I have long admired
Chris Haughton's work, and the wonderful color palette his books create. So, I am thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have him here today to talk about his newest book,
DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB!
e: Hi Chris - welcome! What was your creative process/medium for DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB, can you walk us through it?
Chris:
For this book and all my books I begin by coming up with a very basic story. Some sort of perilous situation or dramatic events which make the reader want to turn the page. I then try to draw that. I create various pieces of art by hand and kind of combine them all together in the best way I can. Most often that means using the computer. I like getting the facial and body expressions by doing very small, rough sketches.
Immediate artwork tends to have more emotion so I often do very sketchy images.
I use collage to work out poses to make sure they are the simplest they can be. I just try to make everything very simple and clear so that it can communicate well to the youngest children.
e: I love all your books and the wonderful color palette that has developed as they have. Are you a color geek (like me)?
Chris:
Yes! I am definitely quite geeky about color! The funny thing is when I started as an illustrator the thing I was most uncomfortable about with my illustration was colour. I pretty much just used black and white! When something needed to be color I just tweaked a black and white image into blue and white or purple and red or something like that. I just didn’t think in colour at all. After a while after working in screen printing and doing other sorts of design work I realised that you can choose colours arbitrarily and it will not affect the reading of an image. A tree doesn’t have to be green and brown. It can be red and blue and read just as well as a tree as long as it is tree shaped. That realisation was a major breakthrough for me. Because then I could choose whatever colours enhance the story. I can create atmosphere with colour and highlight what needs to be highlighted on the page.
The colour themes to each book came from choosing not to print with ’text black’ with my first book. I was told by my editor that the book will be printed in 5 colours. CMYKK cyan, magenta, yellow and two blacks. Myself and my art director, Deirdre McDermott were keen to make the book as colourful as possible, so instead of using the text plate as black, as is usual, we made it another colour, green. That then makes the book have much richer colour combinations than what is available for normal CMYK printing ...and for no extra cost. Deirdre is very clever! For the subsequent books we just used a different colour each time. It’s quite nice because it differentiates the books from each other and also differentiates them from other books in the bookstores… it gives them their own ‘look’. None of this was planned from the beginning… it was a lucky stroke of luck!
e: What a happy stroke of luck that was! What was your path to publication?
Chris:
I studied graphic design in art college. I worked in design briefly, in a music venue, but I was always more interested in illustration. After a year of traveling and living and working in Hong Kong and elsewhere, I moved to London and, whilst doing part time jobs managed to get some illustration work. I worked as a full time freelance illustrator for newspapers and magazines and advertising. After five years of this I tried to create my first picture book story. I was interested to find an outlet for my illustration work outside of advertising and media. What I love about print media is it is communicating messages to a very wide audience, but often this message is an advertising message or one that I didn’t fully agree with. So I wanted to use this medium to communicate in other ways. I went to the
Bologna Book Fair to try to find a publisher, I didn’t really realise that it isn’t really the place to find publishers at the time. I found a great publishing house called Borim Press there and they agreed to publish my first book. So my first book was actually only available in Korean for the first two years. It looked likely that it was never going to be translated into English. I again went around the publishing houses and found Walker Books.
e: Is there a unique or funny story behind the creation of DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB?
Josh:
Usually I begin a story with two images. A before and after image. In this case the first page is the anticipation of the large wave coming, and then the following spread is the splash of the wave. The page itself IS the wave. The waves come relentlessly one after the other as the pages turn and turn. This is dramatic device… will the wave hit poor little crab? Will they jump in? Actually, the starting point of this book was unusual for me because it was inspired by watching crabs at the beach. All the other books have been me trying to imagine the situations. I was in Mexico on the Pacific coast where the waves were enormous. I was just lazily watching these crabs over an afternoon and after a while you can begin to see their personalities. You can see some are more nervous than the others. It was like a silent comedy watching them when a very big wave comes. They all freeze and brace for the impact. That’s where this story began.
e: I love that! What do you think makes an illustration magical, what I call "Heart Art” - the sort that makes a reader want to come back to look again and again?
Chris:
As my editor and art director, Deirdre McDermott says it's all about the 'emotional resonance'. We need to be the main character and feel what they are feeling. When you look into their eyes you feel their predicament, that emotion transfers to you and so you have this emotional response. We feel for a helpless character in a perilous situation, we identify with that. We want to help or want the character to be helped. What elevates this though is if it is then exaggerated, or twisted slightly into a more fantastical realm. If we see this helpless character but the character is clearly just a few shapes of cut paper it makes us on one hand identify, but on the other hand laugh at ourselves for being sucked into such an absurd emotional response. We are laughing, not at the story, but at ourselves. This is really useful in portraying a scary situation, the fantastical element makes it less threatening, as we are being made aware that we are not seeing a real situation. That allows us more poetic license.
e: Good answer. How do you advertise yourself (or do you)?
Chris:
I don’t really do that besides posting every so often on
Instagram or
Facebook. I am very lucky in that Walker Books and Candlewick Press are so great, and all the bookshops they work with are so great and generous in getting my books out there. It's so wonderful to walk into bookshops and see my books on the display. Or see adults reading them to their children. I am so grateful. It makes me so happy.
e: What is your favorite or most challenging part of being a creator?
Chris:
I used to not really enjoy the ‘coming up with the story’ part of the process. It was very difficult for me as I was more of an illustrator with very little experience as a storyteller. I found it excruciating! When I was in primary school we often had to write an essay and then draw a picture on the other side of the page for homework. I hated the writing part but I looked forward to getting that out of the way so I could turn the page over and do the drawing. That’s how I felt with doing my first picture books. Not much has changed in thirty years! Now though, the writing and ideation is (sometimes!) my favourite part of the process. It is the part that is unpredictable and exciting. You begin, and have no idea how it will turn out. In comparison the illustrating is quite predictable.
e: Is there something in particular about DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB you hope readers will take away with them, perhaps something that isn’t immediately obvious?
Chris:
I like the Anaïs Nin quote at the beginning of the book
‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.' That would be a great message to take, I wish I would heed it more myself! I like to have a quote for each book I do. Something that encapsulates the dilemma at the heart of the story. I would like to think this is something that can add another layer to the story. Perhaps it is a bit wordy for the young child but for the adult it adds something more and maybe it is something that can be chatted about between the adult and the child after reading the book. Whether you are a child or an adult or Anaïs Nin or even a small crab, we all have fears. And we all have a need for courage. I like that these stories can be so universal. That’s what makes picture books so special. It allows a vehicle for even very young children to understand and make sense of the world. You don’t even need language!
e: What are you working on next or what would be your dream project?
Chris:
I am working on a book about monkeys at the moment. In a way it is the opposite story to DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB! It is the story of three monkeys who are told: “Whatever you do, do not go down to the mango tree, there are tigers down there.” You can probably guess what happens.
The crab book is about a limiting fear and the monkey book is about a dangerous fearlessness! I remember talking to Jon Klassen about this because his first two 'hat books' are also a similar story told from a different point of view. I am now wracking my brain trying to see if I can retell any of my other stories from an opposing angle as it has been such a fruitful way of coming up with a storyline! The monkey book ends with something like an action film sequence ...which is so much fun to draw.
In the longer term I am working on two non-fiction book ideas. About evolution and about communication. They have been taking me years to make. When I was young I used to love to look at pictures and infographics and maps and diagrams. I want to make books that I know I would have loved to read as a child…. and books I want to read myself as an adult. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily (!) as I've said, I haven’t changed much in the last thirty years!
e: Can't wait to see more! Readers - click the image above to watch the book trailer at Chris' website.
DON'T WORRY, LITTLE CRAB. Copyright © 2019 by Chris Haughton. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, London.
and Amanda Cobbett's handmade lichens - amazing!
For instance, I'm celebrating the new illustrated (by me) edition of 
I have always thought about trying out a graphic novel. Like fully and completely. They are just so impressive to me. It is an ENORMOUS amount of work and illustration effort and I’m not fully able to comprehend the amount of time and effort it must take to create one. I have always been incredibly impressed with graphic novels and the amount of decision making that goes into them. What moment do you choose to illustrate? How do you plan for dialog? How much of these choices live with a writer vs an illustrator? It’s all fascinating to me.
