Creating Characters for Mabel and the Big Wide World by Jane Porter

We are delighted to share a blog from illustrator, Jane Porter about her illustrations in Mabel and the Big Wide World, published with Otter Barry Books.

 

Creating characters for Mabel and the Big Wide World, Otter Barry Books

When I was invited to illustrate Paul Stewart’s touching and tender text for Mabel and the Big Wide World, I knew I would be able to have a lot of fun creating the characters. Mabel is a mouse, and she has numerous brothers and sisters. These siblings play an important role in the story, gently encouraging shy Mabel to overcome her fears of the big outdoors.

But how do you distinguish a family of mice from each other? Mabel is the smallest (until the very end of the story, when we meet even littler Marco), so her size helps her to stand out – but I really wanted to do more.

When you are an illustrator, there are plenty of opportunities to play with the story (without changing it, of course), so one of the first things I did was decide to focus on five siblings – and give them all names to help distinguish them in my own head. It’s not essential to the story, but I liked the idea that children reading the book would be able to follow each of these additional characters through the pages.

I gave them all accessories, and slightly different features, and in my imagination, I feel I know each of them quite well… there’s Marjorie with her handbag, little nose and neat ears; flamboyant Marcel with his raspberry beret; long-legged Millicent with her blue beads; little eager Martin with a bow on his tail; and exuberant Max with his turquoise neckerchief.

Working in collage meant that I had to be careful to keep colours consistent. I went to the art shop and bought different shades of brown and grey card, and used this to make a ‘master’ version of each mouse in my sketchbook. The fur for each mouse is hand-painted in gouache, so I made notes on which colour I used.

I then labelled old takeaway tubs with the name of each mouse, and kept all the scraps I’d need to make them over and over again (I’ve just counted and there are 106 mice in the book – talk about a labour of love!!). This sort of systematic approach is definitely something I’ve got better at with experience.

One of my favourite pages is when Mabel has lots of new, younger siblings – there are 16 mice on this spread alone. Paul didn’t indicate how many siblings there were, so maybe I got a bit carried away…but I really enjoyed making the two mice asleep in a glove.

One of the reasons I love working in collage is that you can almost animate the characters – moving the legs, arms, ears and tail until you have the body language and mood just right. It does however make it painstakingly slow to do – and that’s before I started on the scenery…

You’ll find all the mice in the endpapers of the book – and if you’d like to see more of the process, take a look at this video:

 

And if you are interested in finding out more about my picture book process, do sign up to my free Substack newsletter here: https://janeporter.substack.com/about

 

Views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.