Interview with Nick Butterworth
SCBWI is proud to welcome Nick Butterworth as this year's illustrator keynote at our annual Winchester conference. With over 12 million children's books sold, Nick is a familiar name to anyone versed in British picture books. His style is synonymous with exquisitely crafted characters. But his repertoire of achievements ranges far wider still, as Mike Brownlow discovered in a fascinating and exclusive interview for Words & Pictures.
Can you tell us a little about your early years? Were you an arty child?
________________________________________________
Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.
Hi Nick. First I’d just like to say how thrilled we all are that you’ve
agreed to be our Illustrator Keynote Speaker! Speaking personally, there are
lots of well-thumbed copies of your books around our house. The Percy books in
particular were great favourites with my daughters when they were growing up.
As well as writing and illustrating your many books, you’ve also
been involved in several other areas of the business, including TV and
animation, so frankly you’re the complete package as far as we’re concerned!
We’re really looking forward to what you have to say at our Conference in
November.
Can you tell us a little about your early years? Were you an arty child?
I
don’t think ‘arty’ has ever really described me, man or boy. But I have always
loved drawing and making things. My parents weren’t arty, either, and I never
went to art school, so whatever basic ability I have has been developed through
observation and experiment. If I saw something I really liked by another artist
or illustrator, I would wonder how it had been achieved and try to do my own
version of it. I copied my older brother’s drawings of Donald Duck and Bugs
Bunny. When I discovered Ronald Searle in the Molesworth books, I tried to copy
his work. Mad Magazine was a rich source of inspiration when I was a young
teenager. I still marvel at Mort Drucker’s work. I could name a lot more
victims of my plagiarism!
Eventually
my own style began to emerge, with some of the original ‘contributors’ more in
evidence than others and, I’d like to think, just a little originality of my
own!
You have a huge back catalogue of books
that you’ve written and illustrated. But I believe you started out in a
different direction, going from school into an apprenticeship in a printing
school and shortly after that into a design firm in London – Crosby Fletcher
Forbes, the forerunner of Pentagram. What do you think you learned from taking
this route as opposed to going to art college?
First
of all, I learnt to get up in the morning! I had to be at work by eight o’clock
on a Monday morning, ready to put in a forty hour week. It was a bit of a shock
to a sixteen year old used to shorter days at school with weeks and weeks of
holidays too.
At
the NHS Printing School (a printing establishment run by the National
Children’s Home to provide a grounding in a worthwhile trade for boys from the
Home as well as to print all the publicity matter) I learnt about printing
processes.
I
took to typography like a duck to water. (I had an affinity with letterforms.
At a younger age, I had copied my brother's versions of Old English lettering
which he used to write his ‘Name, Form and Date’ on his school exercise books!)
My grasp of typo helped me secure a position with a small design unit in
London, Frank Overton Design Associates.
Frank,
as the president of the Society of Typographic Designers, was a stickler for
detail in typography and I learned a lot from him. He was well connected with
prominent designers in both America and Europe. He’d rubbed shoulders with
people like Saul Bass, Charles Eames, Misha Black, Milner Gray and Wim Crouwel.
He opened up a world of design to me that I knew next to nothing about.
Working
as number four in the pecking order of a firm comprising four people also meant
that I was fourth from the top! At the age of nineteen, when most of my
contemporaries were at art school and still some way off their first job, I
often found myself accompanying Frank to client meetings and presentations and,
before long, was going alone to take design briefs from clients and make
presentations myself. It was a very good grounding in the real world of graphic
design.
With
the benefit of this experience I applied for a post as assistant to Colin
Forbes (then of Crosby Fletcher Forbes, soon to become Pentagram) and was pleased
and not a little surprised to be chosen from forty applicants, to help
establish the new corporate identity for Cunard Line for which CFF had been
commissioned.
You and two colleagues set up your own
graphic design studio after success as a freelance. What sort of things were
you working on?
When
I went freelance, I teamed up with two old school friends. Leon, Bernard and I
had been in the same art class at school. Bernard’s leaning was towards
typography and Leon was definitely an illustrator and I was somewhere in the
middle. We were Baxter/Butterworth/Cope, affectionately known to our clients as
the BBC!
I
had the most experience and, vitally, contacts and so we picked up work from
clients I had established a relationship with. Cunard Line. The Post Office.
British Telecom. We also found ourselves working for a women’s underwear
company! The wife of our old art teacher was the advertising manager of The
Lovable Company. It was very . . .
interesting work.
Not long after that Mick Inkpen joined
your studio. How did that come about?
I
knew Mick’s elder brother, John (now an architect in Colchester) and he
enthused about his brother’s work, painting and especially his cartoons. Mick
was (and is) a bright spark, all set to go to Cambridge but decided to take a
year out and the BBC (my BBC!)
took him on as a junior in our studio. In the end he decided against taking up
his university place and just kind of stayed. He was talented and a fast
learner. When, for different, amicable reasons, Bernard and Leon went their own
ways, Mick and I continued to work together and our collaboration became even
closer when I decided to do less graphics work and concentrate on illustration.
"I thought children’s books offered a marvellous opportunity to develop a series of illustrations in a way that editorial or advertising illustration rarely did."
A few years on and you had the
publication of your first book, B.B. Blacksheep and Company. Can you remember
what reasons pulled you towards children’s books, and away from design work?
Mick
and Debbie Inkpen had a small collection of children’s books they had bought
because they liked the illustrations. I would often browse these when I visited
them. I thought children’s books offered a marvellous opportunity to develop a
series of illustrations in a way that editorial or advertising illustration
rarely did. The absence of having to have a commercial application also appealed
to me. When my son Ben was born, I became reacquainted with children’s books
from a child’s perspective and we quickly accumulated a sizable collection.
My
first foray into illustration for children was actually meant to be a series of
greetings cards based on nursery rhymes. I produced six illustrations and began
to hawk them around card publishers. One suggested my illustrations would make
a better book than cards. I duly approached children’s book publishers who
almost always had a book of nursery rhymes already on their list. The
suggestion was made that I might try them as greetings cards! I found myself
going round in a circle until, after about a dozen rejections from as many
publishers, I struck lucky with Macdonald Educational who, by some apparent
oversight, didn’t have the obligatory book of nursery rhymes!
I’m intrigued by your collaboration with
Mick. You’ve worked on many books together over the years. How do you think you
influenced each other? And what was the division of labour on the books you
collaborated on? You both write and draw so beautifully, so who did what?!
I
moved into illustration whilst Mick continued in graphics. When I was
commissioned by the Sunday Express to produce a regular strip for the
children’s pages of the magazine, I was suddenly faced with producing a story
and six or nine illustrations to go with it, every week. To relieve some of the
pressure, Mick helped by doing some of the colouring of my line drawings. He
was also a very good sounding board for story ideas as well as a perceptive and
benign critic!
From
this beginning we developed a way of working together in bookwork. One of us
would write a story. We would visualise it together and then I would draw and
Mick would colour. It was a good division of labour that only came to an end
when the close collaboration which necessitated us working in the same room,
was made more difficult by my move to Suffolk.
"‘If I gave you a million children on a Sunday morning, what would you do with them?’"
I hadn’t realised that you and Mick also
had a career at TV-AM as co-presenters of a children’s show. How did that come
about? Was it fun to do, or a terrifying prospect?
When
the Sunday Express decided to revert to using Rupert stories instead of my
Upney Junction, I found myself wondering if there was life after magazine
publishing for my strip. By chance, I came across a copy of Books for Your
Children, the magazine founded by Anne Wood. Anne had been producer of The Book
Tower for Yorkshire Television and it suddenly occurred to me that there might
be an opportunity for my stories of a group of mice living on a deserted
railway station, on TV. I cold-called Anne and was amazed by the response. She
said she had seen and liked my nursery rhyme book and that she had a note to
herself on her desk: ‘Nick Butterworth. Television’.
Anne
had recently been appointed producer of children’s programmes on TV-AM and was
looking for ‘talent’ (!) We met in a hotel in London and she asked me, in her
forthright manner, ‘If I gave you a million children on a Sunday morning, what
would you do with them?’ I waffled some sort of answer that bought me some
time. What would I do with them? I didn’t know – but I’d think of something!
Or
rather, we’d think of something. Mick and I put our heads together and once
again came up with a proposal that suited our natural abilities. Steve was
born. We invented a young boy who would feature in a story every week in a
different occupation. One week, Steve was a despatch rider. The next he might
be a lift operator, or a doctor. Once he was a lepidopterist!
Mick
wrote most of the stories. We produced the illustrations together but with key
parts left blank. This was so that when I told the stories, direct to camera, I
could draw in the missing elements to complete the pictures. It was a bit
hairy, because it was recorded ‘as live’. There was very little in the way of
editing facilities for children’s programmes at TV-AM! We’d prepare two sets of
drawing. If I mucked up after that, well, one of the takes had to be used!
Illustrative style is always a mysterious
business. Why we choose to draw noses or eyes a particular way and not another;
what proportions we give to our characters; what we guess will work best for
the intended audience, and so on. How did you settle on your own distinctive style?
Who were your main influences?
As
I said, I’m a bit of a magpie. I’ve ‘absorbed’ all kinds of styles and
techniques from observing other people’s work. These days my own identity is
more established, but I still want to experiment and try different things.
Besides
the early influence of Searle and Mad magazine, I liked Alan Aldridge’s
airbrush work. You can see an influence in my nursery rhyme book where I
created pictorial capital initials for the text of the rhymes, inspired by Alan
Aldridge’s beautiful initials in The Ship’s Cat.
I
could list those I admire more easily that identify what influence they might
have had. Michael Sowa, Bob Gill, Paul Hogarth, Janet Ahlberg, Milton Glaser,
Peter Cross, Chris Riddell, Helen Oxenbury . . . this list could go on and
on!
How do you typically start your books?
What was the genesis of Percy the Park Keeper for example? Do you keep
notebooks and sketchbooks?
Ideas
often come along at the most unexpected moments. The idea for Jingle Bells, a
Christmas story about two mice plagued by a farm cat, came to me while I was
gazing absent-mindedly over sunlit spring fields from a hotel room during the
Hay Festival.
"I have a file in which I keep all sorts of scribbled notes and drawings with ideas that have floated into my head at inopportune moments."
The
idea for Percy the Park Keeper, more conventionally, popped into my head as I
walked through my local park in central Romford. It was a wintry day and the
park was empty. When I came across the park keeper’s hut with the door open, it
struck me how cosy it looked inside on this cold and frosty morning. An idea
immediately came into my head. Someone could live in a hut like this. The park
would be his garden and the animals that live there too, would be his friends.
I went home and started to write: ‘It’s cold in the park in winter . . .’ Well,
it was. I’d just come back!
I
have a file in which I keep all sorts of scribbled notes and drawings with
ideas that have floated into my head at inopportune moments. Once when I was
jet-lagged, I’d been lying awake for ages. My mind was racing and all sorts of
ideas kept coming to me. Eventually I got up at 5am and wrote down four or five
story ideas. Amazingly, three of these have made it into books!
Percy was made into several animated
films a few years ago. How did you find that experience? Did you have much
involvement in its development from book to TV?
HIT
entertainment acquired the rights to make four half hour specials and a series
of thirteen ten-minute episodes. An inherent problem when a picture book is
animated (particularly with a half hour episode) is the inevitable need for
more material than is contained in the book. A story can become bloated, being
longer than the idea in the original book can support. Or it might be that the
input from other individuals is not entirely sympathetic to the ethos of the
book.
An
author needs to be able to collaborate and not resist each and every suggestion
from others. But he or she also needs to be able to say a firm ‘no’ when
presented with ideas that threaten to undermine the essence of the original
work. Most authors, I think, will fail on the second count more than the
first.
I
did have the right of consultation to some extent but as soon as serious money
was being spent on animation, I didn’t have much input! There were things I
liked about the final result and some things I wish I’d been able to influence
more. I learned quite a bit from the experience and it didn’t put me off coming
back for more with Q Pootle 5, although I’m glad, this time, to have been more
than simply the rights holder, authorising the process.
A few years on, and it’s the excellent Q
Pootle 5’s turn to make it to TV! He’s currently airing on CBeebies, but this
time round it’s noticeable that you’ve formed a production company, (Snapper
Films,) with your son Ben to make the series. Was that so you could retain more
control over your ideas? How
difficult an enterprise was setting up the company?
More
of this in ‘another place’ as they say! But yes, creative control was a major
factor in our deciding to form a production company. It has been a very steep
learning curve and there have been some difficult times, not least in raising
finance. But the rewards of working with my family and seeing the series take
shape have been huge. I have grown used to working alone. To suddenly be
involved with up to eighty people has called for big changes in my working
practices. I’ve even had to learn to commute all over again!
Have you other animated projects in
development? Is animation taking up more of your time these days than books?
The
short answer is, ‘yes’ but I will have to leave that as a short answer, as I’m
sworn to secrecy at the moment! But I certainly wouldn’t like to say that I’ve
abandoned books. Heaven forbid.
1 Do you do many school visits and festival
events? Do you find them enjoyable?
I
very much enjoy going into schools and to festivals. I don’t do as many as I
would like. I love sharing my enthusiasm for books, for stories, for reading,
for illustration, with . . . well,
anyone who will listen!
1 This will be like being asked to favour
one child above another, but of all the books you’ve worked on, is one closer
to your heart than others?
You’re
right. I couldn’t possibly pick one – especially, as I type this, the shelves
above me are loaded with the very books in question. They’re all listening.
They’re thinking, ‘What will he say?’
‘Who will he choose?’ ‘Me!
Pick me!’ ‘No, no . . . Surely,
it’s me! – didn’t we have a great
time when, you . . . you know . . . ?‘
Yes
we did have a great time. The best.
Many, many thanks for taking part!
________________________________________________
Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.
Fascinating journey. Good to hear jet-lag can be so creative! Thank you, Nick and Mike.
ReplyDeleteExcellent interview Mike, thank you very much for the poignant questions! Nick will be a fascinating speaker at the Conference, I can't wait!
ReplyDeleteLovely - I'm so looking forward to his conference sessions.
ReplyDeleteFantastic and inspiring exchange - thanks Mike and Nick! Fascinating to learn of the collaboration with Mick Inkpen and how story ideas out of jet lag too...Really looking forward to Nick's keynote at the Winchester conference!
ReplyDeleteSuperb.
ReplyDeleteThat was great, thank you so much Mike and Nick. I love the thought of Nick's books hoping to be picked - so feels like Percy and the park animals.
ReplyDeleteYep me too, really looking forward to the keynote!
Wonderful interview :-)
ReplyDeleteCompelling reading, great interview.
ReplyDelete