Parallel Stories

 After attending Toni Buzzeo's wonderful workshop at The Writers' Loft on picture book structures, I started noticing them everywhere – Mirror, Circular, 3-tries, and Parallel stories: this is where the plot follows two characters on separate journeys through the story. Sometimes the two characters come together at the end, and sometimes they don't but their experiences echo each other. You see a lot of compositional mirroring that is frequently found in any plot where there is a lot of symmetry either between characters or between parts of the story.

Todays examples are all from author-illustrators! Toot and Puddle by Holly Hobbie, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, and Emma and Julia Love Ballet by Barbara McClintock.

Toot and Puddle by Holly Hobbie: 

This story follows two friends: one who is a homebody and one who likes to go adventuring. Puddle stays home and enjoys life there, while Toot travels the world and sends back postcards. The months of the year serve as a framework, and at the end of the year Toot comes home.

A typical spread shows a scene with Toot and a postcard on the left, and a scene with Puddle on the right. The two stories progress side by side.

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey:

I personally think this is one of the most perfect parallel stories I've ever read. This story alternates the two main character's adventures: first you see Sal eating blueberries with her mother, then Little Bear follows in almost exactly the same fashion. A lot of humor comes from anticipating that what you just saw happen to Sal will now happen with Little Bear, or vice versa. The two main characters never meet, but a great amount of delight can be found in reading about their two, almost exactly the same, adventures. 

Image © Robert McCloskey

Image © Robert McCloskey

Image © Robert McCloskey

Image © Robert McCloskey

Emma and Julia Love Ballet by Barbara McClintock

This story involves a day in the life of the two title characters: Emma, who is a little girl taking ballet lessons, and Julia, who is a professional ballerina. At the end, Emma goes to Julia's performance, which sweetly ties the characters together as well as ending the day. 

Image © Barbara McClintock

Image © Barbara McClintock

Image © Barbara McClintock

I hope you find exploring story structures to be as fun and helpful as I do! 

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Jen Betton wrote and illustrated HEDGEHOG NEEDS A HUG (Penguin-Putnam) and illustrated TWILIGHT CHANT by Holly Thompson (Clarion-HMH). Her newest book, BARN AT NIGHT, written by Michelle Houts and published by Feeding Minds Press will be published in winter 2021.

You can find more of her work here:

www.jenbetton.com
www.facebook.com/jenbettonillustration
@jenbetton

Printing Variations on a Theme

HP Envy 4520

Recently I purchased an inexpensive black and white printer to facilitate the process of character development. Using graphite transfer has been a mainstay for many years but I wanted to speed up the steps involved and save my hands for the actual drawing part. 

I go through reams of the Georgia-Pacific 110lb white card stock, filling a 2 inch three ring binder almost every month with sketches. I find the surface pleasing to draw on because it has a bit of tooth but is smooth enough to hold detail.

About a week ago a couple of little girls faces popped out onto my paper. Curious as to who they were, I pushed them around a bit and got the feeling they were European street kids from the earlier part of the 20th century. "Rag Girls" as well as the word "Gypsy" kept popping into my head. 

I scanned the first sketches and taking them into Photoshop, I set up a document with repeated faces. Before printing I placed a layer filled with white over the top and slid the opacity down to about 80 percent, just barely enough to the faces coming through. The image above is darker than I would print, but for the purpose of showing up here, I made it a bit darker, you get the idea. 

Some too old

By having the pale image on the page, I could shift the facial features slightly while retaining the overall shape. It is extremely easy at small sizes to add just a bit of a crisp edge to a nose which instantly makes the character appear older. Having the profile image faintly printed I could erase easily without removing the entire structure. I specifically chose profile for this part of the exploration because I was trying to nail down certain ages, between 8 and 12. To me the nose and forehead in profile help establish the age.

I generally create a super quick character template for each face and body type, and again using the scanner and printer I can create many variations on a theme without losing the basic shapes.

There were three distinct girls that came out to play over those few days and I wanted to know who they were, and of course to eventually draw them happier. The first two original girls seemed sad or concerned which can be seen in the lineups below. I don't know what the influence was, they just came out of my pencil that day.

Pardon the transparent dress on the girl below. After I had quickly sketched her and decided to spend more time on her, I erased out her dress and sketched in the basic body shape to see if the proportions were correct underneath. Sure enough her upper arm was too short so her elbow did not fall at the waist, which I corrected in the next group.

The Far Left on Top and Bottom are 

the 2 Original Girls

Second Batch

While I was working on them I saw an Instagram image stating it was Holocaust Memorial day, and suddenly I knew who they were. They were the lost children of World War II. In a conversation on Instagram I commented on a quote I saw in a holocaust article, they were "the children the Nazis hated. . . Jewish, Romani, and African".

As always, I cut all of my sketches apart to view them independently and sort into like kind. Sometimes a new direction will show itself and by having them sorted I can decide if I want to follow it. I literally have piles and piles of little sketches that are generally half print and half fresh graphite experiments. 

Yeah, I don't think so, but fun

And of course there are always those crazy pages like the ones above where I go out on a limb with my playing but those go in the scrap pile if unusable or into a stack for use in perhaps another story. I had planned to sketch teenage older sisters but was probably watching a contemporary BBC drama which influenced the age and time period. So I just had a bit of fun with them.

When I have devoted 12 to 14 hours a day for days of hyper focus (can't seem to stop myself until I have finished the process), I am able to sit down and sketch the character out quickly without any prints because I have memorized their facial characteristics and proportions. In fact I see their faces when I close my eyes. . . they become real to me.

And the bonus is I have tons of sketches for my mother to choose from. The one below, or very similar to it, followed her home on Mother's Day! It is the best of both worlds, traditional and digital, and allows me to have created tangible pieces of process art instead of only tracing paper scraps or purely digital images.

Cheap printer, card stock, and mechanical pencils for the win! 

The Value of Craft

The topic of the month on the Kidlit blog is craft. In this post, I’ll take a look at the definition, process, and importance of craft.

(Photo credit: Jen & Chris Creed)

Here are a few definitions of craft that I like (all from Merriam-Webster.com):

“An activity that involves making something in a skillful way by using your hands” 

“Skill in planning, making, or executing”

“Skill in deceiving to gain an end <used craft and guile to close the deal>”

Ok, perhaps not that last one as much. But it does bring up a good point, that our ultimate goal as authors/illustrators is to tell stories that use illusion to make a kind of magic that the viewer wants to believe in. In my experience, the most reliable way to do this is through developing a solid foundation in craftsmanship.

(Photo credit: Jen & Chris Creed)

Here’s a checklist I use when illustrating:

1. Idea (or project brief/manuscript)

2. Write outline/thumbnail

3. Sketch/brainstorm/experiment

4. Research 

5. Rewrite outline/thumbnail

6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 as many times as necessary

7. Finalize manuscript and thumbnails

8. Design characters, locations, and props. Make reference sheets for consistency.

9. Design compositions (at this point, evoke emotion using only basic shapes)

10. Line drawing

11. Value Study

12. Color Study

13. Final Painting

When I skip a step in this process, I find that I stop relying on the dependability of my craft and instead start relying on luck. I do think experimentation and a certain level of risk are important, but I try to balance them with organization and preparation.  

A teacher once told me, there are two ways to make a good image, you can either use time or method. If you use time, all you have to do is keeping working until you’re happy with your art…or pass out from exhaustion. If you learn the principles behind what makes art effective, then you can create a method that’s usually much quicker and less likely to make you pass out. That may sound really boring and stifling, but remember, you can have as many different methods as you want and you can also make experimentation part of your method.

Studying craft has reminded me of how important craftsmanship is to successful storytelling and communicating clearly with readers. I believe that every artist must find their own approach to craft, which I know is both encouraging and overwhelming. But I like to think it’s mostly encouraging, because you have the opportunity to create things no one has seen before in ways no one has ever imagined. So go out, do your picture book thang, and use craft as a tool to tell delightful new stories, I look forward to reading them!

(Photo credit: Jen & Chris Creed)

To close, I leave you with a few inspirational quotes about craft that always make me feel motivated:

“Try not to think of your craft as a business. Try to think of it exclusively as ‘personal work.’" - Marshall Arisman

“There is no ‘gift’ or talent so great that it can dispense with the need for fundamental knowledge, much diligent practice, and hard effort.” - Andrew Loomis

“The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint. The greats were great cause they paint a lot.” - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

The Difficulty of Defining Goals

This month on the KidLit blog, we're talking about goals. I've been attempting to write my post for the past week and have deleted more first paragraphs than I would have thought possible. Allow me to explain.

Most folks in the field of children's illustration will tell you that their ultimate end goal is publishing a book. I do want to acknowledge that, yes, of course, I'd love to publish any of my books, but I have a lot of trouble thinking about publication as an actual goal. When you define your goal as publishing, you essentially place your hopes and hard work in the hands of sales departments, "the market", and an industry, which, though it strives daily to create excellent content for children, is still an industry, and by definition, concerned with the production of commercial goods.

I can only speak for myself, but, as an illustrator and writer, my goals are about my craft. I want to learn as much as I can about illustration and storytelling and spend each day experimenting with words, composition, character, color, and line. While I do hope to publish someday, I cannot control what someone else will think about my work. I can, however, strive to tell the best stories I possibly can. It's a subtle distinction, but to me, it seems a very important one. 

Fellow kidlit blogger, Jen Betton, and I were talking about this post, and she summed up what I was trying to say rather succinctly. "Publishing isn't your end goal, but rather storytelling is. Publishing is the secondary—important, but secondary—reward to telling an awesome story."

Long term objectives are great; I cannot wait until I can walk into a bookstore and find books by all of my talented illustrator colleagues and friends. However, it is really important to take pleasure in the work itself and in the process of getting there.

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Lisa Anchin is a Brooklyn based children's illustrator doodling her way across the five boroughs. You can see more of her work at lisaanchin.com and find her on twitter @lisaanchin