Spring 2020

Welcome to Sketching Weakly!

Well Spring is really Springing, and here at Sketching Weakly we’ve been trying to learn to recognise more birds. At the top here you can see some of the birdlife from the cover of Money-Go-Round – written by Roger McGough with pictures by Mini.

If you want to do a bit of bird-spotting out & about or in your garden, here’s a handy Spotter’s Guide to download and print.

Click on the images below to download a pdf.

Spotter’s Guide Front

Spotter’s Guide Inside

You might be feeling like making something. Here at Sketching Weakly we’ve been trying out making flying birds.

Herbie made realistic ones and Mini just made them up. Here they are being made:

If you want to make some, here’s a pdf you can print out.

Bird Template

And it’s 75 years since the publication of Astrid Lindgren’s much loved book Pippi Longstocking. Mini has been doing new pictures for the paperbacks of the three Pippi books, and they’re out now.

Here’s Mini’s recipe for drawing Pippi.

So do go and have a look at more on Sketching Weakly. You can find out about Mini’s books. You can download incredibly fiddly

You can send Mini a message.

Read Mini’s post about the world of Wind in the Willows.

01 Toad
11 Sketch

Read about the making of the Last Wolf.

rabbitson crop

Find out about the Perils of being a Picture Book Toy.

31a Insetti

Are you an insect fan?

Have a look at this post about our arthropod relatives.

Are you still an insect fan? You may want to buy a framed Meet The Relatives print.

Print03 Cpn P

More Nature

Continuing Sketching Weakly’s ongoing mission to Rule the World. This post is continuing from Less Carbon Dioxide, and If Sketching Weakly Ruled the World....

Nature is our climate crash mat. Nature, in so many ways, can help buffer the world against climate change. From forests producing rainfall and sequestering moisture to urban trees cooling and shading their local area, to flood prevention, to pollination, to minibeasts controlling pests on crops, nature can increase our climate-change resilience. And boosting nature is always a WIN-WIN – because you get the flood prevention/rainfall/shade/habitat/etc PLUS the cascades of animal life and beauty that humans love, and the resilience of having more biodiversity to adapt to a changing world..

Climate change is going to hit nature – there will be moving temperature zones, changing habitats – so if animals can’t move, they’ll die out in that area. So we need connected habitat everywhere for our nature to move around to where it needs to be.

Our relationship with nature has changed. Back in 1532 Henry VIII’s Preservation of Grain Act made it compulsory for every man, woman and child to kill as many creatures as possible that appeared on an official list of ‘vermin’. Virtually all wild animals were on the list: otters, beavers, hedgehogs – even kingfishers. That kind of wildlife massacre would be unthinkable now.

So why does nature still get wallopped?

The main culprits are generally agricultural practices and land-use change. Wild habitat gets converted into farmland. And intensive farming practices leave no space for wild habitat. Roads fragment habitat. Housing developments often feature more car parking space than habitat.

An example of a rather tarmac-heavy devopment: OK, so where are the trees going to grow here?

I’d suggest three changes to help create more space for nature. These changes all involve

A National Planning Policy Framework that puts habitat-protection and creation at the heart of planning developments.

An Agriculture Bill that fosters farming practicies that are wildlife-friendly.

A Packaging Revolution that makes it easy to buy products that have been produced in a biodiversity-friendly way.

1. The National Planning Policy Framework: the way we build things

At present, the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has, at its heart,“a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan making and decision taking.” But sustainable development is a slippery concept; in my opinion development is ‘sustainable’ if it can continue for ever at that level with no loss of biodiversity. But if you are gradually increasing the amount of built over land – the end result must be gradual loss of nature. I’d propose a change of emphasis, from a golden thread to a green thread: I propose we build for biodiversity: we put nature at the heart of planning. Established habitat should have extremely high value; destroying ancient woodland and green belt land should be an unthinkably expensive thing to do. We should plan for as little tarmac as possible – cars can be parked on all sorts of surfaces. Developments should conserve established habitat and build around established trees and hedgerows. After all, somebody already lives there. Green belt land should not be converted into built developments: green belt land is exactly the kind of green space most treasured by people as it is close to where settlements of people live. It’s not ours to nibble away at and pave over – it is our gift to future people so they can live close to nature too. It’s ever-tempting to develop green belt land because it’s cheap to convert and will be the type of place that people will like to live – but that takes something we all share and converts it into a one-off profit that is now out of the shared commons – so it is a robbery from all of us and from people of the future.

The present NPPF requires that councils set aside land for building new housing upon for the next 5 years. This just isn’t sustainable UNLESS the land set aside is land that has been built upon already. We need to become the first animal ever to voluntarily limit our own effects on the world, and tread more lightly and imaginatively on our planet.

Biodiversity is our Green Infrastructure – it can buffer us egainst extremes of flooding and heat. It is so valuable, but it’s not factored properly into economic decisions – it’s a classic market failure situation. To address this – we need legislation. So I would propose a NPPF with boosting biodiversity at its heart, with a mandate to measure biodiversity and land-use change.

2. The Agriculture Bill: the way we farm animals

Some things happen because it’s free to do them. There are some ways of farming that are absolute planet wreckers. Here are some:

Intensive animal farming: if we saw it we wouldn’t like it. It’s only allowed to happen because it’s invisible. Animals are kept indoors or on feed lots in huge numbers, living miserable lives. These type of industrial ‘farms’ are called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. And they’re not just in other countries: we have them in the UK. These animals are fed planet-wrecking foodstuff like soy grown on deforested land. The animal density makes them a hotspot for disease and the overuse of antibiotics. They’re unpleasant to live near to, and generate huge quantities of animal sewage which has to go somewhere. This is total madness, and just plain cruel. And it’s so we can have cheap food. But this cheap meat has a massive real price-tag in animal suffering, disease and destruction of habitat. I’d include trawling and other intensive fishing practices in this destructive intensive farming group, as well as fish-farming of predator fish like salmon.

We can’t afford to farming these ways any more, it’s time to move to properly sustainable farming practices.

We can can make UK agriculture a model for planet-friedly farming to be really proud of – farmers are already trying to do this, and the UK landscape is incredibly suitable to animal-friendly farming.

So what do we want more of?

Things like:

In the sea: the marine farming of kelp, mussels and oysters that creates habitat for other sea live to thrive.

Farming with biodiversity as its friend, leaving field margins wild and leaving some waste around to feed farmland birds; using natural predators to help control unwanted pests, farming to boost soil health, farming animals where they can live a natural life in the landscape, allowing trees to grow to boost biodiversity and help manage water in the landscape.

Farmers often try to do these things anyway – but they also often have to compete on a level playing field with others who farm intensively to produce food more cheaply.

There’s a new Agriculture Bill travelling through parliament at the moment. Our new agriculture bill needs to reward farming for biodiversity and reward growing our green infrastructure to be our climate change crash mat – and it looks like it broadly will do that, with a ‘payment for public goods’ ethos rather than the EU CAP payment by quantity of land held. But we also have to use the same standards to measure farmed imports that enter our country too, or UK farming will be fatally undermined.

And we can reward nature-friendly farming practices another way at the same time by making it easy to buy planet-friendly products, with….

3. A Packaging Revolution: make ethical buying choices easy to do

SORROW AT THE SUPERMARKET

I am a hasty impatient shopper who doesn’t have the time and diligence to check out the supply chains for all the products I buy. I want to be able to wander into a supermarket and instantly be able to choose the products that are good for the planet.

Government action stepped in and revolutionised the packaging of cigarettes. We can all agree that cigarettes are pretty bad for human health. Now cigarette packets look so grim, it’s impossible to buy them without being aware of what you’re buying into. But intensive agricultural practices are killing our planet’s biodiversity. It’s another robbery.

Packaging is hugely influential. There’s been an enormous success in egg-packaging: legislation to require clearly stating the conditions hens were raised in has really boosted demand for free range and barn-raised eggs.

At the moment there are certain symbols you can look for on farmed products: there’s the Soil Association mark, RSPCA-acccreditation, the Red Tractor mark and the Lion Brand symbol. The first two do ensure environmentally-friendly or animal friendly farming. The second two ensure a moderately basic amount of animal welfare and ensure the origin is British. Compassion in World Farming is calling for much more explicit animal-product packaging that really shows the conditions the animals lived in.

But the buyer still has to do a lot of fine-print reading, plus the labelling only applies to animal-products, and I want to buy into farming for biodiversity too.

What if there was a symbol – say an Ethical Earth symbol, that could be put on all packaging?

Maybe something like this?

The ethical farming practices to earn the Ethical Earth Symbol would need to be agreed upon by a panel which would need to be unpartisan and have the interests of the planet and its future at heart, and also the interests of the animals farmed. Practices might include: nature-friendly farming with biodiversity as its friend; farming where animals live in a natural way in a natural habitat; farming that boosts biodiversity and creates more habitats on land and at sea. Achieving organic status is very difficult; Ethical Earth status could be less ‘all or nothing’, it could be more ‘every little helps’, with a broad menu of biodiversity friendly farming practices to choose from that would add to gaining Ethical Earth status, without having to tick every box.

And just as importantly, there have to be certain farming practices that disqualify you from achieving the Ethical Earth symbol. These would have to be agreed, but I’d suggest: animals stocking densities beyond a certain level, animals living in conditions where they are unable to express their natural behaviour, animals fed on products that have caused deforestation.

So, if you farm in a nature-friendly way, that boosts habitat and biodiversity, and is not cruel to animals, I should be able to see that easily on your product on the supermarket shelves, and I might be prepare to pay more for it. Cheap food is often just food where the costs have been passed on to everyone and people of the future in degradation. This is possible because packaging hides the truth about where the food came from.

There’s amazing amounts of data available nowadays – it’s possible to track individual animals through supply chains; this could help in the earning of an Ethical Earth symbol. At the same time, to push change harder, there could be an Unethical Earth hazard symbol that you have to put on your packet if you haven’t achieved an Ethical Earth standard. It ought to be possible to request Ethical Earth-rated products only when you do your online shop. Having the Ethical Earth symbol or the symbol of not-having-achieved it could be mandatory on all food packaging, so you could buy Ethical Earth chocolate biscuits – if it’s possible to make such a thing. And that means with my buying choices I’m now supporting producers in other countries who are farming sustainably and not destroying rainforest habitat.

On the supermarket shelves, the world and its biodiversity is on sale. A Packaging Revolution could enable everything you buy to be a vote for what you want more of. When you choose the Ethical Earth symbol – you could be buying into a better planet.

Making it easrier to choose who to buy….?

We can’t wait for all the world to agree. We have to lead by example. We have to model how to be good citizens of the Earth – by making less CO2, and do our part in protecting and boosting the nature on these islands, and making it wilder and better. It requires enlighted policy-making by a government that is acting in the interests of Biodiversity and the future inhabitants of Earth.

Meet the Relatives

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

01 FLY

Today’s post is about all things insect. So: grit your mandibles, flex your feelers and close your compound eyes, we’re going in…

Meeting the Insect Face

In 1665 Robert Hooke published a perspective-changing book of pictures, Micrographia.02a Micrographia - Fly

02b Micrographia - LouseLooking through a microscope he could see further than anyone ever could before, and he showed us this tiny world of everyday things made enormous and wonderful, with huge fold-out pages. People were amazed by Hooke’s book – Samuel Pepys stayed up all night marvelling at it.02 Micrographia - Flea

The everyday pest is revealed as beautiful; the flea is ‘adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour’ and ‘multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills.’ Hooke also draws the mind-boggling face of a fly. And we find the insect face is hard to love.03 Micrographia - Fly Face

It doesn’t map that well onto the tetrapod look. It’s those mouthparts. The flea has at least a nice moustache – but then – HELP! – it has a pair of legs growing out of its chin. Segments, exoskeletons and too many legs are also not ideal for building our empathy with arthropods.03a flies It is basic human behaviour to feel disgust at insects – no doubt due to instincts of self-preservation against contagion. Lots of insect life cycles are frankly disturbing – especially the parasitic wasps. Most of human history has been a battle against innumerable critters out to infest you & contaminate YOUR FOOD.

Here are some sketches of young locusts and cockroaches at London Zoo.04 locusts

But how does it feel to be an insect? Does it feel like something to be an insect? Some research seems to indicate that bees may experience different emotional states – emotions are useful for instigating behaviour – and it appears that dopamine plays a role in bee decision-making – as it does for us. It could be that emotions are essential for creating all behaviour so all animals that have behaviour are experiencing emotions – so life feels like something for all of them. No-one is a mindless automaton.05 tree of life

As fellow organisms on the Great Tree of Life, insects and us are related, but our branching apart is very distant. The Last Common Ancestor of us & insects was something Pre-Pre-Cambrian, something that maybe lived between 600 and 700 million years ago, and we share with it the invention of bilateral symmetry. No-one has found that ancestor yet, so here is a Kimberella who might have been a bit similar, looking like a cross between a macaron, a sea-slug and a toasted cheese sandwich.06 Kimberella

Picture Book Insects

So, who has crossed over the human-insect divide (that empathy chasm) and involved insects in their picture books? Here are a few of my favourites. Do tell me yours!

Ant & Bee    Ant and Bee 02

I remember having these little books when I was small. I found the small size and relatively large text quite exciting, especially as some words would be picked out in red.

 

Here is Ant tucked up ill in bed. 07 Ant & Bee

Here are some incredible geometrical cakes from when Ant and Bee go shopping.08 Ant & Bee go shopping

Tadpole’s Promise (Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross)Tadpole's Promise

Where water meets willow two creatures meet. Using the page fold to show the intersection of air and water, amphibian meets insect and both must metamorphose.

I am so glad that, as a mammal, I do not have to undergo this sort of utter transformation.09a tadpole 01

 

Du Iz TakDu Iz TakBy Carson Ellis. 10 DU IZ TAK

Insecty creatures find a shoot and tend it, building an extravagant plant house which gets beset by spider and bird, flowers and wilts. 11 DU IZ TAK Like tadpole’s promise, the cast of insects are caught in the cycles of nature and changing seasons, but these ones end with new beginnings and lots of new shoots sprouting.11a DU IZ TAK-character studies

The insect ones speak their own language but you can pick it up…I think they may be swearing on this page:12 DU IZ TAK

Here are some more beautiful insects:

a buzzing meadow garden from Suzy Barton’s Butterfly Dance13 butterfly Dance,

a humming insect Soup Kitchen from Helen Cooper’s Delicious,14 Delicious Bugs

and the most friendly-and-engaging-ever critters here by Yuval Zommer.15 yuval zommer

coversGarden Quest

On holiday on a Greek Island I found this magnificent beetle & handsome grasshopper. 16 Grasshopper and BeetleWhat would they say to each other? What adventures could they have? I imagined them going on holiday to Mount Zakinthos, perhaps eating a large Greek Salad washed down with an unwise amount of Ouzo and then an ill-fated boat trip…17 Grasshopper and Beetle02

I wondered about a story for them; perhaps Grasshopper could be Don Quixote to Beetle’s Sancho Panza. Maybe a Quest that takes place all in one garden, with the tiny insects travelling from one end to the other, beset with adventures and dangers. Well, as often happens, this didn’t really seem to work.19 in the tree

20 the table But then I was asked to make some pieces for the John Radcliffe Hospital Audiology Department. The idea was to make something engaging and distracting for young patients, with lots of details to spot on repeat appointments. So I tried to turn Grasshopper and Beetle’s Garden Quest into a picture-story for a wall. I thought I could make panoramas of a garden world full of minibeasts to spot. Playing around with tracing paper I wanted to make something multi-layered.21 tracing 01 small22 tracing 02 small

It turned into three panoramas which really go from right to left down a garden (the opposite way to a book).

23 RHS Panorama SMALLGrasshopper and Beetle find a label for El Dorado honey on the compost heap.24 CENTRE Panorama SMALL

They take it back to their home in the grass then go in search of it, 25 LHS Panorama SMALL

discovering a honey picnic under the trees.

26 Pot house

Critters under a broken pot

27 GH & B house

Grasshopper and Beetle’s meadow home

28 GH & B travelling

Questing

29 Wasp honey

El Dorado honey attracting attention

INSECTAGEDDON

Nowadays there is grim news about insects from lots of fronts. There has been widespread loss of pollinating insects across Britain in the last 40 years. Insects are also at risk from shrinking habitat ranges due to climate change. There are shifting baselines and clean windscreens. 31 insetti

Are we pulling out the Jenga bricks from the web of life? The tower gets rickettier, but it still looks like a tower until…crash! – one too many bricks has gone. It seems so much insect life is unmeasured, unrecorded, unknown. And that’s the stuff on land – what about the invisible areas we don’t even think about – under the ground, under the sea – ploughing either of those up is wrecking a world that is already there.31a Insetti

So what is causing the disappearance of insects?  32 Space for nature

The causes, it seems, are: habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. What can we do about this? We can share our world with the wildlife in it! We can protect habitats: someone already lives there! We can set aside agricultural land margins and park margins for wild plants, as in this new law in Bavaria. We can treasure what we already have and make more. Edges and hedges and big trees are particularly good habitats…verges, parks, motorway margins, front gardens – all are opportunities for an edge habitat.

We can make our edgelands into mini wildernesses, mini jungles.

Garden Jungle

 

This book, The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson, is about exactly that: the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement, and in the soil beneath our feet.

It is published later in the year and I can’t wait to read it.

The more minibeasts you know, the more you see, and the more you care about.

With climate change we are in danger of a great global biodiversity simplification – losing specialists and gaining generalists. Climate change squeezes the range of animals as they migrate towards the climate they are used to – generally heading north then hitting the end of the range as they run out of habitat.

We can make it easier for creatures to move by increasing & joining habitats – all those edges we already mentioned. But the utterly brilliant thing is that increasing our nature by reforesting and rewilding is one of the most effective ways of reducing atmospheric CO2 – nature can be our climate-change crash mat – but it’s also so much more – what an amazing win-win policy using more nature as a solution to our climate problems would be. Last week scientists and activists called for action on CO2 through natural climate solutions, through defending, restoring and re-establishing forests, peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, natural seabeds and other crucial ecosystems. Here George Monbiot explains how to avert Climate catastrophe by rewilding.

We also can tackle the carbon dioxide in other ways: at the moment it is essentially free to put CO2 into our atmosphere. This is an enormous injustice and a robbery from young people and future inhabitants of earth. Putting a clear price on carbon would change this.32a KidsLit4Climate01s

Meet the Relatives

In September last year, the House of Illustration ran a month’s challenge. It was linked to John Vernon Lord’s exhibition there.  (John Vernon Lord is of course the illustrator of that classic insect book The GIANT JAM SANDWICH!)33 sandwich 01

34 sandwich 02In 2016 John had done a teeny drawing every day for the entire year and they were all on show. The challenge was to do a teeny (1 inch to 3cm) drawing a day for September. (Here are the winners.)  I particularly liked John’s insect drawings, I think partly because they’re life-sized. Here are his lovely beetle and fly.

35 JVL Beetle35a JVL fly

 

 

 

 

 

I wondered about doing a month of 3cm square drawings of insects.

At the Natural History Museum at Tring there’s a wonderful collection of insects in cases. All have been impaled on a pin and labelled, in that classic insect-collecting way. Here are some of my sketches of the Tringsects.37 Tringsects

36 TringsectsI wondered: what if the label, instead of saying ‘Periplaneta Americana’, said ‘Uncle Bert’? Could the insects start to become individuals you could care about?

So here are Captain Peacock, Mrs Henderson, Priscilla, FV Heffenfurter and Matilda.38 peacock 39 painted lady 40 wasp 41 cockchafer 42 mosquitoAnd here are all the relatives.43 All the relatives

 

Lastly, a few links…

 

The Perils of Being a Toy

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

00a RabbitsonIt’s not easy being a toy. You get mired in adventures out of your depths, dressed in outfits you never chose, and left in unlikely places by your forgetful owners. Toys are our avatars. They are mostly (happily) silent unless their owners voice for them. Children can’t help being animators – it happens to the first things that are picked up – they get brought to life.

Anything can be a Toy

Mini's Baby Book form C1967

Mini’s Baby Book from C1967

In my baby book, my mum records that when I was three I talked a lot about two persons called ‘Gully’ and ‘Linda’. My mum never knew who they were, though they were often up to stuff. But I know. They were my hands.

Those Yellow Pages fingers

Those Yellow Pages fingers

You know that thing where you can get your index and middle fingers to stride around like a pair of legs? Well that was Gully & Linda – I can’t remember who was right and who was left. They were possibly married. They used to do a lot of striding around on long car journeys.

Anything can be a toy.

In the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood a few years ago I found this:02 Shoe DollIt was someone’s doll once. What it also was, was the sole of a shoe.

Sometimes the most eloquent toys are the most basic – where imagination has had to do most of the animating. And the most disappointing of toys can be the ones who try to say and do too much. Here is Scrubbing Brush, who is basic:

Scrubbing Brush carrying lunch

Scrubbing Brush carrying lunch

…and Turbodog, who says way too much.

Turbodog - the most useless robotic dog there is...

Turbodog – the most useless robotic dog there is…

...both from Traction Man Meets Turbodog

…both from Traction Man Meets Turbodog

 

 

 

 

Children’s books are the theatre for toys to come to life, where toys really can have adventures. And I love books about toys having adventures.

So here are my Top Five Perils of Being a Picture Book Toy.

PERIL ONE: FALLING APART

It’s the big worry about being a toy. Not being able to regenerate unless someone repairs you can leave you in quite a mess. But the conundrum is: that falling apart makes you REAL.

Let’s go first to That Rabbit Belongs To Emily Brown.Emily BrownHere is Emily Brown’s rabbit Stanley in a terrible state after his kidnapping by the naughty queen:05 Emily BrownAfter she has rescued Stanley, the wise Emily Brown gives that Queen a recipe for making a Real Toy:

You take that horrid brand new teddy bear and you play with him all day. Sleep with him at night. Hold him very tight and be sure to have lots of adventures. And then maybe one day you will wake up with a real toy of your own.”06 Emily BrownSo falling apart can be part of the process of Becoming Real.

For more on becoming real, we’ll have to go to The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams with magical pictures by William Nicholson.07 Velveteen rabbitPondering over a toy’s life in the Nursery, the Skin Horse offers the Velveteen Rabbit this definition of real:

“Real isn’t how you’re made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

There are many ways toys can fall apart: one is unravelling.made for youIn I Was Made For You by David Lucas a home-made knitted cat is destined to be a Christmas present but wakes up with the need to discover the answer to the biggest questions – not just what he is but why he is. The little toy goes in search of an answer to the big Why, but snags his wool on a rusty nail and unravels before our eyes until he is ‘just a long loose thread shivering in the wind’. 08 made for youHe is precariously close to not being at all, but is found and wound by Daisy & her Mum, who reknits him into his shape again.Loved to BitsToys can be tested to destruction. In Loved to Bits by Teresa Heapy and Katie Cleminson, the toy here is Stripy Ted who bravely loses body parts while engaged in adventures with his owner.
Stripy Ted gallantly loses an ear (“Still got the best one – never fear!” he says cheerfully), an eye, and eventually both legs and both arms becoming only a ball and head.

But his owner prefers him in his brave unmended state. 09 Loved to bitsSo how much of yourself can you lose and still be you?

You can come unstuffed, but you can also be remade.Tatty RattyI think Tatty Ratty, by Helen Cooper, is perhaps a story about being remade, so that old loved tired lost Tatty Ratty can become new again, dusted with sugar & floating down from the moon.

Lost probably on the bus just before the story begins, Tatty Ratty is only seen in the journey of adventures back home that Molly and her Mum and Dad dream up for him. Tatty Ratty is always getting closer, and always getting a bit remade – feeding himself up on porridge to get restuffed, falling in the sea to become washed, being dusted with sugar on the moon for a touch of sparkle.
Finally the family are ready to track Tatty Ratty down at the Kingdom of Bunny. There could be a difficult moment here, when Molly spots the shelf of similar white bunnies with buttons who are all pretty much Tatty Ratty clones. 12 Tatty RattyBut Tatty Ratty’s imagined journey home has somehow prepared Molly to find the right one.12a Tatty RattyPERIL TWO: BEING LOST

A perennial peril of being a toy due to their hapless, absent-minded and easily distracted owners, being Lost can happen anywhere. Red TedIn Red Ted and the Lost Things, Red Ted finds himself in a Lost Property Office having been left on a train, and along with a toy crocodile decides to pluckily find his own way home. I love seeing the little toys bravely navigate the confusing streets of the full-size world.13 red tedA nonchalant cheese-loving cat comes along for the ride. Red Ted is small but resourceful and the crocodile shows his teeth, seeing off a colossal dachshund. For the small toys the journey home is an epic struggle. Finally Red Ted is reunited with Stevie who makes everything right and has superpowers of understanding when it comes to toys and cats.13a red tedPERIL THREE: BEING SUPPLANTED, IGNORED, NOT PLAYED WITH, OR GIVEN AWAY

These fates are too awful to think about  – and they all do happen in the films Toy Story 1, 2 or 3 (EVERYTHING that can happen to toys happens in Toy Story somewhere.) Actually they are so awful I couldn’t find picture book toys that get treated this way (any suggestions?), so here I’m resorting to a story of pure imagination…

The Story of the Bad Mump Mump

The Real Mump Mump

The Real Mump Mump

When my son Herbie was 6 months old he was given this monkey. It was a good one – long legs, squashy round body, perfect bedtime companion. It wasn’t till a year later that we found out from Herbie that the monkey’s name was Mump Mump.

Underwater fantasy Mump Mump

Underwater fantasy Mump Mump

So all was well.

One day I was idly wandering round the toy department of Fenwick’s on Bond Street and I discovered an entire bin of Mump Mumps, probably on special offer. Ooh! – I thought – I could buy a spare Mump Mump! Just in case. We’d never ever have a lost or destroyed Mump Mump crisis!

Reader, I nearly did it. But I didn’t.

On the bus home I realised the full horror of what I could have done. Imagine the life of the Other Mump Mump.

Consigned to a cupboard – (as your existence must always be a secret to the child you are meant to be for) – you watch – (probably through a chink in the cupboard door) –  as your child talks and plays and sleeps with the other hated Mump Mump.
In your cupboard over the long years you plot out ways to despatch your rival Mump Mump. Maybe the day comes when the blow finally falls and the other Mump Mump is left on a beach or dropped off a ferry or mysteriously set on fire and at last you can take your rightful place at the heart of your child’s world.
But no – the long years in the cupboard will have taken their toll and you will be somehow poisoned and bitter inside.

Maybe not the best picture book material.

But with ‘given away’ I’m going to mention Dogger here.

dogger16 dogger

Dogger is lost and found and nearly lost again. Dogger’s owner is Dave. Dogger isn’t actually given away, he is lost then ends up on a toy stall at the school fete – but we see the loved toy ending up on a table with a ‘5p’ label hanging on them. Dogger is perilously close to going home with another child. Some ingenious bargaining by Dave’s sister Bella saves the day.

PERIL FOUR: The hard-working life of a toy which may include having to take the blame…Blue Kangaroo

Picture book toys often have to work hard for their owners. Blue Kangaroo, being a quiet sort, doesn’t point out the unfairness of being repeatedly incriminated for his owner Lily’s mishaps.
Eventually Lily’s mum puts Blue Kangaroo on a high shelf and Lily has to go to bed without him.
The page I love (I think it’s the shadow that makes it so exciting) is this page of blues as Blue Kangaroo jumps down from the bookcase where he’s been banished with an idea about how to put things right.17 Blue KangarooHere is a collection of toys (and an actual cat) grouped round our son Herbie when he was fairly new. When he was very little it always seemed important that he be surrounded by a sort of glow from his stuffed guardians. 17a GuardiansIn While You are Sleeping by Alexis Deacon, the bedside toys are hard at work every While You Are Sleepingnight, protecting, checking, scaring bad dreams away, tending their child. There’s a gathering of guardians around the bedside. Alexis Deacon’s warm pastel pictures conjure up a mysterious dark tender night-time world.

18 Sleeping19 SleepingBeing a toy is a serious business, a life or death struggle, a battle.

There are rules to being a picture book toy. Your owner will know you are alive but this is something they believe without seeing. You generally don’t come to life in front of them. It might freak them out. You don’t come to life around any humans (except maybe strange slightly magical ones.) You can only wander about when no people are watching you. Animals can probably see you and sometimes even understand/talk to you.21 red tedWhen I was making Toys in Space I had a picture in my mind of a group of toys being left on the grass in the garden overnight for the first time. They’d see the stars and wonder what they were. 22 TISWhat else would happen? I badly wanted them to be abducted by an alien. However I wanted also to be brutally realistic, so the story of Toys in Space was my way for having Toys simultaneously abducted by aliens and not abducted by aliens. 23 TISTo get through a night out in the garden, they tell a story (which is where the beaming up comes in) until at last dawn happens and the sun comes out and they know they will be found.24 TISPERIL FIVE: Your Owner GROWS UP

The Unspoken Tragedy in every toy’s life – is that its owner will grow up, the end of childhood.

On the final page of The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin says:

“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.”

Pooh thought for a while.

“How old shall I be then?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Pooh nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw.

“Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I – if I’m not quite -” he stopped and tried again – “Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?”

The fate of a toy is to not grow, not change except to get worn and torn and be the victim of entropy, while your owner grows and changes and inevitably always grows up. But a toy is also potentially immortal if it doesn’t get too distressed, which its owner never is. So our toys have the potential to outlive us.

In Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood live a huge collection of toystoy museum

who have outlasted their owners. In David Lucas’s Lost in the Toy Museum Bunting the Cat and the collection of historic toys romp their way through a game of hide and seek in the Museum.

25 LOST

 

AND LASTLY…

Toy Names very often seem to have to state the bleeding obvious…so we have Red Ted, Stripy Ted, Blue Bear….25 Blue BearHere is my Blue Bear who sits on my shelf in an encouraging way… But I always feel that Blue Bear is only a breath away from getting up and stumping off and having adventures of his own.26 Blue Bear picAnd perhaps one day he will.27 Blue Bear multiple
For more about lost toys, here’s the tale of a lost whale.
TOYS

Meet the Relatives

This September, the House of Illustration ran a competition inspired by John Vernon Lord’s ‘A Drawing a Day’ – the challenge was to make a 1 inch square picture every day. I reckoned drawing things that actually would fit in a small square would be good, so I drew buglife….

16 Matilda 11 Gerald

 

 

 

 

Here’s the whole lot of them:The RelativesThe winner was this assembly of found plastic beach rubbish by Sojung Kim-McCarthy : bits of plastic that shouldn’t be there, but one person’s rubbish transformed into somebody else’s treasure:

beach squares

 

The Last Wolf & Other Missing Animals

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

HALF OUR ANIMALS ARE MISSING!

01 Lost AnimalsA few years ago an announcement came out in the news. According to the WWF Living Planet Report, since the 1970s more than half of the wild vertebrate animals on Earth had quietly disappeared. Half of our animals are missing! – how could we have been so careless? And those were the big, visible animals. In a more recent study from Germany, 75% of flying insects – the insects on which everything else depends – were found to have vanished in 25 years. Things are quietly disappearing. Why are they disappearing?

THE LAST WOLF IN ENGLAND

The story of The Last Wolf started with Red Riding Hood. I wondered: what if, instead of taking that basket of goodies to Granny, Red is in the woods because she wants to catch a wolf. But could she actually find a wolf? In England, wolves were probably extinct by 1500, and the last wolf in Scotland may have been killed in 1680. There were once wolves, lynxes and bears, but we’ve lost all our big predators now and become a land of more Wind in the Willows-sized animals.

But walking in the woods can make you remember that the woods could once be dangerous places, where the unwary and unwise could get into trouble. It’s easy to be hidden in woods.02A Wytham treeSNear where I live in Oxford are the wonderful Wytham Woods, which have been studied for over 60 years and where you can walk around and see big old trees full of lumps and crevices, which are also fun to draw. When I was thinking about the story of the Last Wolf I liked walking in Wytham Woods and imagining a wolf was there, and drawing the big old trees.

Big old tree at Wytham Woods

Big old tree at Wytham Woods

I collected my favourite picture book trees – which started with these by Jenny Williams:05 Jenny WilliamsHere are more beautiful picture book trees. This is from John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk illustrated by Sara Ogilvy:06 midnightfolkand these wonderful wolfish woods are from Emma Chichester Clarke and Michael Morpurgo’s Pinocchio:07 pinocchioI kept these at hand for inspiration. Most of my previous picture books have been set indoors in the world of man-made things, so it was exciting to go venturing into the trees.

Here are some sketchbook pages from when I was working out the Last Wolf. I wasn’t sure how to end the story. I did want to begin and end the story with the Good Old Days forest at the beginning and the shrunken woods eaten into by houses at the end, but my wise editor Joe Marriott at Penguin Random House helped me to find a more hopeful ending.

08 Sketch09 sketch10 Sketch11 Sketch12 LW picHere’s the bit in the book where Red meets the Last Wolf.13 Wolf14 WolfAnd now to….

VAUCANSON’S DUCK

This is all that was last seen of Vaucanson’s Duck.15 duckIt is thought to have been destroyed in a fire in 1879. The Duck was an extraordinarily lifelike automaton. It could quack and drink and eat duck-food, which it would then transform into duck-poo to the astonishment of everybody around. It looked like a living breathing bird. But the burnt remains of the Duck reveal the cogs and springs and cams which made this illusion of life happen.

ANIMALS AND US

In the usual human view of the world, it is divided into those that talk and those that don’t. This is very useful, because it means that those that talk can farm and eat those that don’t.

Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes

It is Rene Descartes I blame for this.  Descartes (1596 – 1650) maintained that animals cannot reason and do not feel pain; animals are living organic creatures, but they are automata, like mechanical robots. Descartes held that only humans are conscious, have minds and souls, can learn and have language and therefore only humans are deserving of compassion.

He assumed animals were automata. But this is a big mix-up: automata – machines which create an illusion of inner life, but work by clockwork and cams – can only be made by humans. Only people make machines like this. Nature doesn’t work this way. In the animal world it seems feelings drive behaviour. Feelings give the impulse to act, and determine what that action might be. Feeling scared at a threat brings an impulse to run away. Feeling strong, brave or angry will make you act differently. If something behaves like it has an inner life – then, I argue – it probably does. If my dog behaves like it is scared, it is because it feels scared. If my dog is behaving like it is pleased to see me, then it must be because it feels pleased to see me (I hope!)  Rene Descartes drew up the drawbridge, made the world into Us and Them, human and non-human. The non-human can’t talk, so doesn’t have an inner life. And that means they can be owned, eaten and treated as slaves – all very economically useful. Only with the ideas of Charles Darwin did we start to see ourselves in the continuum of the tree of life, and take our place in the unfolding story of evolution.17 insectsPicture books are a fantastic direct line to empathy and imagination –– where else can you explore what it would feel like to be an egg or a biscuit or a spoon? 18 EmpathyBut also the great thing about picture books is they are an arena where you can make anything you want happen. And one thing I’ve always wanted is to meet is an animal that could talk. But talking animals only really happen in books. The world of children’s books is crammed with talking animals – from Alice in Wonderland to Narnia to Philip Pullman’s daemons to Piers Torday’s Last Wild  – talking animals are rife. Books are windows and doors into experiencing being someone else and that someone may be an animal.19 Lynx and deerThe legacy of Rene Descartes was to see animals as automata, giving an illusion of inner life, but not really having it. But automata are only possible because they are manmade – nothing in nature works this way. The inner lives of animals are worth imagining, what it must feel like to be them. Some animals end up being food. Would we be able to treat talking animals this way? It would seem a bit rude to eat someone who you could have a conversation with (see the Dish of the Day episode in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) But maybe it is even ruder to eat someone you don’t know at all. An anonymous meat could well have had a terrible life. Maybe it is worth asking the question: Meat – Who did it use to be? Packaging is powerful stuff. It would be useful if meat packets could tell us more about the life of whoever is in the packet, so we could choose the one who had a good life before they were meat.

MEAT: who did it use to be?

MEAT: who did it use to be?

MORE TREES PLEASE 21 more trees pleeseRed Riding Hood is a tale that came out of the terror of the forests – the ancient human struggle for survival against nature and predators. But things aren’t like this anymore – we’ve remade the landscape of our planet and its animals to support nearly 7 billion humans on Earth.  It could be time now to change our Us and Them thinking. It always used to have to be ‘Humans first’, because we were small and the Wild was vast. But now the vast majority – some say 98% –  of the mass of vertebrate land animals is us and our livestock. Could we give back a bit more space for the Rest of the World? We could include thinking about nature in everything we plan, and try putting a real value on our existing nature especially ancient woodlands. The amazing 4.6 billion year story of life on Earth – the complex long weaving of our life on Earth – is it OK to unravel and simplify this?

A Sunday Times headline: as it was (left) and as it could be (right)

A Sunday Times headline: as it was (left) and as it could be (right)

We can tackle this by framing everything we do in the context of nature, but also we have to step back a bit – leave more land unclaimed, leave the Antarctic Krill for the Antarctic animals. This needs regulation and legislation, otherwise a tragedy of the commons always happens. The National Planning Policy Statement of 2012 put ‘sustainable development’ (is that not an impossible thing?) at the heart of the planning system. Here’s my dictionary’s definition of ‘sustainable’:

Sustainable adj 1 able to be sustained. 2 able to be maintained at a fixed level without exhausting natural resources or damaging the environment: sustainable development.

So – sustainable development means development at a level which can be continued indefinitely without environmental degradation. If you systematically convert unbuilt-on land into built-on land so the overall balance of land-use changes – this is not sustainable if carried on indefinitely even at a low level.

There’s a new draft National Planning Policy Statement out for consultation right now. We should make sure that putting space for Nature is at the heart of everything we plan. Here’s how you can give feedback. (And also here.)24 Election Manifesto

Winter trees in Grosvenor Square, London

Winter trees in Grosvenor Square, London

Trees are multi-level, they make habitats more three dimensional.  Trees seem especially important in cities. The challenge is: can we create our buildings in sympathy with trees, plan around big trees, be generous and build with enough space for big trees? Can we value big old trees as special individual entities – to be valued like national treasures, like St Paul’s Cathedral? A big old tree gives vastly more to us than a young sapling. They are not interchangeable. We have to factor in time, put a value on time so it is not affordable to cut down a big tree. It seems that Sheffield City Council’s destruction of their street trees at the moment is demonstrating exactly how not to do things.

Plane tree in Grosvenor Square, London

Plane tree in Grosvenor Square, London

Chestnut tree near Iffley Lock, Oxford

Chestnut tree near Iffley Lock, Oxford

MAKING SPACE FOR NATURE

If you give animals space and habitat to live in they bounce back. Rewilding Yellowstone Park with wolves boosted the whole dimensions of biodiversity there, by returning a missing keystone species – changing the behaviour of their prey and enabling woodland to grow back. Pine martins, red kites, beavers are all coming back from the brink in the UK. Rewilding can make more for all of us by restoring a balance of predators and prey and a more complex natural world.

Every little bit of wilderness helps.28 Cut out & keep

Here’s a useful cut-out-and-keep Wild Verges Award – if you see a particularly lovely roadside verge of cow parsley and wild flowers later in the year you could award it to the council concerned. Or give it to your own garden.

Nice bit of Cow Parsley in Regent’s Park

Nice bit of Cow Parsley in Regent’s Park

PS: The Last Wolf is out now, published by Penguin Random House. Catch it if you can!30 LastWolf Cover

Mollusc Frenzy

It’s been raining and the molluscs are on the move, charging up the garden path, swarming up stalks and flinging themselves acrobatically from leaf to leaf as they circle in on Sketching Weakly’s prize Campanula Pendula. Which is now a sad-looking stalk.

Mollusc FrenzyThe flies have been busy too.

fliesSnails seem to really love tree climbing.

climbing snails

Pie Cycling in Somerset

Sketching Weakly couldn’t help but admire this pie cycling shirt while at large near Exmoor.IMG_3120Here is Tony in a shady gazebo scanning for bird life.

IMG_3113Here’s a bit of the Shady Gazebo. But technically speaking it is probably a Bower.IMG_3121A small gathering in the Shady Bower.

IMG_3122

 

 

Sweltering on the Paddington train…

…in the carriage where the air-conditioning was broken and the designer hadn’t thought to include any blinds. Trying to draw the reflection of the man in front, he became a hallucinatingly large apparition.

IMG_3128

So had a go at some (largely imaginary) trees seen from the window. The train helpfully stopped quite often due to signalling problems near Hayes and Harlington.

IMG_3127