THE PUMPKIN EATER FROM PONDICHERRY

This book was a departure from anything else I had done. For starters it was the first book I had completed using photoshop, and it was one of the few books where I was happy with the reproduction in the finished book.

This departure was partly out of necessity. I had just moved house when I commenced this project, and unfortunately my studio space had shrunk to half the size of the previous. I'm still currently working in this same space, and I long for the day I can afford a bigger house with bigger rooms to produce bigger pieces.

The less materials I am dealing with, the less room I need, so I came up with this simplified method of working. All I needed to create this art was a sheet of bristol paper, a nib, black ink and fine-tip pens, and my Mac.

 The majority of work put into one picture, comes in the cross-hatching stage. So once this stage is done I have a picture that looks like this:

Then it's just a matter of scanning the image at 1200dpi, adjusting the threshold so the image becomes solid black lines on a white background. I select all the black lines in 'colour range', cut and paste into a new layer. Then beneath this layer I start adding in all my colour layers...

There's nothing complicated about my approach to photoshop. I don't try to emulate textures or brush strokes, I just use mostly flat colours. I figure if I want textures, I'll just do that the traditional way. I find it far more time-consuming and fiddly trying to mimic reality in photoshop, than actually doing it for real.

One thing I dislike about photoshop, is that the possibilities are virtually endless. Most people might find this an advantage, I don't — I actually like being restricted in certain areas. And if there are no natural restrictions, I'll create my own. For example, when I did this book I restricted myself to using just flat colour, and if I needed some sort of gradient, it had to be an unusual gradient, and not some crisp air-brushed gradient. I did the following background playing with halftone patterns, etc...

If I didn't set restrictions for myself, I'd be making tweaks to these pictures still! There is a tendency to over-produce to the point that it's just too much, and it becomes a mess, and Photoshop enables this. I'm guilty of it. I wish I drew the line with heaps of my stuff. But I hope I'm getting a bit better at knowing when to quit with a picture these days, more than I used to. Evidently, subtlety has not always been my forte...

This story was a challenge at first glance. I loved it, but I thought it was more suited to an anthology, accompanied by just one or two pictures, I didn't think there was enough to sustain a 32 page picture book. Reasons being, the story takes place in a short sequential period of time, mainly at night, the location barely changes, and the story has just two characters. I prefer stories that take place in several locations with a wide range of different characters, I don't like repetition. So when I first read this story, it seemed repetitive, not storywise, but in it's pictorial possibilities. So the challenge here was to make sure every picture was vastly different from the next. I achieved this by coming up with unusual angles and extreme close-ups...

Plus variations in colour...

The child (and narrator) of this story is not identified by name or sex, so I was free to come up with my own take on him/her. So I based the design of the child on my niece, Rachel...

She's a puckish little girl in real life, so I could see her matched equally to a marauding monster. And I couldn't star her in a book without making mention her brother, Carl. And while I was at it, why not throw in their family dog Winchester ("Winnie")...

There's a story behind the snake hanging out of her mouth, which was current at the time of drawing this picture. My brother found a brown snake in his shed at home. Not wanting to wrangle a dangerous snake, he called in a handler to remove it. By the time he arrived, the snake was nowhere to be seen. A few days later, my brother arrived home to find the snake dead, thrashed in half and lying on the driveway. He knew Winnie had got to it, and was certain he'd find her lying dead somewhere (not many dogs can kill a venomous snake and livc to tell the tale). My brother called out to her frantically, and in true Winnie fashion, she emerged slowly and timidly from under the house, the snakes blood visible on her white fur, with a look of 'did I do something wrong?'. Amazingly, she had killed the brown snake without being bit!

I should mention something about the design of the Pumpkin Eater...

The tricky balance here, was to have a character that is grotesque but still palatable to young readers. I suspect I might have failed here... The monster of the story is a nasty character, so I didn't feel he should be represented by a typical 'cutesy' monster. For one, essentially he dies at the end (ie. he's shot into space and blows up), so he can't be too pleasant, otherwise the reader will be sad to see that happen. My idea was to make the reader actually want to see him gone by the end of the book! If he looked liked Cookie Monster, it would be unforgivable to kill him off at the end!

Originally I partially based his design on a vulture, hence the scrawny naked neck and mane...

This feature was debated between myself with the publisher and author. They felt it was too ridiculous that he'd be swallowing such massive pumpkins down such a tiny neck. My argument was it is funnier, which was the whole point. The more ridiculous and impossible an idea is, the more I lean towards it. But that said, there is nothing more ridiculous than an anaconda swallowing a pygmy hippo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VryQDsx5Ad8), so this idea really wasn't a stretch (pun intended). Nonetheless, I relented and did away with the neck. I could live with the change.

I'm fond of this book, and I was very happy with how it turned out. And as is the way, the books that I'm actually happy with, happen to be the least popular with the buying public. And with a print run of only about 2,000, it was never really given a fighting chance. This book is now out of print, but fortunately I have stocked up on remaining copies. If anyone wants to purchase this book (signed), drop me a line (whackothechook@internode.on.net).