Starting again

I’m working on new board books. They always come out in pairs. The first one is about a snail and it’s been finished for some time. The other one is about a mouse and about…that is the problem. We wanted it to be about seasons of the year, but then I thought I can do better than that.

Last week I had a meeting with my editor Denise Johnstone-Burt. Denise is really nice and she is a friend, but she is also a great editor and so it didn’t take long before she said: ” Look Petr, it’s not good enough. It simply doesn’t work”.

What do you do in a situation like this? You excuse yourself, go around the corner, cry a bit, come back and admit that you actually thought the same but were afraid to admit it to yourself.

After that everything is much easier. I went home and changed the book. It was easier than I thought it would be. It’s always good to have a proper chat about your work. Being just with your thoughts and pencil can be a lonely job.

Since that meeting  I have had permission to get on with the final work. The part of my job I like the best. I will get on with it as soon as we finish decorating my daughter’s room.

Last Saturday I also attended Young Librarians Group conference in Aston University in Birmingham. I was doing a short talk together with two young artists Yasmeen Ismail and Tom Percival. They both are very talented and I could listen to them talking about their work much, much longer than the time schedule allowed us.

Tom was mentioning his latest picture book “Herman’s Letter” and was also showing an animated trailer for the book which he did himself! It was brilliant.

It was great to see Yasmeen’s sketches and see how she worked on the book “Time for Bed Fred!” Yasmeen’s illustrations are stunning.

I was talking about the importance of board books and picture books and at the end I read Elephant. I thought the librarians deserved a story at the end of the day.

Admiring Yasmeen’s illustrations, I found something interesting . Yasmeen’s Fred is having a bath in the same bath as my Elephant! I hope they changed the water.

I’m sure we are not the first and the last illustrators who put animals into the bath, but the fact that we thought that a pink bath with golden legs is best for our pets is rather interesting. I liked that.