While in Hong Kong last year I bought an enormous calligraphy brush which I put to good use on this over sized ink painting. This is my first big ink sketch, it was fun and physical. More to come.
My kids and I recently made a hippo head out of watermelon. We’ve found tutorials online for turtles, sharks and flowers but never for hippos so we thought we’d share our methods in this video.
Dan Krall is a super talented artist whose work can be seen on the big screen, TV and children’s books. His rough loose style brilliantly juggles the cute and the grotesque. This week his latest children’s book “The Great Lollipop Caper” debuts in bookstores.
I sat down with Dan about a week ago to talk about his adventures making books. Most artists want to make books but when they see the quagmire that is publishing most opt not to go into the dark mysterious swamp. Dan is someone who has successfully travelled through the unforgivable swamp of publishing and has returned to tell his tale. Dan was kind enough to do a Q & A with me which I hope you will find as insightful and as inspiring as I did. My questions are in italics and Dan’s answers in bold.
Dan you’ve worked in animation for some time in both feature and television and also in children’s publishing. It seems like there has always been a crossover of artists between the two mediums. Can you describe your creative journey becoming an artist in the animation industry and how you crossed over to become a successful author and illustrator?
Moving into children’s publishing seemed like the natural order of things for me once I had acquired all the different skill sets from my animation career that made it possible. Once you’ve done backgrounds, and then characters, and then color and then story, it’s kind of hard to resist making your own content. I tried once early on to make my own tv pilot, but I didn’t really care for the process. Too much money at stake, too many cooks in the kitchen, so I lost interest in using tv or film as an outlet for my ideas, I had always loved Children’s Books so I thought I might try that instead.
One thing that really surprised me when I first started out in Publishing is really how little the 2 fields (Animation and Children’s Publishing) have in common. To an outsider, and to me at the time, I thought they were practically the same thing, you know “drawing pictures for kids”. As it turns out they’re two completely different art forms coming from two completely different places, part of the artistic journey for me has been to try to understand the publishing medium better. What kinds of stories and characters are appropriate for it.
When did you first get the idea for the lollipop caper?
I was joking around with a friend, we were trying to come up with ideas for a TV show and one of the ideas was based on a girl sleuth who solves silly childhood mysteries. I came up with the idea of a crime called “The Case of the Great Lollipop Caper” for her to solve, there was no story at that point, just the title. We didn’t pursue the show, but I always liked the mystery idea so later I flushed it out into a story.
How long did it take from the inception of your idea to the finished product?
Probably about 4 or 5 years? After I finished writing the story I sent it to my agent to pitch to the Publishers. He pitched it around for a while, which can be an extremely slow process. You’re only supposed to send it to one house at a time and wait until they decide before you move on to the next one. I think the norm is a few weeks until they get back to you, but I’ve definitely waited anywhere from several months and in one case a year and a half for someone to finally come back with a “no thank you”. Once Simon & Schuster saw it, they fell in love with it and things moved very quickly, then it was edited and art directed and in no time I was working on the finals which I think took about 6 months. Once you turn in the final artwork it’s usually about a year until it’s on the shelves. It’s an incredible amount of work and an even more incredible amount of waiting. Having a book come out doesn’t happen every day for me.
How does your creative process differ (or does it?) when you work on an animated story be it a feature or tv show versus making a children’s book?
I think they all start the same, with the kernel of an idea, and then they’re just molded into whatever form they’re eventually going to take. The main thing that distinguishes a book from tv or a movie is the editing process. 32 pages is not very much space so there’s a ton of editing and consolidating of ideas. I usually write a book to be about 2 or 3 times it’s final length in the first pass and then just go over it again and again to try to distill it down to it’s essenence and squeeze it in the page count. The other thing that’s very different is that the pages are meant to be stared at for a long time and hopefully over and over whereas in tv and movies the images fly by quickly and you can get away with a lot more cheating, it’s a totally different approach to making an image and it took a long time for me to figure out what my “illustration style” is and I’m still working on it. Since publishing and animation are so different, often things that “look like a tv show” are kind of a pariah in the publishing world so it’s difficult to find a way to express my idea and style but still make it look like it should be a book instead of stills from a tv show, that’s the part I’m always working on.
What artists contemporary or past that inspire your work?
My current favorite artists are Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Marc Boutavant, Delphine Durand and Jakub Dvorsky. From the past I love Dr, Seuss, Rowland Emmett, Shel Silverstein, Quentin Blake, Ronald Searle, Tomi Ungerer and Ludwig Bemelmans to name a few.
What authors living or dead inspire you?
Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. Neil Gaiman and Lemony Snicket.
What do you think the future of publishing is?
A lot of people are very nihilistic about publishing or any other media industry for that matter. Personally I’m not all that freaked out by it, maybe I’m stupid not to be.
I feel like there is always room for content that connects with people. A couple of times every year I see some book, tv show, movie or song that no one ever heard of before and all of a sudden it’s a household name and the whole world has to have it, there is infinite room for people to make things people love.
How that stuff is being delivered is definitely changing but if anything I see it expanding. It’s true a lot of things are expected for free that didn’t use to be and I believe deals are getting worse for authors and illustrators (I haven’t been doing it long enough to have experienced it first hand) I think there’s a natural balance to it though, and that things like Kickstarter are a great system of checks and balances. If the publishers start to pay too little, or Amazon and Barnes and Noble take too big of a cut to where content creators can’t earn a living, the creators will move to where they can and those companies will be left in the dust. It’s the content people want, no one really cares how they get it as long as it’s easy to get, or if anything more and more they only care that the creators are not getting screwed and will go to lengths to buy things in a way that prevents that.
I get asked often what kind of pens or brushes I use. Some of my favorite pens are: faber castell brush pens, copic brushes , Pentel has a good bristle brush pen, sumi brushes that I dip in a bottle of ink and most recently squid( as in the ten tentacled cephalopod.) Octopi and squid are the makers of nature’s ink. It evolved as a defense mechanism and cloaking agent for Octopus and squid. When threatened, special organs jet tenebrous ink into the water confusing predators and giving the cephalopod a chance to escape. Although it is rarely used in drawing or writing now a days, cephalopod ink was anciently used by various cultures. The word sepia is the taxonomic name of the cuttlefish. And unsurprisingly cuttlefish ink is brown or sepia colored. Squid ink is dark blue, Octopi ink is black. Going back to the roots of ink I decided to paint with and acutal squid. While in China Town we bought some market squid. Using water soluble India ink we dipped the squid and began painting with them. With a little experimentation we discovered that painting with a squid is remarkably similar to painting with a sumi brush. You don’t want the brush too saturated with ink or you won’t be able to control the line work- if it’s too dry the ink becomes sticky and hard to control. Afterwards I painted the pupils on the squid to give them a bit of life. It was slimey, it was gross but we also thought it was pretty cool.
Here’s a little animation I did for a documentary I’m working on with my kids about elephant seals. They are the largest pinniped weighing as much as 5000 pounds! I made this animation to illustrate in a fun way the growth of a pup into an adult seal.
Here is another finished painting for my next book The Scariest thing in the Jungle. All the paintings for this book are done on cold press paper with water color and india ink. Water color and ink are unforgiving mediums. Now a days most painterly effects can be achieved in Photoshop or other similar programs. I find it however more challenging and exciting when there is something at stake. On the computer you can hit the undo button every time you make a mistake. With water color or ink there is no undo only redo. If you mess up you start all over again. So I was relieved that this painting with stampeding animals only took one try.
Later this year my third picture book will be coming out entitled “I’m the Scariest Thing in the Jungle!” Even though it’s not finished my publisher requires a cover which may or may not be the final cover. The typeface will definitely be different. This cover, and the entire book is painted with water color and inked with sumi brushes.
