Secrets of the scraps
Secrets of the scraps: A blogpost by Jane Porter about making Mabel and the Big Wide World, a picturebook collaboration between Jane Porter and Paul Stewart, published by Otter Barry Books.
Mabel is a small mouse with big fears – she worries about great big hairy things, and teeny weeny scary things. She’s the main character in the fourth book I’ve worked on with author Paul Stewart, each one made by hand by painting and cutting thousands of tiny pieces of paper.
Sometimes I wonder why I choose to work in collage – surely it must be one of the most painstakingly slow of all illustration processes, with every single leaf and blade of grass snipped by hand and glued with a Pritt stick. But when I found myself working on the final spread of the book, and deliberately adding extra things to make it take longer so that the project wouldn’t be over, I knew the answer – it’s just a lot of fun, and very satisfying to do.
One of the things that makes it special is the chance to hide lots of little tiny details that tell stories nobody else will ever know – the secrets of the scraps! In my first book with Paul, Wings! I sneaked in some old maps of places I’ve lived over the years. In ‘Brian the Brave’, some of the gates you see in the dry stone walls are actually scraps of a woodcut I made, inspired by structures on the Thames estuary. And in A Little Bit of Hush, the cosy quilt on the last page is actually from a photograph of the floor of a church in the Yorkshire Wolds, with colour added by me.
In this latest book, the scenery is packed with stories. The farmhouse near Mabel’s barn has music in the windows: this is taken from a 1930s book of folk music one of my students once gave me to put in my collage drawer. The smudgy textures in the thunderstorm scene are my own fingerprints, transferred through monoprinting.
In the big rainbow spread, some of the houses have windows that were part of a screen-printed poster I made many years ago with children at a school in East London – the children drew the built environment of Brick Lane, and now tiny details from their drawings are in Mabel’s big wide world. That same spread features rather a grand house in the middle – this is Canons House in Mitcham, where I did some lovely workshops with families to make wall hangings from the house when it was restored with lottery funding.
And if you look very carefully on the spread that’s filled with flowers, you might spot that the stamens of one of the blue flowers are actually legs, with trousers and smart shoes on! These come from a 19th century bound volume of Punch magazine – so dilapidated I decided to cut it up for collage.
I’ve one last secret to tell you: many of the scenery spreads feature stripy swirls in the hills. I made these using one of my favourite tools – a Sticklebrick! I mixed the greens I wanted with very cheap school paint, then while it was wet, dragged the Sticklebrick through to create interesting textures.
If you’d like to see more of the process of making illustrations for the book, take a look at this video:
And if you are interested in finding out more about my picture book process, do sign up to my free Substack newsletter here: https://janeporter.substack.com/about
Thank you to Jane for this wonderful insight into wonderful ways to use scraps to tell stories.
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