the advantages of the ‘stillness’ and reliability of picturebooks, which don’t change with each viewing. Those of us who are devoted to the rich affordances of paper picturebooks can take heart in their excellent sales of late, despite the technological revolution going on alongside. Visual texts and educational development Before discussing children’s interpretations of picturebooks, it is necessary to consider briefly how the way children develop is linked to visual literacy. Her work showed that when children draw and talk about picturebooks, they often reveal their cognitive, aesthetic, and emotional awareness, which in turn contributes to understanding the development of visual literacy. Some of her findings are included in a chapter by Kate Noble and Morag Styles in Talking Beyond the Page (Routledge, 2009), edited by Janet Evans. In Literacies Across Media (Routledge, 2002), Margaret Mackey highlights the two- way interaction between the human body and the text in the act of reading. She describes it as a physical as well as a cognitive activity – a playful process of negotiation, imagination, orchestration, interpretation, and experimentation, using visual strategies of noticing, searching, exploring, hypothesizing, comparing, labelling, and strategizing. It is anything but passive! She explores these ideas in Art, Narrative and Childhood (Trentham, 2003) in a chapter on children’s responses to David Macaulay’s Shortcut (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), which one ten-year-old tellingly describes as ‘the most thinking book’. How children respond to picturebooks You can learn on a stained-glass window and when it comes to a book, you’re ready and you can look at the pictures and know what’s happening. Tamsin was one of the children who took part in Arizpe and Styles’ research project. She already knew that you take images as seriously as words in picturebooks, and that you have to learn how to read them insightfully. This is something she picked up by looking at the pictures in stained-glass windows when she went to church as a little girl. In the research that led to Children Reading Pictures, in addition to answering questions the children were given the opportunity to look at the same book several times and discuss it with those of the same age group. The children found the tactile nature of the text, with its beautiful, raised images in an almost completely black setting, engaging and exciting. They were physically interacting with the book’s materiality, touching the illustrations with a wide variety of movements, thereby giving them an embodied experience of this picturebook. Jack is metacognitively analyzing what enabled him to identify the image; a combination of the overall feel of the image and clues from the written text. This is interesting, as, when learning to read, children commonly use clues from the pictures to support their understanding of the text, but here the process is reversed. You’re luckier if you can see because you can’t do a lot of things...you’d find it, life, much harder if you couldn’t see. Looking and learning Children today grow up in a highly visual world, and quickly overtake their parents in their ability to master new multimodal technologies. In most cases, they encounter moving images as early as, if not earlier than, books and learn how to interpret visual codes. D: It’s funny because we are reading it and he’s reading it there except in this book, Herb is in it and when he is reading it, he is not in it. This beautiful, most original picturebook offered sighted children the opportunity to empathise with those who cannot see the world in the same way but can still share the same experiences. As Perry Nodelman put it in Words about Pictures (University of Georgia Press, 1990), good picturebooks ‘offer us what all good art offers us: greater consciousness – the opportunity... to be more human.’ CHAPTER 4 Many aspects of picturebooks and visual literacy are analyzed from a wide range of perspectives. In most contexts, illustration to words, a prompt or aid to provides the image a visual accompaniment that aims to not augment the overall experience of a book. But in the case of picturebooks, words and pictures combine to deliver the overall meaning of the book; neither of them necessarily makes much sense on their own but they work in unison. The most satisfying picturebooks create a dynamic relationship between words and pictures. Often this duality can be in the form of a playful dance, where images and words can appear to flirt with and contradict each other. Increasingly, the boundaries between word and image are being challenged, as the words themselves become pictorial elements. The potential for the creative exploration of this relationship is being recognized and exploited by today’s picturebook-makers in increasingly sophisticated ways. Highlights • In most contexts, illustration to words, a prompt or aid to provides the image a visual accompaniment that aims to not augment the overall experience of a book. • Many aspects of picturebooks and visual literacy are analyzed from a wide range of perspectives. • How Texts Teach What Readers Learn was by the distinguished educator and scholar Margaret Meek, whose work had a huge impact on teachers and scholars alike • The secret lies in what the words don’t say: the fox is never mentioned in the written text, which comprises a single sentence about Rosie, a confident little hen, taking a walk ‘across the yard’, ‘around the pond’, etc., coming safely home. • Winston produces a very large landscape-format handmade book that opens out to at least a metre wide (‘Ideal for annoying fellow air travellers,’ he quips). Orphan, he explains, is a kind of archaeological dig of a story, made of its own history: clouds of handwritten texts spreading across the wide spaces of the pages; each letter ‘i’ that was used in the original writing gathered up and formed into an image. • This is an area that often offers more opportunity to incorporate her own decorative hand-lettering into the titling. This decorative appeal of Castrillón’s work encourages publishers to go that bit further in production quality, choosing high- quality papers and often opting for Pantone colours in order to get as close as possible to the effect of screen print. As she explains from her meticulously tidy home studio, this is where her visual language really began to assert itself: On my Master’s course, I spent a lot of time in the print workshops and found that, through the methodical process of building layers in screen print, I learned a great deal about structure and pattern, and it really opened my eyes to colour too. Summary In most contexts, illustration to words, a prompt or aid to provides the image a visual accompaniment that aims to not augment the overall experience of a book. The most satisfying picturebooks create a dynamic relationship between words and pictures. Often this duality can be in the form of a playful dance, where images and words can appear to flirt with and contradict each other. A few very talented picturebook writers, such as Martin Waddell, Jon Scieszka and Chris Raschka have collaborated with illustrators to produce picturebooks that deliver a satisfying interplay between the two forms of text, visual and verbal. Theorizing picturebooks The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), edited by Bettina Kümmerling- Meibauer, contains forty-eight chapters by most of the ‘good and the great’ international scholars of children’s literature with a keen interest in picturebooks. In his more substantial and ground-breaking Words About Pictures (University of Georgia Press, 1988), Perry Nodelman argued that placing words and pictures ‘into There was a point when we came up with the visual element of a little framed photo of the dinosaur toy the main character is looking for inside the book. Sometimes we love to show a sequence of smaller illustrations on one page or spread. They are great to show character or story progression in a very limited space, while still being visually interesting. Saul Steinberg was a consummate visual thinker. He described drawing as ‘a way of reasoning on paper’ and his work explored the idea of the drawn line as a language that transcends mere words. Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ is an early example of text taking the visual form of that which it describes or alludes to. Pictorial text The blurring of boundaries between text as the representation of something visual and text as a pictorial element in itself is not new. Hill quotes Stefan Themerson, who, in collaboration with his artist wife Franciszka, wrote and published a number of influential picturebooks from the 1940s: Language is one species of the genus sign and pictorial representations are another species of the same genus. These two species can be wedded to one another. The interplay between word and image plays a key role in Jeffers’ output as both picturebook maker and gallery artist. Jeffers’ masterly use of pictorial space is key to his work. His oeuvre as a gallery artist may seem to be very different from his book work. Professional case study: Book arts meet commercial publishing through typographic landscapes. Sam Winston and Oliver Jeffers, A Child of Books Published in 2016 by Walker/Candlewick, this collaboration was highly innovative in its use throughout of text as a pictorial element of the page. Winston produces a very large landscape-format handmade book that opens out to at least a metre wide (‘Ideal for annoying fellow air travellers,’ he quips) Orphan, he explains, is a kind of archaeological dig of a story, made of its own history: clouds of handwritten texts spreading across the wide spaces of the pages; each letter ‘i’ that was used in the original writing gathered up and formed into an image. It was ‘A history of documents that said something about the process of writing itself.’. The authors have produced a ‘classroom kit’ as a guide for teachers when sharing the book with children in class. Melissa Castrillón, Un Silenzio Perfetto Pattern has tended to go through phases of popularity. Decorative pattern-making is currently enjoying a considerable revival across many areas of the applied visual arts, including illustration in general and picturebook-making in particular. This decorative appeal of Castrillón’s work encourages publishers to go that bit further in production quality, choosing high-quality papers and often opting for Pantone colours in order to get as close as possible to the effect of screen print. As she explains from her meticulously tidy home studio, this is where her visual language really began to assert itself: On my Master’s course, I spent a lot of time in the print workshops and found that, through the methodical process of building layers in screen print, I learned a great deal about structure and pattern, and it really opened my eyes to colour too. Castrillón’s sketchbooks are teeming with detailed coloured pencil test studies for her spreads and for various individual elements within them. CHAPTER 5 Domestic violence, dying, sex and relationships, sadness and war have all been explored in the pages of picturebooks, some feel that childhood has become more and more sentimentalized in popular, mainstream visual and verbal literature. Perceptions of what is meant by ‘childhood’ vary across time and across cultures. Early European children’s stories, including many fairy tales, were often savage and dark in their cautionary nature. There will always be disagreements as to what children should be protected from or exposed to. Although domestic violence, dying, sex and relationships, sadness and war have all been explored in the pages of picturebooks, some feel that childhood has become more and more sentimentalized in popular, mainstream visual and verbal literature. Highlights • Domestic violence, dying, sex and relationships, sadness and war have all been explored in the pages of picturebooks, some feel that childhood has become more and more sentimentalized in popular, mainstream visual and verbal literature. • Nyhus uses visual devices such as sharp objects perched precariously on the edge of surfaces to give a heightened sense of impending violence. He says of the audience for this book: The audience is mainly children, especially those who have experienced domestic violence and parents with mental illness. • The text is poetic and symbolic with a lot of verbal metaphors and contains quotations from people with similar problems. Asked why he felt a picturebook was the appropriate medium for addressing such a topic, Nyhus says: Sinna Mann was made in response to a request from a family therapist needing a simple book about children witnessing domestic violence to use as a ‘conversation piece’ in his talks with his clients, both children, women, and men Student case study: Political allegory Haworth-Booth studied English Literature at Cambridge University. She found art lessons at school something of a trial. I already had a keen interest in making work in relation to politics, and climate change, and had been trying for some time to come up with an idea for a book that would save the world – or at least broached these subjects in a way that children would understand and not find too frightening! Haworth-Booth used both shadow-box sets and storyboards in developing The King Who Banned the Dark. An increasingly evident trend has asserted itself over the past decade in the form of the powerful influence of mid-twentieth-century design and commercial art on the visual aesthetic of contemporary picturebooks. This is manifest in the stylistic tendencies of many current illustrators and designers, and in the trend for republishing in facsimile editions long-out-of-print gems from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Townend’s wartime picturebooks were originally printed lithographically at the Baynard Press, at a time when materials such as ink and paper were strictly rationed. Chapter 6 In this chapter we describe the mechanics and aesthetic characteristics of the main printmaking processes, through words and pictures. ‘printmaking’ is now distinguished from ‘printing’ broadly in the sense that the former refers to the use of hands-on reprographic processes as the method for creating limited editions of prints that exploit the particular aesthetic characteristics of the medium, while the latter refers to the commercial process of mass reproduction of the printed page for books, magazines, etc. Such distinctions did not exist in the early days of reprographics; the artist carved an image directly on to a woodblock that was inked and printed repeatedly on to paper. Similarly, the distinction between printer and publisher had not yet arisen. Highlights • At a time when it is possible to reproduce any form of original artwork through highly sophisticated digital scanning and printing, it is something of an irony that so many artists in the field of picturebooks are deliberately imposing limitations that replicate some of the pre-digital visual effects created by relatively crude printmaking processes and using these in tandem with digital technology. • In this chapter we describe the mechanics and aesthetic characteristics of the main printmaking processes, through words and pictures. • Printmaking processes have changed little over hundreds of years but are currently in more demand than ever. • Often the handmade element is informed by direct experience of the printmaking processes discussed in the preceding pages of this chapter, adapted to ‘kitchen- table’ methods in a variety of inventive ways. Summary The various processes and techniques that have been employed in book illustration during its evolution as an art form were, until comparatively recently, closely connected to the printing processes used to reproduce them. The term ‘printmaking’ is distinguished from ‘printing’ broadly in the sense that the former refers to the use of hands-on reprographic processes as the method for creating limited editions of prints that exploit the particular aesthetic characteristics of the medium, while the latter refers to the commercial process of mass reproduction of the printed page for books, magazines, etc. Such distinctions did not exist in the early days of reprographics; the artist carved an image directly on to a woodblock that was inked and printed repeatedly on to paper. In this chapter we describe the mechanics and aesthetic characteristics of the main printmaking processes, through words and pictures. The print room The recent revival of interest in printmaking has led to print studios springing up in many towns and cities, where they are in constant demand from both professionals and amateurs, keen to explore the creative possibilities of the various processes. Despite the speed with which visual effects can be created or replicated on screen, the much more time-consuming methods, and raw effects of ancient relief processes, such as wood and linocutting, are more popular than ever. This revival may in part be a reaction to the amount of time that we all spend in front of a screen, and the consequent need for direct physical contact with tools and process. Printmaking processes have changed little over hundreds of years but are currently in more demand than ever. Many artists choose to impose such limitations, despite the technology available. Executed primarily through digital media, has clearly evolved from his experience of screen-printing, both as an art student and subsequently as an employee in a print workshop He shares with us some insights into his approaches and reflections, beginning with the influence of his relationship with ‘print’. It occurred to me that I already knew this practice because I had made some urban stencils a few years earlier: this language was not entirely unknown to me. What about wider influences? There are many – far too many to name or even just remember! I became a professional printer shortly after finishing my studies. I spent hours looking through the archives of the workshop, asking myself how they arrived at this or that result, with what means and with what intentions. I found myself in a workshop where standards of quality were at a level normally reserved for the production of artworks within what might be described as a ‘subculture’. It fascinated me, as I had discovered and admired some of these authors or artists a few years previously. If some of my books are still made in silkscreen, I don’t print anymore because I no longer have time. It has been almost twenty years since I was a printer. The close-up detail of the spread shown opposite highlights Blexbolex’s referencing of printers’ half-tone dot screens, alongside further interior spreads from The Holidays Anuska Allepuz Anuska Allepuz has a rapidly growing reputation as an exciting and innovative talent in the field of picturebook-making and illustration for young adults. Her glowing textures, sympathetic characters and dynamic designs exude warmth and narrative purpose. Allepuz’s love of black-and-white photography plays a major role in her work. All of her compositions are worked out carefully in black and white and coloured digitally at the end of the design process. This ensures careful control of the overall tonal range and contrast. Allepuz took a job in a studio in Barcelona, digitally retouching damaged old black- and-white photographs and reproductions of paintings that were to be used in encyclopaedias. She eventually quit the job to pursue a full-time career as an illustrator. Inks, paints, rollers, stencils, and screens in Anuska Allepuz’s studio. Yann Kebbi The fluid effects of ink being wiped and moved around on a smooth surface are evident in Yann Kebbi’s monotype prints. The prints have a fluid, painterly quality typical of the effects of this medium and retain a highly individual, personal narrative language. Kebbi says about his working process: Each of the monotypes was made in several printings on the same paper, like the principle of silkscreen printing. With a roller I fully cover the plate of black ink, and with some cloth I take off the black to keep only the areas I want, I print. This step allows me to have a full and deep black, and to give depth even to the areas supposed to be white on the picture. I use the coloured inks and alcohol, and I paint on the plate and make as many printings as I need for the picture to be complete. Basically, there isn’t any real end yet, only a trail and the demonstration in different places of this man’s loneliness. Beth Waters A Child of St Kilda While undertaking her final project for her master’s degree in children’s Book Illustration, Beth Waters suffered a crisis of confidence; after struggling gamely with a project that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she decided to cut her losses, abandon the project and start over again. She had been sure that she wanted to explore narrative approaches to non-fiction but had become bogged down in a rather technical project about Brunel’s great steamship, the SS Great Britain, in her home town of Bristol. Waters decided to tackle a theme that was very specific, both historically and geographically, but provided greater scope visually for landscape, atmosphere, and human interest. She had been aware of the romantic story of the island of St Kilda while studying for her undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University. In order to fully capture a sense of place in her final illustrations, Beth Waters made the four-hour boat journey to the island to sketch from direct observation and test possible compositions. Characters are used to guide the reader through sometimes complex subject matter in a manner that is entertaining as well as educational. Narrative approaches In January 2018, Publishers Weekly reported that juvenile non-fiction had been the fastest-growing sector over the previous year, increasing by 8 per cent. For the illustrator, this has become an exciting new area of opportunity, whether as sole creator or working in partnership with scientists, historians, zoologists, or geographers. Bringing knowledge to children through engaging visual and verbal storytelling has opened up new worlds for readers and makers. With the attention of children being increasingly competed for across various screen- based media, general knowledge is acquired in many ways. Weaving stories and storytellers as well as humour into ‘educational’ books in order to engage and hold the attention of the picturebook reader is becoming a familiar approach. Juries judging international picturebook awards, including the Bologna Ragazzi Awards, have sometimes deliberated in recent times over whether it is still meaningful to retain separate entry categories for fiction and nonfiction when the boundaries between the two are becoming increasingly porous. Strong women A welcome addition to the non-fiction landscape has been the boom in picturebooks that celebrate the historical contribution of female figures in art, literature, and the sciences. The series ‘Little People, Big Dreams’ is a highly successful example of this trend. Many of these picturebooks take a strongly narrative approach. Many other publishers are bringing out picturebooks in a similar vein but using a variety of approaches. The subtitle of Anna Doherty’s The Brontës (Wren & Rook, 2019) – The Fantastically Feminist Story of the Astonishing Authors – gives us a clue to the use of humour and twenty-first-century colloquial language in this story of the famous sisters. One of the many titles from the Little People, Big Dreams series (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2017). Anna Doherty takes a comic narrative approach to telling the story of the Brontë sisters. The book is historically well researched but told in a way that is accessible to a young audience. BIG books and Wimmelbücher Big, beautiful non-fiction books have become a welcome sight in our bookshops, teeming with visual and verbal information, demanding to be picked up and experienced. We don’t have such a word in English, but the term is beginning to appear in academic circles. It describes those books whose pages teem with little visual details, exemplified by the works of Ali Mitgutsch and Rotraut Susanne Berner, as well as Richard Scarry and the Where’s Wally? Lewis’ compelling mixture of naivety and graphic sophistication helped the book win the 2017 Bologna Opera Prima Award. This ‘in-house’ Planeta Tangerina collaboration between Isabel Minhós Martins and Bernardo Carvalho is a big, handsome book, typical of the new wave of non-fiction texts that are told in attractive, expressive ways. This one is an atlas of voyages of the great explorers. Novelty and interaction The line between picturebook and toy can sometimes be a thin one. What the Victorians referred to as ‘movable books’ or ‘toy books’ have become popular once again and bookshops are selling all manner of boxed or variously packaged illustrated material that might be designed to be assembled, folded, arranged, drawn, and painted onto or otherwise physically engaged with. Acknowledged as one of the most important and influential figures in non-fiction picturebook publishing, Rachel Williams originally studied creative writing at Deakin University, Melbourne, in her native Australia. Her first job was as an editorial assistant on a scientific journal, but she soon went on to work as a commissioning editor at Lonely Planet, commissioning photography for travel books. The imprint continued, and Williams moved on to set up Wide Eyed Editions within the large publishing group Quarto. Once again, she ‘builds’ books around the work of particular artists that she admires, making contact with them, asking what their particular passions and preoccupations are, and developing projects from that starting point. The award-winning Pascal Blanchet’s sumptuously retro and beautifully produced Go West! (Wide Eyed Editions, 2018) was originally published as En Voiture! by the innovative French-Canadian publisher La Pastèque. Narisa Togo Magnificent Birds The Japanese crane from Narisa Togo’s homeland features prominently in Magnificent Birds. She has a wide knowledge of both disciplines and brings them together beautifully in Magnificent Birds (Walker Studio, 2017, in collaboration with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) She originally studied Ecology at undergraduate level at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology before coming to England to take a Master’s degree in Children’s Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art. Togo lives in Japan, where she divides her time between printmaking and leading groups on birdwatching trips. Togo’s work is informed by both Japanese and European print traditions and is executed through the meticulous and painstaking process of reduction linocut. Findings Penny Holroyde is a partner at the Holroyde Cartey agency in London. She explains what she perceives to be the benefits for an artist of being represented by a literary agent: ‘We charge substantially less than artists’ agents –15 per cent as compared to anything up to 35 per cent. Highlights • That artists and authors research carefully before approaching a publisher to make sure they are fully acquainted with any particular visual ‘flavour’ of an individual publishing house. • The dominance of the conglomerates has been challenged in recent years by the rise of small independent publishers. • In this chapter we look at a range of publishing houses, large and small, but with particular emphasis on the new independents that have had an impact on the market. • Well-known publishing house, there may be an array of individuals in various posts who are responsible for commissioning new work: senior designers, commissioning editors, etc. • Independent publishing house, there may be one or two individuals who are responsible for the whole process of design, editing, print management and distribution. Summary Children’s one that book plays publishing is a significant a massive role in the global industry, and economies of many countries, when successful books are exported as co- editions in other languages. Though, children’s publishing is a commercial industry that involves writers, artists, designers, publishers, printers, marketing people and booksellers. These exist in an interdependent chain in an increasingly global context. Publishers can have very different ideas about picturebooks for children, but they vary greatly within individual countries in the kind of books they publish. It is essential, that artists and authors research carefully before approaching a publisher to make sure they are fully acquainted with any particular visual ‘flavour’ of an individual publishing house. A series of case studies reveals the differing philosophies of publishing houses and the mechanics of getting picturebooks into shops and into the hands of the reader. The publishing process Well-known publishing house, there may be an array of individuals in various posts who are responsible for commissioning new work: senior designers, commissioning editors, etc. Independent publishing house, there may be one or two individuals who are responsible for the whole process of design, editing, print management and distribution. The larger houses dominated the market in the past, but, as the case studies in this chapter show, many smaller independent publishers have emerged and flourished in recent years. Since the growth in independents, this has been further complicated by large conglomerates setting up more and more imprints with a mission to produce more ‘artistic’ books to compete with the smaller publishers. Approaching a publisher The publishing process begins when the picturebook-maker manages to make contact with the picturebook publisher. With most successful picturebooks ‘composed’ by one person, the most common way to present an idea to a publisher is in the form of a dummy version of the proposed book. This is a mock-up of the whole book; it most commonly contains a few spreads that reproduce finished artwork, with the remaining images in the form of rough pencil sketches. The highly successful picturebook-maker Oliver Jeffers might be seen as a model example of how to approach publishers on first leaving college. He struck a deal with a local printer to produce an edition of printed, bound dummies of what was to become his first book, How to Catch a Star (HarperCollins, 2004), in return for some original artworks. A mutually comfortable feeling about working together is very important. The literary agent Another way in which a publisher might be approached, or a publisher might approach an artist, is via a literary agent. Sportspeople, actors, writers, and illustrators may choose to be represented by agencies. For providing this service, the agent will take a percentage of the income generated. Picturebook-makers often prefer to be represented by literary agents who specialize in representing writers and artists who work mainly in publishing. Penny Holroyde is a partner at the Holroyde Cartey agency in London. She explains what she perceives to be the benefits for an artist of being represented by a literary agent: ‘We charge substantially less than artists’ agents –15 per cent as compared to anything up to 35 per cent. Publishers sometimes give picturebook deals to artists before they have suitable, publishable texts. In this situation, they speak to agents, looking for writers. Browsing is important when it comes to buying picturebooks, so the child-friendly bookshop offering an opportunity to touch, hold and share the books still has a key role to play. The library market The library market is important in the United States, where sales to libraries and schools can make a significant difference to the overall sales of a picturebook. Many editors have this in mind when they are commissioning: The reviewer. They are evolving and changing so quickly as a form that it has proved difficult for reviewers to keep up with their essentially visual nature. We wouldn’t leave children to choose sweets or burgers all the time, so it is important to help them find books that are nourishing and will have lasting quality. They have a powerful capacity to look and to absorb images. It could be argued that we are currently experiencing a ‘golden age’ book design and production. Case study: The art publisher One of Thames & Hudson’s 2019 picturebooks, Norm, by Chinese illustrator Sylvia Liang. At his third-floor office in Holborn, the London base of the famous transatlantic art publisher, Thorp sits surrounded by his vast collection of books. The collection reflects his personal passion for great design and illustration and includes some of the rarest examples of Constructivist books from early twentieth- century Eastern Europe, mid-century British and American books with designs by the likes of Paul Nash and Edward McKnight Kauffer, and many more. Roger Thorp was the first to publish the picturebooks of Beatrice Alemagna in a previously resistant English-language market (Thames & Hudson, 2019). This title by Joe Lyward was developed in the final stages of his MA studies. Case study: Growing a publishing business Anne Herbauts’s lyrical, sensual use of paint and texture has been well-known in mainland Europe for many years and has been introduced to the American market by Enchanted Lion (2016). Claudia has brought her particular vision to bear on the company, introducing international picturebook-makers such as Blexbolex, Beatrice Alemagna, Violeta Lópiz and Olivier Tallec to the US market. We asked her whether, in the early days of seeking out foreign-language books, she felt like something of a pioneer: It is the case that when I started meeting with foreign rights people in Bologna I was told by many that not a single US editor was coming to see them at that time, though there were a handful of publishers who mentioned their custom of meeting with Jack Jensen of Chronicle every Bologna, and how thoughtful he was about books and how glad they were that he kept showing up. The insidious, creeping menace of La Guerra is depicted in André Letria’s artwork through various symbols and visual metaphors. André Letria and Pato Lógico The Portuguese illustrator André Letria founded the studio Pato Lógico in 2010. In 2014, his book Mar (Ocean), in collaboration with writer Ricardo Enriques, won a special mention in the Bologna Ragazzi Awards. What I tried to do was to create a story with the pictures without paying any attention to the original text. This took me to a point where I had to speak to him and tell him that we couldn’t work with this anymore and we needed to experiment further. I felt that he was writing descriptions of the illustrations, almost like captions, because he didn’t have experience of working in this way. We were both learning at the same time. I think this was much more possible in a family situation than it would have been with another author. How did Pato Lógico come into being? I went to the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon – the same school where Bernardo Carvalho and Madalena Matoso [of Planeta Tangerina] studied. With my own publishing house and sometimes having books that are sold successfully abroad, in a way it makes me sad for all those years before, when it didn’t seem possible. It is the small publishers and illustrators that are making the market move forward. It is difficult for us as publishers to find writers who can work in the way that, for example, I did with my father. In his Lisbon design studio André Letria is surrounded by sketchbooks, artwork from ongoing projects, scanners, screens and final printed books. Among the picturebooks published by Pató Logico is the brilliant Dança by João Fazenda, a silent book in which contrasting personalities are expressed entirely visually through their respective graphic idioms. Planeta Tangerina Just a short journey eastward along the mouth of the Tagus to the Estoril Coast, we find the modest suburban house that has been taken over by the iconic picturebook publishing studio Planeta Tangerina, co-founded by Bernardo Carvalho, Madalena Matoso and Isabel Minhós Martins, who met as art students at Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts in the 1990s. As the studio affirms in its ‘mission statement’: Reading a picturebook is about reading words and images, it’s not about reading pages but instead sequences; reading picturebooks involves reading covers and endpapers, reading rhythms and changes of rhythm, reading scenes, planes, details and different representations; it involves constantly making connections between elements, appreciating the movement, the sounds, the pauses and the silence of the pages.