Spring Cleaning and Creativity

Reflections on how creative processes follow similar patterns to tidying!

I’ve been a bit quiet on the newsletter front as I’ve been super busy with a few different projects. I can’t share news of all of them yet, but the first one is coming this July!

BEAR’S WASH DAY

Bear’s Wash Day (Little Tiger Press) is the first in my new series of novelty books for babies and toddlers - all about Busy Chores for Little Paws. Each book focuses on a household job that little ones love joining in with. They are full of flaps, wheels and sliders and relate strongly to Montessori philosophies of early learning. And they have been massive amounts of fun to make. Bear’s Wash Day will be in the shops from July and they’ll be more books it the series coming in 2025.

Bear’s Wash Day, pub. Little Tiger Press, coming July 2024 and featuring flaps, sliders and wheels perfect for little hands to help!

My kids are always a big part of the inspiration for my books. Here’s my daughter Martha helping with the washing up when she was two. She’s wearing an apron my mum made me at the same age!

MESS!

Creating this project alongside another big one, and venturing beyond picture books, has been a BRILLIANT. BUT it’s fair to say that I’ve been in juggling mode so have neglected some of my other life responsibilities. There’s been a LOT of tidying up to do post hand-in.

Creative Mess

As spring finally sprung, I sorted my workroom debris into piles to be chucked, recycled, filed away, or stuck in a box to postpone a decision on category for an indefinite period... I wiped away ink stains, swept up eraser shavings, and deep cleaned screen printing equipment (including a trip to the local Esso and its jet washer.) It turns out vacuuming plus damp cloth for dusting is so much more satisfying when you’ve left it a while!

Then came the finishing touches of arranging ink bottles in pretty lines and sorting bookshelves so spines aligned.

This is the kind of tidying I like - where you are reshaping the aesthetic of a space. I find daily maintenance tidying, taking a space back from C to B boring and hard. But when there’s a sense of editing and curating I am inspired and motivated. Taking a space back from F to A feels creative and fun and once I’m on a roll I get quite zealous about it. It’s funny that this has become my adult relationship with chores yet as a young child, like so many others, simple things like washing up and sweeping felt like fun. Perhaps because they felt tactile and grown up but never overwhelming. It was occasional play rather than relentless chore. For me now, keeping both work and housework creative increases my productivity and drive.

CLEANING, TIDYING AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As I’ve tidied, I’ve been reflecting on how similar the process of clearing up the house is to making creative work. As an author, I’ve learned the most important lesson is to write something, anything, however bad so you then have something to work with. A bit like landing a clump of clay on a wheel, ready to mould into a shape.

“There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.”

―Robert Graves

My visual work also comes together mainly in the edit. I tend to create things as separate elements by hand, through painting, stamping, printing and drawing, then scan them together and collage and edit in photoshop. At first these images are a mess and I spend hours arranging then balancing colours, textures and shapes until they feel right. Then more time tweaking and refining.

Here’s an example of a page coming to life for my most recent picture book, Measuring Me.

I scan in hand painted or printed elements and then collage them digitally. The process becomes an editing one, which is always my favourite place to be.

Here is a refined version of the page.

I have always loved the editing process. In my career as a TV producer (before motherhood and children’s books), the edit was my happy place, where hours of footage was condensed, distilled, placed into a rhythm of storytelling that felt just right, as when a jigsaw falls into place. Once it’s done it feels like there was never another way. The journey to that point is never completely smooth - I think that’s the nature of the creative process - but the buzz of things coming together - of making a mess and then refining it into a finished work - is a priceless feeling.

MEASURING ME!

Measuring Me! is my first non-fiction picture book and came out in hardback in February. The idea behind it stems from a frustration I have that the national curriculum sometimes expects children to understand abstract mathematical concepts or language before they’ve got to grips with their real life context and usefulness. My telly career was all about researching information and making it accessible and entertaining, so it’s been really fun applying that experience to making a children’s book. Measuring Me is packed with amazing facts about the human body, scale and equivalence with the aim of inspiring curiosity and wander.

I’ve been thrilled with the response to Measuring Me. It’s been a made a Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Corebook and was a Book of the Month for Lovereading and SchoolReadingList.co.uk. Here’s the LoveReading4Kids review and my blog for the CLPE

Measuring Me comes with a pull out height chart at the back of the book showing how tall you are in tin cans and how your height compares with various animals. Here’s my dog Milly helpfully trying it out.

SHOUT OUTS!

I wanted to give a shout out to three wonderful books, and a proud mum one too.

First, Ruby Wright’s Invisible dogs (Rocketbird Books) which was published this month, and has that perfect picture book combination of beauty, wit and poignance. I’d recommend it to all who love books that have that magic three. With glow in the dark colours too, it really is a must-have!

Second, Momoko Abe’s new author illustrator picture book, Pearl and Her Bunch (Hachette Children’s) which appealed to me instantly because of its core colour combination of pink and green. This is my favourite colour way and I have it in both my living room and bathroom! Secondly because it celebrates families that are bound by bonds of love over genes, something very close to my heart. It’s a delightful story beautifully executed.

I also wanted to give a shout out to my friend Zehra Hicks who, with author Sean Taylor, has just won the Oscar’s Book Prize for When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth. I couldn’t be more proud of Zehra. We met fifteen years ago on a Chelsea School of Art Children’s Book Illustration course run by the wonderful Carolyn Dinan and it’s been wonderful to have shared our journeys to publication and beyond. I couldn’t be more delighted that Zehra has so well-deservedly won this prize.

Lastly, a quick hurrah for my daughter who has just got her final piece back from last year’s GCSE Art. The theme was Lock, and she used a combination of cyanotype, found objects and a mysterious box of keys that belonged to my grandfather to make this piece. I’m such a proud mum and amazed she managed to pull this off while also revising for eight other subjects.

Good luck to all families in Examland right now - I’m glad we’re having a year off from it here!