Drawing Poo in the Zoo by Ada Grey

The Poo in the Zoo series is one that children will love reading and giggling along with.  Illustrator Ada Grey shares some of her highlights in illustrating this series.

Book Covers

If anyone had ever told me that my future job would be drawing Poo, I would never have believed them. But here I am, and I have to say it makes me laugh every time I sit down at my desk!

I remember buying Steve Smallman’s “Smelly Peter, The Great Pea Eater” for my daughter and reading it on repeat for about three years, so to end up illustrating such a fabulous series for him is a perfect circle!

Poo Bob sketches, Hector sketches

I knew PITZ was going to be fun when Little Tiger Press first sent me Steve’s text and asked me to sketch out how the characters might look. I was given free reign, but as you can see, Bob and Hector, and the animals, almost drew themselves.

Bright Agency – UK

Animal sketches

Bright Agency – UK

The thing that took the longest, was researching who does what sort of poo!

Kids know their stuff, and I knew that I needed to have a degree of accuracy, just in case there was an expert or two out there! Did you know that the Bare-Nosed Wombat’s poo is cubed? It’s because its food is squeezed by its intestines as it is digested, and the squeezing is stronger in some places than others. They also do up to a hundred poops a night!

Wombat and animals

Little Tiger Press

Iguana is very naughty and needed to look cheeky, but luckily, their googly eyes proved to be perfect for this. He is based on a Red Iguana, who’s latin name is Iguana iguana morph, which are actually green ones that have been bred to be orange.

 Iguana

Little Tiger Press

 

See, there is a lot of research that goes into all of this!

But sometimes, things have to be a little bit silly, because silly is fun and the Poo series has plenty of scope for that.

Inside the museum

Little Tiger Press

One of my favourite spreads is inside Hector Gloop’s Amazing Poo Museum. I had so much fun inventing all the different poos that we decided to turn it into the endpapers too!

And did you know there is an actual real-life Poo museum? It’s on the Isle of Wight!

The zoo layout

We saw more of the Zoo in book 2 – “The Great Poo Mystery”, and I had to plan the layout of the zoo in more detail and add some more animals.

I investigated penguin poo and alligator poo for this one and though pooper scoopers do exist, they are not as good as Robbie!

Robbie

Duria

http://www.sedgwickmuseum.org/education/ideas_and_evidence.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2445061)

 

The biggest help for drawing the third book, The Island Of Dinosaur Poo, came when I was investigating coprolites (the proper name for dinosaur poo). I came across an amazing picture called the Duria Antiquior By Henry De la Beche, painted in 1830.

If you look carefully, you can see two of the dinosaurs are pooping!

Dinosaurs

Storm

It was fun playing around with the dinosaurs colours, and I loved drawing the storm, but I also got to make up some dinosaur doo-doo names for the endpapers!

Endpapers

As you can see, books need to stay looking consistent over a series and I haven’t done this alone. Apart from Steve coming up with amazing ideas all the time, the super team of editors and designers (Ellie Farmer, Eleanor Wharton, Helen Chapman, Dana Brown, Rebecca Essilifie and Sarah Malley) have kept things consistent and have helped me when I’ve been stuck. Creating a book is a real team effort!

I really hope you enjoy reading the Poo In The Zoo series as much as I enjoy drawing it. Who knows where Bob and his friends will end up next!

The Poo in the Zoo series is written by Steve Smallman, Illustrated by Ada Grey and published by Little Tiger Press.

 

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.