Blithering Broomsticks by Korky Paul
As you may know, Winnie the Witch and her black cat Wilbur are celebrating their 35th Anniversary. A new hardback, anniversary edition of their very first story is published and available now. We are delighted to share a guest blog from illustrator, Korky Paul.
BLITHERING BROOMSTICKS!
In 1988 Winnie the Witch won the FCBG Children’s Book Award for books published in 1987. Winnie was one, I was thirty-one. Now I am seventy and Winnie and Wilbur are celebrating their 35th Anniversary with over nine million sales in 44 languages.
I enjoyed a very privileged childhood growing up in Zimbabwe. I loved school, sport, roaming the bush-veldt, but mostly I loved DRAWING…
Our house was filled with my grandmother Edith Christie’s art works. I would study her drawing endlessly. She was my inspiration and gave me all her art materials when she got too old to draw. As a teenager I was endlessly drawing. My schoolbooks were filled with doodles, and scribbles but always “cartoony”. One school friend kept asking, “Siss-man Korky! Why can’t you draw properly? All big noses and crocodile teeth!”
Books where always in the home. Treasure Island, Jock in the Bush Veldt, Just So Stories, Lear’s Nonsense Stories, American Marvel and DC comics and my all-time favourite, Shock-haired Peter by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann. Books or comics with illustrations are what inspired me. Words never enjoyed the same fascination for me as illustrations did.
I studied Fine Arts at Durban Art School, South Africa and my first job was at an advertising agency in Cape Town. In the late seventies I fled apartheid South Africa for Europe and continued to work in advertising.
My younger brother, Donald, worked for Oxford University Press (OUP). He arranged a meeting with the Children’s Books editor, Ron Heapy. You can imagine – some bloke working at OUP, Africa Sales Division, has a brother who draws…
Mr Heapy looked at my portfolio and made photocopies. “We’ll put these on file”, he said. As I left Ron handed me a manuscript. “Do three drawings. A4 format, paperback, double staple bound and part of an Oxford reading programme. It’s about a witch that lives in a black house with a black cat. Written by an Australian called Valerie Thomas.”
A few weeks later, I return with three full colour illustrations in a large picture book format. “That’s not what I asked for!” he muttered. “I know. But it’s a great story,” I replied. “Pity to publish it as an A4…
Winnie the Witch has gone on to appear in 24 picture books, 32 chapter books, has been translated into 44 languages and sold nearly ten million copies. I am amazed and delighted.
I liken illustrating picture books to making a movie. As the artist, you are the cinematographer, the director, the casting agent, the costume designer, the set designer as well as being responsible for the locations, camera, lighting, props and continuity!
The text is the soundtrack and it’s that special combination between words and pictures that makes for good storytelling in a picture book. As in a movie, neither the text nor the illustrations can exist comfortably on their own.
In most of the picture books I’ve illustrated the author offers little or no description of the character’s physical appearance or the environment they inhabit. In a picture book I will draw it, unless there something that is key to the plot. This process requires endless scribbles, preparatory sketches, and oodles of time, but it is so much fun!
In ‘Winnie the Witch’, the writer Valerie Thomas used only one adjective to describe our heroine’s home – ‘black’. My initial sketches showed a picturesque cottage complete with thatched roof and exposed timber beams. The results were dull boring and obvious.
‘What’s the opposite of a cottage?’ I asked myself. Answer: ‘Stately Home’. Once I had hit upon this idea the story opened up for me. The real challenge lay in illustrating it all in black! This is where my classical training as a fine artist came in. When painting black add reds for a warm black, and blues for a cold black.
One of the wonderful things about being involved with such a long running series is that you meet people who have grown up with these books and loved them, and passed them on to their children…
After thirty-five years of encouraging reading, I will continue to love drawing Winnie and Wilbur’s magical, spellbinding adventures.
Winnie and Wilbur stories are available around the world and in multiple languages. These books are published by Oxford University Press.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.
