Quentin Blake on The following quotes are taken from the
interviews Quentin gave during the making of the Teachers TV
programme. Zagazoo & Cockatoos Zagazoo is a book about a little
boy which is totally metaphorical. It doesnt say he behaved like a
little elephant around the house, he really does turn into an
elephant. He actually arrives in a brightly coloured parcel and to
show that the parents are excited about it, they throw him from one
to the other. There isnt a note in the text to say dont do this at
home but we hope you know that. It doesnt pretend to be realistic.
In a sense I suppose none of these books are quite real because
youre controlling the set of signals that youre giving to the
reader.
Quentin Blake
Quentin Blake
Another book, Cockatoos, works in a different way. There are an
increasing number of cockatoos in the pictures and you have to spot
them. The whole point of the book is that they belong to a rather
dim-witted professor. He can never find the Cockatoos but we can
see them and so the idea is to fill the pages with as much material
as possible. It takes place in a house in France and so I drew all
the French things that I could think of so that on every page
opening he goes into a room and says there are no cockatoos here,
whereas we can see them. Again, you have control over the
illustrations. Its terribly important that its not just a question
of you write some words and then you draw pictures of what is
mentioned in the words. It doesnt work like that at all.
Classroom activity: as enrichment to a story-writing activity
get children to illustrate their very short story so that the
illustrations add to the story by including details not mentioned
in the text.
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Meaning in the Green Ship The premise of the book is really the
children discovering this ship made of trees and bushes and cut
into shape. The ship has been made by this lady who, as we discover
later, has lost her husband at sea. This is her way of thinking
about him. Then she and the children imagine that theyre going to
places on the ship. Of course, the ship never moves but when the
weather is cold they imagine they are in the Arctic and if its a
nice day and theres a palm tree, they can imagine theyre in the
Mediterranean. I suppose there are two ways of reading the book.
You can read it with the reactions of the adult person, the grown
up woman and her feelings and shes thinking about things that have
happened in the past. Whereas the children are regarding it as an
adventure; in their imagination its something that might happen to
them in the future. Story of Clown Clown is the story of a toy that
gets thrown away into the dustbin with a lot of other toys.
Fortunately he has independent life thats the part of the story
that you have to accept. The shape of the book is his various
adventures in meeting people and trying to find someone who will
help him rescue the other toys, and whether theyre helpful people
or not. Finally he does find someone: a little girl who helps him
rescue the toys. The story cannot happen but we draw it as though
it was realistically happening.
Quentin Blake
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Purpose and Meaning in Clown Im not sure that I realised
immediately that it was about being thrown away, about being
excluded from society. It was quite interesting that when I was
talking about this book in France somebody said to me its about the
homeless isnt it? I suppose that must have been in my mind but the
story came to mean that. If you say to yourself I would like to do
a story about the homeless or I would like to do a story about a
disadvantaged child its quite hard to make it convincing. Its
better if you have an idea which you encounter somewhere and
realise that the story is in it. So thats how I came to start
inventing the story of clown and I suppose I must have been a bit
aware of that sort of symbolic aspect as well because I didnt give
him a name, I just wanted him to be a clown, which means that in a
way he can be any of us. Words and Pictures I suppose the
conventional idea of what an illustrator does is that hes given a
story and then he draws what happens in that book. Of course if
youre illustrating somebody elses story that is more or less what
happens except that you make the choice of which bits are going to
be good to draw. I think people who write and illustrate picture
books find that when they come to do the drawings theyre perhaps
crossing out some of the stuff theyve written before because you
dont want to do it twice. You want the words to help the pictures
and the pictures to help the words so that both of them are telling
the story at the same time. What is interesting and important is
that theyre like two languages. Where do you get ideas from? One of
the questions that children always ask is where do you get your
ideas from. Sometimes I say I dont know but its not quite true. I
think that its not hard to think of some kind of idea for a book.
What youre on the lookout for as you sit and think about it is a
story that is worth spending time on because its got lots of visual
opportunities and interesting characters. It needs also to have a
story that means something in life and that both you and the
readers will want to spend some time with because its going to take
three to six months to do the book and you hope its going to be
around for years afterwards with different generations of young
readers. I sometimes think that you get the best ideas when youre
trying to escape from some other kind of work and youre looking out
of the window and something comes to you. Classroom activity: give
children an ideas notebook in which they write down story ideas
which occur to them (maybe when looking out of the window!) which
can be used later. The difference between illustration and
animation One of the things that is different in an illustrated
book from an animated film is that you choose a moment. In an
animated film a moment would happen very quickly, whereas something
you can only do in illustration is to have that split second you
can keep and go back to. You dont have to necessarily read the
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whole story but you revisit it, you own that moment again for
whenever you like and for as long as you like. Classroom activity:
choose an illustrated book and find a moment in the text that is
NOT illustrated then ask children to illustrate that. Role of
Colour I started life as what used to be called a black and white
artist. I think black and white is very good for showing activities
and thats the basis of what I do: tell the stories by people
acting. Its not so much the scenery, but what is happening at the
front of the stage. But colour has become more and more interesting
to me, partly because its hard to discover how it works. It
introduces atmosphere and emotion into a picture and as soon as you
start adding sunlight or shadow it makes it more three-dimensional
so that you begin to feel this is a kind of reality.
Quentin Blake
Quentin Blake
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Classroom activity: get half the class to illustrate one moment
from a story in black and white and the other in colour and discuss
the differences. Producing a book with no words / How to read a
picture book Of course one of the advantages of a book with no
words is that you have to talk about whether youve understood it or
not. You have to discuss, even only with yourself what is actually
happening, what do those gestures mean, what is happening next?
Mostly you can find out quite easily but these are considerations
that can be transferred to other picture books as well. For
example, Ive seen an adult read through the words of a book, turn
the pages, get to the end and nothing has happened. You havent
actually met the book at all. Whereas with Clown because there are
no words, you have to meet it, you have to know that youve been
involved in it. But in fact its what you should do with other
books. You need to take time over them, you need to think about
what those situations are and what they mean. Of course the first
thing that is exciting is to find out what happens next but as you
do that you are thinking about what it means, how people are
reacting and the significance of the story. So you need to engage
with it and, of course, the nice thing about picture books is that
theyre manageable works so that you can read them again or you can
revisit bits of them. There are lots of ways of having them in
front of you and having that experience again. Technique Most of my
books are drawn with a Waverley pen, which is a scratch nib pen
which was invented in the 19th century to do copper plate
handwriting with. Its very good for showing the different pressures
of your hand. If youre making a gesture, you can do a big scratch
for the arm reaching out or you can do it quite nervous and
scratchy in a different way. In fact its responding to your
feelings about what the person is doing. Classroom activity: after
looking at Quentin Blakes drawings get children to draw using
Waverley or similar pens. The aim is not to imitate Blake but to
experiment with pen and ink and discover the expressive qualities
of scratchiness!
See www.houseofillustration.org.uk for more ideas.
