Sarah McIntyre

Oliver and the Seawigs
Sarah McIntyre

About Author

Sarah grew up in Seattle in the United States and did her first university degree in Russian language and literature. Ten years later, she studied Illustration at Camberwell College of Art in London.

Her first UK picture book was Morris the Mankiest Monster with Giles Andreae. Her solo picture books include the bestselling Grumpycorn books, The New Neighbours, Dinosaur Firefighters, Dinosaur Police and there's a Shark in the Bath. She co-wrote and co-illustrated Jampires with her friend David O'Connell.

Her comics include Vern and Lettuce, and she wrote a regular comic for the Sunday Times called Shark & Unicorn. When she met Philip Reeve, this sparked the Reeve & McIntyre highly illustrated chapter books, which they think up together; Philip writes and Sarah illustrates, but Sarah helps develop the story and Philip helps draw the pencil roughs. These include Oliver and the Seawigs, Pugs of the Frozen North and The Legend of Kevin.

In 2015, Sarah set up the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign with James Mayhew to show how everyone benefits when illustrators are credited by name for their work. She loves seeing how starting with pictures inspires children to come up with whole new worlds and original stories. Find free book related activities on her website: jabberworks.co.uk

Sarah's most recent picture book, Don't Call Me Grumpcorn, launched in Spring 2020. Her new book with Philip Reeve, Kevin and the Biscuit Bandit - the third in the Roly-Poly Flying Pony series - comes out in September 2020.

Author link

jabberworks.co.uk

Interview

JAMPIRES

DAVID FICKLING BOOKS

SEPTEMBER 2014

JAMPIRES, the new picture book by Sarah McIntyre and David O'Connell (published by David Fickling Books), is a feast of jamminess with the delights of sherbet-snow, skyberry orchards and mountains of blueberry pie.

This is the world of the Jampires, which we explore with a little boy who is determined to find who stole the jam from his jam doughnuts!

We asked Jampires co-creator Sarah McIntyre about comics, inspiration and of course jam doughnuts....


Q: You described the 'comic jam' with David O'Connell as inspiring the picture book. How does that work and are you a regular 'jammer'?

A: My very first Comics Jam was one I set off on a LiveJournal blog page I set up for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (which is no longer active). I posted the first panel of a comic called Lunch with Hubert, and encouraged people not to spend more than an hour making their panel; ideally spending 20 minutes or less on it. (A 'panel' in comics is a scene, usually contained in the lines of a box.) So the story set off, and those of us in the blog community took turns deciding what would happen next in the story. It was so fun to watch it unfold, and none of us could guess where the next person would take it. Dave's comics were particularly well drawn and clever, and I noticed he'd been writing and drawing a long-term web comic called Tozo.

I got a bee in my bonnet to do another Comics Jam, just with him, and when we met up, we looked for a topic. An airship was flying over head, so we decided to set 'Airship' as the comic theme. We again set a time limit of an hour or less per panel (or page, in fact), and we decided we would make the story 24 pages long, in a certain format, so later we could print it up as a mini comic if we wanted. I drew a page, e-mailed it to Dave, and he picked up the story and immediately took unexpected turns with it. The comic picked up speed, and we were e-mailing several pages a day back and forth. It was tremendously exciting - I so wanted to find out what would happen next, and Dave kept surprising me by writing and drawing things I never would have come up with myself. I realised the magic in creating a story collaboratively; it was more than just two people's ideas; there was a third wonderful thing happening between us in the way the story was unfolding.

For the Airship comic, we'd been posting it online as we went, and getting feedback from the public. But for our next Comics Jam, we picked the theme of 'Jampires', and the word was so full of promise that we decided to do it secretly, not posting online, in case it turned up a good idea for a book. And again, magic happened; we were both hugely entertained by our Jampires comic (which you can read online at www.jampires.com and exists in a small-edition print run, sold at comics festivals). We packaged up our Jampires Comics Jam in a nice presentation case and brought it to David Fickling, who was instantly smitten with the concept of these little creatures who suck the jam out of doughnuts. But David Fickling thought it would be fun to publish it as a picture book rather than a comic, and as I'd been making another picture book for him, that seemed like another fun project, to adapt our comic.

Am I a regular 'jammer'? You wouldn't believe how many Comics Jams I've led and taken part in as I've travelled around the country doing events. I've led Comics Jams with groups as large as several hundred people at once. But it's also handy to pull out of my pocket when I'm at a work dinner, say, at a festival, and there's one kid stuck at a table full of adults. With a piece of paper, a pencil and a Comics Jam, it's impossible to be bored. And I love how it pulls in the oldest kids in a primary school; there's nothing babyish about a Comics Jam.

If I'm doing a picture book event and find I've been given older kids than I expected - kids who aren't quite old enough to see picture books in an adult professional context - I'll often set them off on a Comics Jam. But I try not to do it with groups of children who are under eight years old, unless each child is paired with an adult. It can be hard for many children under 8 to create something on a page that someone else can understand without them having to explain it. But paired with an adult, it can be a wonderful shared experience; the child coming up with ideas, and the adult making the ideas work in a narrative way on paper. (That said, I tried it last weekend in a group that included two teenagers with clear signs of autism, and they absolutely hated it; they didn't like losing control of their story or being forced to empathise with a character someone else had created.)

And yes, I'm always up for a Comics Jam, myself! Recently I went to Manchester and I didn't really know anyone up there, so I said on Twitter that I'd be at the pub, ready for a Comics Jam if anyone was up for it. Surprisingly, we had a good group turn out, everyone from professional comics artist to a girl just out of school who'd been brought by her mother and who wanted to find out more about comics. We drank beer and ate pizza and had fun making four-panel comics together. It's really a party game, a lot like Consequences.

On our jampires.com website we've created a printable guide for setting up Comics Jams, so anyone can learn how it's done, and teachers and librarians can use it if they like. It's a great technique to get kids storytelling and paces them well, so everyone creates a story in the same amount of time. It also teaches kids that it's not enough to have an idea in their head, but all the information needs to be right there on the paper, so they can go away and the reader can understand it without having the creator standing there, explaining things.


Q: Was it the 'comic jam' that sparked the theme of jamminess for your picture book? Is the finished book very different from your 'jamming session'

A: It's fun to make books about stuff we love, and I really, really love raspberry jam. And Dave's great at baking. Also, there's a great bakery between my house and where he used to live, and I used to swing by it to pick up treats on my way to visit him. I think we were fascinated by the way the bakers manage to get jam into the doughnuts. (On a side note, that used to be writer-illustrator Liz Pichon's job, putting jam into doughnuts!)

Yes, the picture book is completely different from the comic; only the two Jampire characters are the same, and the fascination with jam.


Q: How did you work on the text together, did you start from scratch or use ideas from your comic? What changes did you make? What happened if you didn't agree about something?

A: David Fickling felt the comic was a bit too old for the sort of picture book he envisioned, so we tried to make our picture book story more warm and cosy. We went through SO MANY drafts: 18 versions, in fact. And very often, throwing out everything and starting from scratch. Sometimes we'd use rhyming verse, sometimes not. Dave and I hardly ever disagreed about anything; we have a very seamless way of working together. It even happens when we draw; our drawing styles sort of merge together somehow. I think that comes out of mutual respect for each other's storytelling skills, and acknowledgment that the other person's fresh idea might be just what the story needs.

We did get frustrated with how many drafts we were going through, but in a way, it felt a bit like going on a university course, taking a class with David Fickling. He had this way of bringing us into the office, enthusing and pumping us up to have the guts to try writing it all over again. With anyone else, it might be dispiriting, but somehow David makes you feel that it's an exciting privilege to rewrite. I think it's his superpower.


Q: Were you writing things you wanted to draw - like the fantastic Land of the Jampires with fields of jam tarts, castles of sponge cake etc?

A: Ooo, yes. We both love world building, we both loved baked goods, so why not combine the two?


Q: Did you both illustrate the story, how did that work? How did you decide what each of the characters would look like, especially the Jampires?

A: We shared the illustration. We discovered early on, making the Airship comic, that a lot of people couldn't even tell apart our drawing styles when we were collaborating. Funnily enough, we put off for ages deciding how the Jampires would look in the comic: I drew the tops of their heads, so we knew they had little horns, but the whole story was building up to a big reveal who ARE these Jampires? We introduce them much earlier in the picture book, and we added a single character Sam ('cos it rhymes with 'jam') instead of the two children from the comic, to simplify things. In the comic, we're seeing things through the eyes of a grown-up baker, but we thought kids might relate better if the story was seen through young Sam's eyes. And perhaps a bit like Where the Wild Things Are, we wanted him to go on a journey out from his bedroom and see this fantastical place these creatures came from. (I was curious to see it myself.)

So just as we drew the comic together, we both drew the picture book: I did some character sketches, then Dave drew the thumbnails and pencil roughs; so the compositions are all his, except where I tweaked them slightly. I traced over his pencil roughs to make the finished artwork. So the illustrations are slightly different than either of us would make on our own, but I think they really work.

For the final colour artwork, I experimented with using pencil in this book instead of paints, something I hadn't tried before. And I only used black pencil, no other colours, even though the book's in full colour. I drew different layers in pencil, scanned them in, and changed the colours of each layer in Photoshop. In the past, I'd given up on pencils, because I couldn't get vibrant enough colours with them - everything looked too muted and muddy to me - but using this pencil-digital technique, I could get the zing I wanted, and control the colour palette. I'm not sure I would use it again, it felt like I was endlessly feeding the scanner with various bits and bobs; there was no single piece of original artwork to lose myself in, except what was on the screen. And sometimes I'd think, I can just do this bit of colouring digitally and save time; but when I did, the colour would look too flat, and I'd know I had to go back and scrub away to make that textured layer with real pencil.


Q: How did you go about designing the finished picture book?

A: We worked with designer Ness Wood, who was my terrific designer for my first UK picture book, Morris the Mankiest Monster, also with David Fickling. I love her aesthetic taste, and she really knows what works.


Q: Do you have a favourite spread?

A: I love the spread where the hosts of Jampires are swirling around the giant jam pot in the sky. When we thought up that image, I'd just been to see the Chinese opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, and I saw this setting as sort of a giant wonderful opera set, with its clouds and heavenly lighting effects. (Not easy to achieve with black pencil, let me tell you!)


Q: You also work collaboratively with Philip Reeve for your OUP books - what is it about this way of working that appeals to you?

A: Again, it's that thing about what we create being greater than the sum of two parts. Working collaboratively stretches us, makes us think outside of our normal confines, and we spark ideas off each other, and delight each other with surprise twists and turns of the tale. We dont seem to get stuck; one person will always have an idea. And working with those guys, their idea's almost always a good one. They're both geniuses, I feel honoured that they want to work with me. (Did you know that Dave has a PhD in science?)


Q: And we have to ask, do you like jam donuts?

A: I like them a bit TOO much. Yes. But the jam inside is the best bit; a doughnut that's sucked dry just isn't the same.


Q: You blog a daily illustration, is that quite hard to get done and why did you set yourself this challenge?

A: I used to do that, but I got so busy with book work that I've had to content myself with blogging several times a week. Sometimes I'll post drawings, but sometimes it'll be event reviews, or photos of children's drawings or comics. But I'm glad I started out by posting a drawing a day; blogging really helped me find out about other people's work, learn who I was and what I could do, and work on the areas I needed to develop. I still use old-fashioned LiveJournal as my blog base, but I link to it from Twitter and Facebook. LiveJournal is where I discovered so many amazing comics artists - Dave, Eleanor Davis, Drew Weing, Raina Telgemeier, Lucy Knisley, Will Kirkby, Kate Beaton and others - so I have a real sense of loyalty to it. Also, I have a terrible memory, and posting things on my blog is like having a mental external hard drive. I often Google things I've done to remember, say, a librarian's name, or find out what I did at a certain festival.


Q: What has been the highlight of working on the Summer Reading Challenge materials?

A: I had fun coming up with the Mythical Maze characters, particularly Medusa, Unicorn and Anansi. Some kids at Leith Library helped me brainstorm them, so they wouldn't be too traditional looking. In fact, the original Unicorn had a full body tattoo and Mermaid was a goth, so we didn't go with everything. But the kids helped make it fun. Damian Kelleher was a terrific go-between with The Reading Agency and me, and over the years I've worked with him, hes taken me out for some amazing jammy afternoon teas. And it's been brilliant getting the feedback from librarians, mostly on Twitter using the #SummerReadingChallenge hash tag. They've photographed some wonderfully creative displays, and different craft projects and activities they've come up with. And I've seen some great Medusa headdresses and one adorable library assistant with a unicorn horn. (I had to draw her.) I made a fun Medusa hat, too, for the big launch at the British Library. (I love hats.) It's been a hard year for libraries with so many closures and cut-backs, and I've been moved to see them rallying so hard to help their kids.


Q: What else are you working on, what will we see next from you?

A: Along with Jampires, this autumn I'm coming out with Cakes in Space, my next book with Philip Reeve. I have a real baked-goods theme going right now; that wasn't entirely deliberate! I'm also going up to Kendal in the Lakes District this October to take part in a 24-Hour Comics Marathon, as part of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Seven comics artists (including me) were chosen to see if we could each come up with a whole comic book in 24 hours, and then the festival will print up a limited edition. I have some ideas what I'm going to write about, but I wont do any actual drawing work on it until the clock starts. It's a little twisted - I'm going to get awfully tired - but there's something wonderful about having to do a whole project in a very limited, set amount of time. I can't get too fussy over it, I just have to DO it. In that way it has similarities to a Comics Jam. And I'm also working on another picture book for Scholastic (but if I told you the theme, Id have to kill you). Dave and I will be running the family activity area at Leeds Thought Bubble comics festival on 15 & 16 November. Were going to make it Jampire themed - Jampires present COMICS JAMTASTIC - and make Comics Jams and collaboration a big part of the activities we offer.


Q: How did you become a children's books illustrator, do you illustrate other kinds of work, too?

A: I used to think I wanted to be a fine artist - maybe a painter - but I couldn't work out how I could make a living at it, so I tried other jobs: working at a newspaper in Moscow, teaching art classes there one day a week at an international school, and running a south London art gallery with friends for six years. But I didn't like the way so much of fine art was so inaccessible to the general public, and artists so often seemed to be trying to outdo each other with who could talk the best theory without producing much to look at. That bored me, and I kept finding myself drawn back to the picture book sections of bookshops. Bookshops and libraries have always been my safe havens.

I did my degree in Russian literature, but when I moved to England from the USA, I started taking evening classes in children's book illustration, mostly from illustrator Elizabeth Harbour. She's an incredible teacher - so inspiring - and she taught me the value of working on lots of small, achievable projects, instead of trying to come up with one huge masterpiece. We made lots of little books in her class - I took the course three times - and other students from the class and I kept meeting up monthly for several years after she stopped teaching, so we could discuss our work and encourage each other. Sometime then, I went along to a SCBWI conference, met agents and publishers, got terrific feedback and realized I could DO this. SCBWI was such a help in learning how the whole publishing game works. I illustrated several books for a small publisher in the USA. And then I enrolled at Camberwell art college and did an Illustration MA with top-notch course leader Janet Woolley.


www.jampires.com : Set up your own comics jam, read the original Jampires comic that inspired the picture book, learn how to draw a Jampire, make a Jampire mask, make Jampire finger puppets!

On Twitter: #Jampires

@jabberworks, @davidoconnell, @DFB_Storyhouse

 

JAMPIRES, the new picture book by Sarah McIntyre and David O'Connell (published by David Fickling Books), is a feast of jamminess with the delights of sherbet-snow, skyberry orchards and mountains of blueberry pie.

This is the world of the Jampires, which we explore with a little boy who is determined to find who stole the jam from his jam doughnuts!

We asked Jampires co-creator Sarah McIntyre to tell us more about comics, inspiration and of course jam doughnuts....


Q: You described the 'comic jam' with David O'Connell as inspiring the picture book. How does that work and are you a regular 'jammer'?

A: My very first Comics Jam was one I set off on a LiveJournal blog page I set up for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (which is no longer active). I posted the first panel of a comic called Lunch with Hubert, and encouraged people not to spend more than an hour making their panel; ideally spending 20 minutes or less on it. (A 'panel' in comics is a scene, usually contained in the lines of a box.) So the story set off, and those of us in the blog community took turns deciding what would happen next in the story. It was so fun to watch it unfold, and none of us could guess where the next person would take it. Dave's comics were particularly well drawn and clever, and I noticed he'd been writing and drawing a long-term web comic called Tozo.

I got a bee in my bonnet to do another Comics Jam, just with him, and when we met up, we looked for a topic. An airship was flying over head, so we decided to set 'Airship' as the comic theme. We again set a time limit of an hour or less per panel (or page, in fact), and we decided we would make the story 24 pages long, in a certain format, so later we could print it up as a mini comic if we wanted. I drew a page, e-mailed it to Dave, and he picked up the story and immediately took unexpected turns with it. The comic picked up speed, and we were e-mailing several pages a day back and forth. It was tremendously exciting - I so wanted to find out what would happen next, and Dave kept surprising me by writing and drawing things I never would have come up with myself. I realised the magic in creating a story collaboratively; it was more than just two people's ideas; there was a third wonderful thing happening between us in the way the story was unfolding.

For the Airship comic, we'd been posting it online as we went, and getting feedback from the public. But for our next Comics Jam, we picked the theme of 'Jampires', and the word was so full of promise that we decided to do it secretly, not posting online, in case it turned up a good idea for a book. And again, magic happened; we were both hugely entertained by our Jampires comic (which you can read online at www.jampires.com and exists in a small-edition print run, sold at comics festivals). We packaged up our Jampires Comics Jam in a nice presentation case and brought it to David Fickling, who was instantly smitten with the concept of these little creatures who suck the jam out of doughnuts. But David Fickling thought it would be fun to publish it as a picture book rather than a comic, and as I'd been making another picture book for him, that seemed like another fun project, to adapt our comic.

Am I a regular 'jammer'? You wouldn't believe how many Comics Jams I've led and taken part in as I've travelled around the country doing events. I've led Comics Jams with groups as large as several hundred people at once. But it's also handy to pull out of my pocket when I'm at a work dinner, say, at a festival, and there's one kid stuck at a table full of adults. With a piece of paper, a pencil and a Comics Jam, it's impossible to be bored. And I love how it pulls in the oldest kids in a primary school; there's nothing babyish about a Comics Jam.

If I'm doing a picture book event and find I've been given older kids than I expected - kids who aren't quite old enough to see picture books in an adult professional context - I'll often set them off on a Comics Jam. But I try not to do it with groups of children who are under eight years old, unless each child is paired with an adult. It can be hard for many children under 8 to create something on a page that someone else can understand without them having to explain it. But paired with an adult, it can be a wonderful shared experience; the child coming up with ideas, and the adult making the ideas work in a narrative way on paper. (That said, I tried it last weekend in a group that included two teenagers with clear signs of autism, and they absolutely hated it; they didn't like losing control of their story or being forced to empathise with a character someone else had created.)

And yes, I'm always up for a Comics Jam, myself! Recently I went to Manchester and I didn't really know anyone up there, so I said on Twitter that I'd be at the pub, ready for a Comics Jam if anyone was up for it. Surprisingly, we had a good group turn out, everyone from professional comics artist to a girl just out of school who'd been brought by her mother and who wanted to find out more about comics. We drank beer and ate pizza and had fun making four-panel comics together. It's really a party game, a lot like Consequences.

On our jampires.com website we've created a printable guide for setting up Comics Jams, so anyone can learn how it's done, and teachers and librarians can use it if they like. It's a great technique to get kids storytelling and paces them well, so everyone creates a story in the same amount of time. It also teaches kids that it's not enough to have an idea in their head, but all the information needs to be right there on the paper, so they can go away and the reader can understand it without having the creator standing there, explaining things.


Q: Was it the 'comic jam' that sparked the theme of jamminess for your picture book? Is the finished book very different from your 'jamming session'

A: It's fun to make books about stuff we love, and I really, really love raspberry jam. And Dave's great at baking. Also, there's a great bakery between my house and where he used to live, and I used to swing by it to pick up treats on my way to visit him. I think we were fascinated by the way the bakers manage to get jam into the doughnuts. (On a side note, that used to be writer-illustrator Liz Pichon's job, putting jam into doughnuts!)

Yes, the picture book is completely different from the comic; only the two Jampire characters are the same, and the fascination with jam.


Q: How did you work on the text together, did you start from scratch or use ideas from your comic? What changes did you make? What happened if you didn't agree about something?

A: David Fickling felt the comic was a bit too old for the sort of picture book he envisioned, so we tried to make our picture book story more warm and cosy. We went through SO MANY drafts: 18 versions, in fact. And very often, throwing out everything and starting from scratch. Sometimes we'd use rhyming verse, sometimes not. Dave and I hardly ever disagreed about anything; we have a very seamless way of working together. It even happens when we draw; our drawing styles sort of merge together somehow. I think that comes out of mutual respect for each other's storytelling skills, and acknowledgment that the other person's fresh idea might be just what the story needs.

We did get frustrated with how many drafts we were going through, but in a way, it felt a bit like going on a university course, taking a class with David Fickling. He had this way of bringing us into the office, enthusing and pumping us up to have the guts to try writing it all over again. With anyone else, it might be dispiriting, but somehow David makes you feel that it's an exciting privilege to rewrite. I think it's his superpower.


Q: Were you writing things you wanted to draw - like the fantastic Land of the Jampires with fields of jam tarts, castles of sponge cake etc?

A: Ooo, yes. We both love world building, we both loved baked goods, so why not combine the two?


Q: Did you both illustrate the story, how did that work? How did you decide what each of the characters would look like, especially the Jampires?

A: We shared the illustration. We discovered early on, making the Airship comic, that a lot of people couldn't even tell apart our drawing styles when we were collaborating. Funnily enough, we put off for ages deciding how the Jampires would look in the comic: I drew the tops of their heads, so we knew they had little horns, but the whole story was building up to a big reveal who ARE these Jampires? We introduce them much earlier in the picture book, and we added a single character Sam ('cos it rhymes with 'jam') instead of the two children from the comic, to simplify things. In the comic, we're seeing things through the eyes of a grown-up baker, but we thought kids might relate better if the story was seen through young Sam's eyes. And perhaps a bit like Where the Wild Things Are, we wanted him to go on a journey out from his bedroom and see this fantastical place these creatures came from. (I was curious to see it myself.)

So just as we drew the comic together, we both drew the picture book: I did some character sketches, then Dave drew the thumbnails and pencil roughs; so the compositions are all his, except where I tweaked them slightly. I traced over his pencil roughs to make the finished artwork. So the illustrations are slightly different than either of us would make on our own, but I think they really work.

For the final colour artwork, I experimented with using pencil in this book instead of paints, something I hadn't tried before. And I only used black pencil, no other colours, even though the book's in full colour. I drew different layers in pencil, scanned them in, and changed the colours of each layer in Photoshop. In the past, I'd given up on pencils, because I couldn't get vibrant enough colours with them - everything looked too muted and muddy to me - but using this pencil-digital technique, I could get the zing I wanted, and control the colour palette. I'm not sure I would use it again, it felt like I was endlessly feeding the scanner with various bits and bobs; there was no single piece of original artwork to lose myself in, except what was on the screen. And sometimes I'd think, I can just do this bit of colouring digitally and save time; but when I did, the colour would look too flat, and I'd know I had to go back and scrub away to make that textured layer with real pencil.


Q: How did you go about designing the finished picture book?

A: We worked with designer Ness Wood, who was my terrific designer for my first UK picture book, Morris the Mankiest Monster, also with David Fickling. I love her aesthetic taste, and she really knows what works.


Q: Do you have a favourite spread?

A: I love the spread where the hosts of Jampires are swirling around the giant jam pot in the sky. When we thought up that image, I'd just been to see the Chinese opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, and I saw this setting as sort of a giant wonderful opera set, with its clouds and heavenly lighting effects. (Not easy to achieve with black pencil, let me tell you!)


Q: You also work collaboratively with Philip Reeve for your OUP books - what is it about this way of working that appeals to you?

A: Again, it's that thing about what we create being greater than the sum of two parts. Working collaboratively stretches us, makes us think outside of our normal confines, and we spark ideas off each other, and delight each other with surprise twists and turns of the tale. We dont seem to get stuck; one person will always have an idea. And working with those guys, their idea's almost always a good one. They're both geniuses, I feel honoured that they want to work with me. (Did you know that Dave has a PhD in science?)


Q: And we have to ask, do you like jam donuts?

A: I like them a bit TOO much. Yes. But the jam inside is the best bit; a doughnut that's sucked dry just isn't the same.


Q: You blog a daily illustration, is that quite hard to get done and why did you set yourself this challenge?

A: I used to do that, but I got so busy with book work that I've had to content myself with blogging several times a week. Sometimes I'll post drawings, but sometimes it'll be event reviews, or photos of children's drawings or comics. But I'm glad I started out by posting a drawing a day; blogging really helped me find out about other people's work, learn who I was and what I could do, and work on the areas I needed to develop. I still use old-fashioned LiveJournal as my blog base, but I link to it from Twitter and Facebook. LiveJournal is where I discovered so many amazing comics artists - Dave, Eleanor Davis, Drew Weing, Raina Telgemeier, Lucy Knisley, Will Kirkby, Kate Beaton and others - so I have a real sense of loyalty to it. Also, I have a terrible memory, and posting things on my blog is like having a mental external hard drive. I often Google things I've done to remember, say, a librarian's name, or find out what I did at a certain festival.


Q: What has been the highlight of working on the Summer Reading Challenge materials?

A: I had fun coming up with the Mythical Maze characters, particularly Medusa, Unicorn and Anansi. Some kids at Leith Library helped me brainstorm them, so they wouldn't be too traditional looking. In fact, the original Unicorn had a full body tattoo and Mermaid was a goth, so we didn't go with everything. But the kids helped make it fun. Damian Kelleher was a terrific go-between with The Reading Agency and me, and over the years I've worked with him, hes taken me out for some amazing jammy afternoon teas. And it's been brilliant getting the feedback from librarians, mostly on Twitter using the #SummerReadingChallenge hash tag. They've photographed some wonderfully creative displays, and different craft projects and activities they've come up with. And I've seen some great Medusa headdresses and one adorable library assistant with a unicorn horn. (I had to draw her.) I made a fun Medusa hat, too, for the big launch at the British Library. (I love hats.) It's been a hard year for libraries with so many closures and cut-backs, and I've been moved to see them rallying so hard to help their kids.


Q: What else are you working on, what will we see next from you?

A: Along with Jampires, this autumn I'm coming out with Cakes in Space, my next book with Philip Reeve. I have a real baked-goods theme going right now; that wasn't entirely deliberate! I'm also going up to Kendal in the Lakes District this October to take part in a 24-Hour Comics Marathon, as part of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Seven comics artists (including me) were chosen to see if we could each come up with a whole comic book in 24 hours, and then the festival will print up a limited edition. I have some ideas what I'm going to write about, but I wont do any actual drawing work on it until the clock starts. It's a little twisted - I'm going to get awfully tired - but there's something wonderful about having to do a whole project in a very limited, set amount of time. I can't get too fussy over it, I just have to DO it. In that way it has similarities to a Comics Jam. And I'm also working on another picture book for Scholastic (but if I told you the theme, Id have to kill you). Dave and I will be running the family activity area at Leeds Thought Bubble comics festival on 15 & 16 November. Were going to make it Jampire themed - Jampires present COMICS JAMTASTIC - and make Comics Jams and collaboration a big part of the activities we offer.


Q: How did you become a children's books illustrator, do you illustrate other kinds of work, too?

A: I used to think I wanted to be a fine artist - maybe a painter - but I couldn't work out how I could make a living at it, so I tried other jobs: working at a newspaper in Moscow, teaching art classes there one day a week at an international school, and running a south London art gallery with friends for six years. But I didn't like the way so much of fine art was so inaccessible to the general public, and artists so often seemed to be trying to outdo each other with who could talk the best theory without producing much to look at. That bored me, and I kept finding myself drawn back to the picture book sections of bookshops. Bookshops and libraries have always been my safe havens.

I did my degree in Russian literature, but when I moved to England from the USA, I started taking evening classes in children's book illustration, mostly from illustrator Elizabeth Harbour. She's an incredible teacher - so inspiring - and she taught me the value of working on lots of small, achievable projects, instead of trying to come up with one huge masterpiece. We made lots of little books in her class - I took the course three times - and other students from the class and I kept meeting up monthly for several years after she stopped teaching, so we could discuss our work and encourage each other. Sometime then, I went along to a SCBWI conference, met agents and publishers, got terrific feedback and realized I could DO this. SCBWI was such a help in learning how the whole publishing game works. I illustrated several books for a small publisher in the USA. And then I enrolled at Camberwell art college and did an Illustration MA with top-notch course leader Janet Woolley.


www.jampires.com : Set up your own comics jam, read the original Jampires comic that inspired the picture book, learn how to draw a Jampire, make a Jampire mask, make Jampire finger puppets!

On Twitter: #Jampires

@jabberworks, @davidoconnell, @DFB_Storyhouse

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