The Society of Children's Books & Illustration lovers volume 2 Sept 13 | Page 5

5 The Society of Children’s Books & Illustration Lovers – Newsletter # 2 – September 2013 Also have a look at his shop with bags, toys, rugs… lampshades! http://shop.chrishaughton.com/ A bit lost “I always wanted to do a children's book. I adapted a cute little bird that I had drawn for people tree, and I wanted to try to make a simple story about the bird meeting all the other animals in the forest. At first I had him as a clever bird who had to pass all the animals of the forest to go from the top of the trees to the bottom to feed. He cleverly passed a snake, a tiger and an elephant etc, but my editor and I wanted it to be more friendly so I thought of him being lost and meeting them that way. The bird eventually turned into an owl because I wanted his eyes to be at the front so he can make better facial expressions. So the book turned out to be totally different! But even though the story was very different some things I wanted to keep. I wanted it to be a little bit like a pantomime so that you can ask questions 'Will it be Mommy Owl?', ‘Is that Mommy Owl?’ They are the fun parts about reading books with children. I also wanted to hi de the Mommy Owl in all the pages so you try and spot her if you look carefully. The most important thing was I wanted was for it to be able to be read without words so that children can understand everything just by looking at it.” http://www.walker.co.uk/contributors/Chris-Haughton-8964.aspx Oh No, George! “…I didn’t realise it at the time but all these ideas revolved around the idea of characters somehow messing up (which i thought would make entertaining drawings) I realised it’s a lot funnier if there is intention from the character to not mess up, so in the end i scrapped clown man and sort of fused all three ideas to make the dog the comic lead character… “…I usually draw from my head without using much reference but i found myself googling ‘guilty dogs’ to see if i could find some good material. It turns out there’s a lot about this on the internet. the video below is really worth watching if you havent seen it.” You can keep reading about the whole process of creating George here: http://chrishaughton.com/george/ and do check out the video of the dog. It’s hilarious! 5 http://www.meetup.com/The-Society-of-Childrens-books-and-illustration-lovers/