You don’t have to draw everything (even in picture books)

Emily asked us why backgrounds can be so overwhelming. So in this episode, we share lots of low-pressure ideas to make them doable (maybeee even fun).

Please enjoy Tania nearly falling asleep under a weighted blanket 🤣

Podcast Episode Highlights:

• How to stop overthinking it
• Colour tips and some good stuff Chris Haughton taught us 
• NO ZOOMING IN ALLOWED 😠 
• John Burningham
• Old Lady Baby

(rough) Timestamps:
00:00 – Emily’s question: “Backgrounds scare me – help!”
01:00 – The Chris Haughton breakthrough about colour
03:00 – Tonal tips: how to make your characters stand out
04:00 – Thin lines, wobbly pens, and keeping backgrounds soft
06:00 – The menace of digital zoom 😬
07:00 – Backgrounds = hints, not homework
08:00 – John Burningham, cut-out characters and painterly skies
10:00 – Embracing imperfection and storytelling over polish
11:00 – Blindboy’s advice: fail on purpose
13:00 – Art Club, recycled drawings, and happy accidents
14:00 – Upcoming Art Club news & picture book course teaser
15:00 – Weighted blankets, fancy deodorant, and Aesop air freshener 😌

Links & stuff:

• The Picture book course details: www.thegoodshipillustration.com/pb
• Make sure you're getting our emails for Art Club invites: Scroll to the bottom here

Bye bye bye
 x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania) 

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✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

Backgrounds and weighted blankets
===

[00:00:00] this question's from Emily. She says, I'm finding background scary. Do you have any handy tips for where to begin?

I love my pencil and ink sketches, but as soon as I think about the background in color, I. I feel like I freeze up and worry. How do I make them feel more achievable and doable? Is this a picture book person? I think so. I just guessed it could be. My mind jumped straight to our chat with Chris Horton the other day where he was struggling with color.

He really had a thing about Colory. He said he wasn't intuitive about it and he couldn't do it, which is crazy when you look at his work now color, [00:01:00] his color is so incredible. And I remember him saying that he scanned in a black and white drawing and put on Photoshop, dropped in a color in the background.

And then what did he do in Photoshop? He, oh, what you talk about this Tanya, and I can never remember the term something. Pardon the threshold. ~Yeah, ~yeah. Would that be the right word? Could be. I really dunno. Or the saturation magic. He did some magic saturation in Photoshop, of which I, ~I, ~I am not sure what he did.

And then really loved what came out when he had his black and white drawing with this color thing he did on Photoshop. ~And, ~and then he realized backgrounds don't have to be realistic. They could be any color just 'cause it's a green grass background. He can think like a designer and do a a magenta, pink background.

And that was a massive breakthrough for him. So maybe this illustrator is. Thinking what backgrounds should be rather than that, what they could be. If you let go of preconceived ideas about picture book, if this is a picture book person, picture books have got to have lovely detailed backgrounds with loads of stuff going on.

Maybe [00:02:00] you are not that kind of illustrator and you're more of a miffy illustrator like Lucy Cousins and you've got a mouse with a plain primary color background, maybe. ~Um, ~a horizon line and a plant. Yeah, and a butterfly in the sky. Just a linear, it doesn't have to be tackled with the same attention to color or detail or rendering that you've used with the character that you've created.

We're presuming it's a character. It usually is with picture book, isn't it? The more you put. In the background, the more you'll lose the character. So you've gotta try and keep the space and the structure in the image, haven't you? So less is more, basically, sometimes I'll have done a, a detailed color background, like there's something in the story that means the background needs to have a lot of stuff going on in it.

But then what I do is I think of the background as a whole. So the whole background might be tonally very similar. So the character might have like a bright red dress on and yellow tights or something so they pop forward. But the whole background might be [00:03:00] like beige gray or lilac with little tiny bits of color in.

I might have the red from the dress watered down a lot and use some pink in the background. But something about either to tonally the color of the background or the way I hold my pen in my hand is different. So the character. I might hold the pen quite firmly and it might be a stronger line. And then the background, I hold the pen so it wobbles about a bit as I draw the background.

Yeah. So you can, or, or it's a thinner line, isn't it? Yeah. You, you want things to recede behind the character. Mm-hmm. So it's either low contrast, the, like the grays you talked about, or the line is much thinner than the line you use on your character. So it looks like optically everything's going towards the back and it's cooler colors that we see, or just less detail the same way we look across a landscape.

And you can't see much detail as it recedes through the hedges and the fields and the trees until it's just simple silhouettes. [00:04:00] So even silhouettes of things. ~Mm. ~I'm thinking about Katie. We sometimes talk about how ~um, ~if this person works digitally backgrounds can become difficult 'cause you've got that evil zoom in tool.

Yes. I have to really resist if I'm working digitally going anywhere near that. Zoom in. It's so hard because it's so temp to be like, just zoom in. I draw a bird very carefully on the tree and then you pull out and your eye is just drawn straight to that. Look at that tiny fiddly bird. Read the background.

Yeah. They're going to be looked at. It's so hard I think as well when you look up picture books or other people's work and it has got really detailed full backgrounds and you might think, oh, I've gotta do that. That's what a background is. But it's sometimes just like a hint, isn't it like a sort of something to anchor them, give a bit of context where they are.

I had to get into a bookshop and pull out loads and loads of books and just have a look at how other people tackle backgrounds. Because I think often in picture books I. I don't know why this is, but a lot of people think backgrounds have got to be detailed. Oh, that's the worst thing you can do, isn't it?

You've just gotta figure out what do you actually [00:05:00] need? Is it a door that someone's about to come through, or a landscape or a staircase or whatever? Mm-hmm. And only focus on the essentials unless of course you're a hyper maximalist and your work is all about details. A bit like Katie Bell. Katie Bell, yeah.

Yeah. Our mentee ~from the, ~from the one-on-one mentor in session thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's, we had four mentees. Oh yeah. She was like a jigsaw illustrator was so detailed. Yeah. Like, where's Wally? Where's Waldo? With all the crazy detail in the background. Yeah. That was amazing that you could tell. How about she enjoys doing that level of detail?

She loved it. Yeah, she loved it. And maybe that's, you know, if your book is about creating big immersive spaces for kids to get lost in and point out lots of different things, then you're kind of flattening the space down and making everything come to the foreground. That's one way of working. But if you're trying to just hint at,~ um,~ backgrounds, you don't need all that information.

Oh, I've just lost my train of thought thing I was gonna say about backgrounds without repeating myself. And it's [00:06:00] totally gone. I'll just shout it out randomly in a minute. Okay. And interrupt you Tanya. Tanya is half lying on the sofa under a weighted blanket, so we, we need to be kind to her.

Katie's bought her weighted blanket round for me 'cause I can't sleep at night. And I thought, well, I'll just give it a little go now. But clearly my brain power's trading. I, I'm about to fall asleep any minute now. It's a parasympathetic nervous system. You're feeling soothed, squashed like you're in the womb again.

Can we just talk amongst ourselves while, oh, I know what it was. It was. The technical workflow thing. So if you work ~a, ~a little bit digitally or you've just got some,~ you,~ you only need basic digital skills for this without risking your lovely character on that page and drawing things behind it and it going wrong, and then you're ruining the whole illustration.

If you can sort of semi collage those things in like a trial, a lot of people do that, don't they? Yeah. So that it's a low risk approach to a large scenario that you can have all the different elements on separate layers, or [00:07:00] if you're working analog, maybe collage them a bit with bits of paper and place them in and out until you've got the right balance of.

Elements in the image. So your character and your central action isn't overwhelmed, but you don't have to do it in a wana. That makes me think of, I mean, that could even be the approach for the final artwork. If you think of John Birmingham, where he'll draw, draw or print a really painterly amazing landscape or a sky or something, or a wilderness, or, I'm thinking of his book Harvey Slum Berger's Christmas, one of my favorite books because he makes you say the word Harvey slum Berger so many times he can barely speak.

It's brilliant. Anyway, uh, so Father Christmas is on this mission to deliver a present to a little boy. 'cause he gets back after his huge Christmas Eve trip delivering out to all the presents, and he finds he's got one left in his bag. So he has to go back out and he has to do this huge journey. And it keeps saying Harvey s Luenberger had to go up the ly poorly mountain.

I can't remember, but you say the word Harvey s luenberger a million times [00:08:00] and all the backgrounds are, they look like. I dunno, painted in two minutes with a big fat brush and some, a bit of two different colored inks with a bit of paint in it. Um, some of them look a bit printy and then the character of Father Christmas looks like it's drawn on a separate piece of paper and cut out.

And every spread Santa is cut out of a piece of paper and stuck on these incredible backgrounds. Wow. It's so good because then when we did the one-on-one mentoring session the other day, somebody was cutting out. Oh, she her. Oh, her work was wonderful. Rachel, Rachel Bailey,~ gorgeous,~ gorgeous work, reminded me a little bit of John Burningham in that it was so full of emotion and it had a printed element and a little collagey and painterly element.

And this, this is what I was saying to her, please go away and paint some really big painterly backgrounds and plunk your characters on and have a look. That could be the final artwork. I love the DIY sound of that. Mm. Yeah. [00:09:00] Just that sort of your speed of saying, I've got a background here. I'll cut the character out mm-hmm.

Roughly and put him on, and that is finished. Mm-hmm. I mean, the joy in seeing quick handmade things now rather than overwrought over rendered. Yeah. Complex perfection. John Bur that's the thing with John Burningham as well. He is all about the feeling and the emotion and what that bit of the story,~ what,~ what you need to feel, what that bit of writing is doing.

And it, I always think he looks like he's just focusing on what is this, what does this picture need to do? And even if the drawing is weird and the hand's too big and the knees are too knobbly or whatever's going on, he, as long as it's telling the story, he's, he is, yes. That's it. Uh, he's so brave in just leaving things.

Just leaving things slightly wrong because they're doing exactly what the story needs. Whatever needs to be told on that page. Yeah. He's not got the curse of final artwork. He has not. Yeah. Yeah. It's that kind of cavalier confidence and [00:10:00] some, sometimes, previously, we were talking a couple of podcasts ago about what if you don't like the style that you think you have discovered and that you're boring.

Your work bores you. It's sometimes it's as simple as seeing something brave, almost risky. ~Um, ~spontaneous and handmade and just saying, yeah, that's it. Print 20,000 of those. That is the finished work. And when you see something like that just thrown, thrown together, it's like, wow, that works thrilling.

Yesterday I listened to the newest Blind Boy podcast and it's called something like a Message for Artists. It's that episode if anybody wants to go and find it, but in there he's basically saying, as an artist what you should strive to do.

He's not even saying, just accept this as part of the process is fail. So don't just accept failure as part of the process, but. On your venture to make something decide. He said he sits down at his desk to write his new story and he, he says, he'll think, well, I should write a story [00:11:00] about this, what would happen?

And he gets in his head about it. So then he thinks, I am definitely gonna fail. So what I'm gonna do, and he gives a great example and it's something like, oh, what does he say? He wants something like one man, two. Oh, something like pull the other man's trousers down or something ridiculous. And he, he says as soon as he's had a ridiculous idea, that is definitely a fail.

Then he's completely free to play around in that space. And then he's often, he's writing and all he is doing is messing about because the purpose is to fail and then you accidentally don't fail. So I really like, I was not saying accept failure. He's saying try it. Try and fail. Yeah. 'cause then you're doing something brilliant.

Yeah. Then you're doing something and you can edit it and fix it later. Yeah. Is this, it's all about action, isn't it? Do something rather than do nothing. Yeah. And it's so easy to hope for perfection from yourself that you become paralyzed. You don't do anything and you avoid doing the work. But I think that [00:12:00] continual making and doing and not assigning a huge amount of value to the things I'm saying all this, I dunno whether I can really do it myself.

'cause I haven't been making enough recently. But yeah, just playing and saying nothing is for the, is to be used as. A final piece. Yeah. Building in the failure really makes sense. Yeah. It's like self. I love it. You said you're not sure you do it yourself. I'm not sure I always do it myself either. I think we're lucky when those times arrive when that happens, aren't we?

It's not something you can just arrive at and do all the time. It's like art club. I feel like that happened at art club all the time. 'cause we were against the clock sort of manufactured art club to do that didn't we? Was like you like who can make loads of bad work? Let's go. Yeah. And everybody was ready for it and then made the best drawings.

Yeah. Always still want to make the big art good ship art club illustration exhibition and get everyone to send in their favorite pieces of work they did from that because. I think that lift of ~um, ~pressure, just people created so much good stuff. Yeah. Each session you'd have one drawing that you were actually proud of.

Yeah. And [00:13:00] surprised you. Yeah. I had a big pile for the recycle bin. Yeah. I hope you didn't put 'em all in recycle. You did some amazing drawings. Especially when you drew yourself looking like a lemonhead. That that one's survived. Lovely. And Helen's legendary scary granny child. Yeah. Old lady baby. My old lady baby self portraits.

It's weird. Old lady baby turns up all the time. I even turned up in real life when we're Atlona and somebody took a photo of us in this photo. Helen, her embodied old lady baby. Old lady baby. Do you remember the photo Tanya? You, I think I do remember you saying that there was a really scary picture of you put my hands doing something for Don't think you'd become monitor, book monitor or something.

You'd given some power's gone to my head and I dunno what to do. Or Lady Baby Art club. We need another art club. Is there one soon? Yes. Anything planned? Yes. 'cause we're gonna launch the picture book course soon and. We're gonna have two art clubs around that time, and I've forgotten the dates. Yeah, me two.

If you, if you're on our emails, which you should be, if you're not, if you go on our freebies on on, just go on the good [00:14:00] ship.com. Good. Sorry. The good ship illustration.com, and scroll to the very bottom of that first homepage. You can join the emails there, but we'll announce it and it'll be on Instagram talking about it as well.

It's in the next few weeks. Yeah. End of June. Yeah. 22. Oh, I, yeah. So we'll have a couple of art clubs around that. The time is ripe for art club, isn't it? Let's make some scribbles. It's away. Scribbles. Okay. So see you next week. Bye. See you there. Bye. Ready? That was good one. Yay. I always feel like we've bought ourselves loads of time when we do this.

Like, oh, that fourth one is like, that's extra. Let's all have a giant now. Then the week off work, those were four. ~Good, ~good juicy ones. They were probably over, they're longer than we've normally done thing. Yeah. Get the buck perhaps are in.

I got new deodorant and it smells really nice. I feel like it's a smell, a bit like your hair has smelled before, so you probably like it. I use that new wash. Uh, it's the same sort of smell as [00:15:00] that. Oh, is it? It's like, um, it's called. A is like Act A KT, and it smells really squi. I won't make you sniff my arm.

It smells really good.

I bought Asop a freshness spray. Oh, you can't go back now. I cannot live without a squirting it in every room. I'm walking. What's that one? The Aesop air freshener. Thats so fancy. Spread it in the kitchen and then walked through it and got in the car to pick fried up from school. And she's like, mom, you smell amazing.

Fresh. Thank you. Fresh. You've got, you've gone above and beyond. I've got Purdy and F. Oh. Oh yeah. Oh, we use that as well.