The Klaus Flugge Award is a celebration of illustration and we love it!

We’ll take any opportunity to shout about the creativity and wonder brought to the pages of picture books – illustrators we salute you.

We always marvel over illustrations and how they can really capture stories and amplify the impact of a picture book, but how they end up in a book was rather a mystery.  Grace Gleave from Macmillan Children’s has very kindly shared the journey of Emma Farrarons illustrations in Klaus Flugge shortlisted My Hair is as Long as a River by Charlie Castle…

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As a picture book editor, (surely one of the best jobs you can have?!), I spend a delightfully large proportion of my time hunting for illustrators, and pairing them with the perfect text. Usually, but not always, the text comes first, and this was the case with Charlie Castle’s gorgeous ode to a little boy with long hair: My Hair is as Long as a River, a very personal story and the book Charlie wished they’d had as a young child.

 Often it takes weeks, months, even years to find the artist whose work we think best chimes with a text. It is probably the most important decision we make as picture book editors. Happily for me, with MHIALAAR (doesn’t the abbreviation look like an appropriately elvish word for such an ethereal text?) it took us about 30 seconds. As soon as the text came in, I was certain I wanted Emma for the job. Separately, Lorna, our incredible designer, had come to exactly the same conclusion. And when I sent the text to our Art Director, he came straight over to my desk and said: ‘You know who’d be really good for this…’ Of course – Emma!

But having the creative team all excited about an illustrator is one thing. Getting the sales and management teams on board is sometimes more thorny. But as soon as I showed Emma’s development sketches to them, they were sold; it was clear to everyone that she was the one. The naivety and freedom in her mark marking, the way you can see the brushstrokes, just felt like a perfect match for Charlie’s text which is all about imagination, childlike wonder and delight.

We had a very free-flowing process when it came to developing the illustrations. Emma is an observational genius, so her starting point was her sketch book, which is full of little moments she has caught of her two young boys. Emma, Lorna and I would get together, she’d pull out her folder overflowing with paper and we’d pore over her early ideas and sketches. We’d focus on moments we thought worked particularly well, and then she’d take those further. Charlie was also involved and it was wonderful having Emma and Charlie together sparking ideas off each other.

At the start of the process, we had a spread where the hair turns into a blanket – we ended up editing it out because it felt slightly out of sync with the trajectory of the story (it came at the start where we are just setting out on our adventure). So instead of a night-time blanket it became a ‘cloak’ for all the adventures to come – but just look at all Emma’s ideas for how a hair blanket could work. And this amount of thought and experimentation went into every single spread! I just adore the one below on the left with the children cocooned by the hair.

Getting the hair right was a big topic of conversation during those early meetings – we wanted it free and fluid but also not just a big mass – we needed it to turn into flower stems, tree branches, birds’ nests, waterfalls… no mean feat! We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could make the hair feel like a living thing, metamorphosing into all these different scenarios. I remember in an early meeting Emma showed us a picture of a ping pong ball she had rigged up in her studio, to which she had glued long strands of wool so she could see how it fell – true dedication to her craft! She also spent a lot of time watching nature videos of waterfalls and thunderstorms to inspire the natural world she was creating. I think these tactics really paid off in the drawbridge spread. I adore the drama of those shark-like crashing waves, with the precarious balancing act going on above. But actually, I think my favourite moment in this spread is the quieter one between the children in the foreground – the way the older girl has her hand resting on the red-jumpered boy, and his hand holding the little girl next to him. I think these little perfectly observed interactions are what make the story sing.

My favourite part of the job is the day that the illustrator sends us the final artwork for a book. You always have an idea in your head of how you think it should look. The beauty of the moment is that it never, EVER looks like that. It always looks better, in ways you could never have imagined, because the illustrator has sprinkled their own completely original magic on it. Emma did this and more with Charlie’s gorgeous text – and I can’t wait to see what she does next!

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Many thanks to Grace for sharing this insight into the journey of illustrating a picture book.  We look forward to the Klaus Flugge winner announcement and wish everyone involved from all three shortlisted titles the very best of luck.  You can see more about each book using the links below and don’t miss more insight from the editor of Grandad’s Star!