Sam Thompson and Anna Tromop Interview
Wolfstongue and The Fox’s Tower are written by Sam Thompson and illustrated by Anna Tromop. In this interview, this creative duo chat with each other about their collaboration. It’s a great way to gain insight into their respective talents and processes.
SAM:
Hi Anna. We’ve been invited to have a conversation about working together on two books, Wolfstongue and The Fox’s Tower, for which I wrote the text and you drew the illustrations. Wolfstongue (which was published in 2021) tells the story of Silas, a boy who befriends a wolf and discovers a world of speaking animals called the Forest. The Fox’s Tower (published in October 2022) tells a new story in which Silas is a grown-up, and his daughter Willow in turn finds out about the Forest: when Silas is kidnapped by foxes and taken to the strange tower where they live, she has to follow and rescue him.
From my point of view, the process of collaboration was very enjoyable and rather magical. Once I had written the story, I sent it off to you and our editors at Little Island, and you promptly sent back sheets of sketches showing lots of options for scenes that you could illustrate. We discussed which ones we liked best, and you worked them up into more detailed sketches and then into the finished illustrations. Honestly, as the writer, it just felt like a treat to have an artist imagining my stories so vividly, giving faces to my characters and shape and detail to my scenes. Each new batch of sketches was exciting and inspiring to see.
That was my experience. How did the process work from your point of view?
ANNA:
Hi Sam! I also really enjoyed working on this. The process was a little different compared to the first book – then I got the completed manuscript up front and a detailed brief from the publisher about what scenes they wanted depicted and occasionally reference photos. For the second book we’d already established a visual language that needed to stay consistent, and they were more open to letting me pick scenes to illustrate – which was a real treat!
SAM:
Yes, the two books were two different processes. With Wolfstongue, as you say, I had finished the writing before you began the drawings – I wrote the book not knowing if it would find a publisher and never considering the possibility that it would be illustrated. With The Fox’s Tower we knew from the start that the pictures would be integral, and it felt much more as though the writing and the illustration were going on side by side and feeding into one another. The environments of the tower-city and the forest play a big part in the story, so seeing them take shape in your sketches really did shape the descriptions in the text. The way that the illustrations often focus on background elements and small details gives depth to the setting and makes it feel like a living world, which I love.
ANNA:
There’s always so much descriptive language in your writing so there was lots to choose from. I also find there is so much atmosphere in this book – from dark forest to the dirty city – and I think to try and keep that magic, we often ended up deciding to depict little background scenes, details and architectural elements, especially for the less tangible elements of the story. Hopefully that adds to the world building, without taking away that freedom of interpretation you have when you read a book.
Is the atmosphere something you were intentional about from the beginning, or did it evolve from the surroundings in the story?
SAM:
I did have definite intentions about that from the beginning. That’s always the case with fiction-writing, for me – wanting to capture a particular mood or atmosphere might sounds like a vague ambition, but it’s usually one of my main motives for writing a story. I think one inspiration for The Fox’s Tower was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, in which a huge castle is evoked in an incredibly solid, vivid way – I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, in which the story becomes the embodiment of an amazing physical structure. I’m not saying The Fox’s Tower gets anywhere close, but it was part of the motivation!
Another source of inspiration for the book’s settings was the art of M. C. Escher: I wanted the Tower to feel like the strange buildings that Escher designed. Like Peake, I suppose, Escher had a strong sense of how the spaces and structures you inhabit shape your reality.
What about you: were there any artists who specifically inspired your illustrations for these books?
ANNA:
It’s really funny that you mentioned Escher, because I also referenced his working on some of the interior illustrations – one double spread in particular, without telling you which one. There are so many artists I admire, but to keep it to a few; I adore the illustrations for “A Monster Calls” by Jim Kay and the work of Levi Pinfold, Rovina Cai and Shaun Tan. There are so many more, but especially story and texture inspire me – and I try my best to bring some of that into my own work.
SAM:
Now I’m trying to work out which of the double spreads is particularly Escher-inspired… there’s the amazing one where a giant raven is breaking apart and turning into hundreds of tiny foxes, which to me echoes some of Escher’s tessellations, but there’s also one of Noble the Lion on his balcony, in which you’ve handled the perspective on the architecture in a way that reminds me of Escher drawings like ‘Belvedere’ and ‘Waterfall’. Those are my guesses!
I wanted to ask you about the style in which you draw the animal characters in both Wolfstongue and The Fox’s Tower. One of my favourite things about the illustrations is that the animals are not humanised – even when they are doing human-like things, as the story sometimes requires, they always look like animals, and they don’t have human expressions on their faces. I think this is important, because one of the ideas running through the books is that humans are all too ready to see animals as reflections of ourselves, and we need to pay attention to notice that animals have their own ways of being which are separate from ours. It seems to me that the illustrations express this idea. But I wanted to ask how you went about finding a style for them – what sort of process does that involve?
ANNA:
The publisher was clear from the beginning that the animals were real animals and not anthropomorphistic. I’m glad you see them as such! For the most part that was a pretty straightforward process, where I made sure I used real foxes when I needed a reference rather than humans. Some of the drawings (and especially crowds) were trickier, as my thinking kept defaulting to human behaviour. I guess the ‘style’ for the books came pretty naturally out of that – grounded in realism, but not bound by it. I love working traditionally so after the sketches and compositions were approved by you and Little Island, I’d paint them in black watercolour. The rest I finish digitally by adding texture and highlights – either watercolour or monoprint. It’s a bit like a digital collage piecing the bits together, but I like having it grounded in physical materials.
SAM:
It’s fascinating to hear about the stages of the process. I can’t help thinking of it by analogy with the stages of writing fiction, from first draft with a pencil and notebook to final revisions on screen… but of course the comparison also shows how each art-form has its own nature, and one doesn’t map perfectly on to the other.
Which also applies to your point about animal characters with human behaviour. When I was writing the story, I was aware that I was creating a contradiction, insisting that the animals were animals, but also having them behave like humans – this contradiction is an important tension in the book, and in writing you can keep just enough ambiguity in place to make it work. But I imagine this makes a challenging task for the illustrator, when you have to make foxes look fox-like but also show them doing human things like riding on trains!
For me, that’s an example of why the text and images go so well together – they reveal new aspects of one another, and I always feel that the pictures teach me a lot about the story I’m telling.
We’d better finish up – but before we do, could you tell me anything about the projects you’re working on now?
ANNA:
My current work deviates a bit from children’s books – I’m doing a cocktail menu for a bar in Oslo, and I also have a packaging project for a wine importer. Variation is key to keeping things interesting I guess! You?
SAM:
My main writing project at the moment is a third Wolfstongue book, which is provisionally titled The Forest Yet To Come, and I hope will offer some interesting possibilities for illustration…
Thanks Anna, good to speak to you!
Wolfstongue and The Fox’s Tower are published by Little Island Books and are available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.