Animal Crackers

Today my debut picture book, Animal Crackers, is published by Rocket Bird Books. Here I’m going to talk about how it came into being. If you’d like to know more, I’ll be doing an online talk with my editor Libby Hamilton and Orange Beak Studio on 16 May!

It was early 2020. Like people across the world my partner and I were stuck in a too-small flat, juggling work, kids and the school lessons that they didn’t want to do, all the time with the creeping depression that results from being isolated for an indefinite time from nature, friends and family.

My oasis in the lockdown desert was Friday night Art Club, hosted on instagram by The Good Ship Illustration. Illustrators Helen Stephens and Katie Chappel would cheerfully broadcast an hour of drawing prompts and people like me across the globe would sketch along, live, from our homes. We drew what was around us with the materials we had to hand. I regularly assembled a collection of food packets from the kitchen cupboards and escape into my sketchbook for an hour.

I’ve always loved food packets. I love the quality of the Marmite jar and the golden syrup tin. With a can of baked beans anyone can be the owner of a design classic. As a child I would repeatedly watch adverts for Coco Pops, Milky Way bars, even the Findus Crispy Pancake, and with my cousin Maisie repeat the slogans and songs ad infinitum, collapsing into hysterics as we shouted “COCO POPS ARE SO CHOCOLATEY THEY EVEN TURN THE MILK BROWN!”

The more I drew, the more I noticed how many animals are used on food packets. Lions on the syrup tin, the cockerel on the cornflakes, a bull on the mustard pot and beautiful sardines on the sardine tins. And at this time, my seven year old daughter was DESPERATE for a pet. I’d been through this phase as a child growing up in the countryside: my guinea pigs ran away within a week, the gerbils kept me awake at night, our cat was a chronic dribbler and the fox killed the chickens. My parents’ exasperation as they reluctantly gave in to my demands for yet another ill-fated animal resonated with me strongly now, and I absolutely refused to allow my daughter a pet. Plus we live in central London, the options are limited. And so the germ of a story idea evolved. Things come to life in stories… toys, drawings, cars… had anyone made the animals on a food packet come to life before? I couldn’t think of an example.

At this time I was invited by Ness Wood of Orange Beak Studio, with whom I’d been having tutorials for a couple of years, to do an online talk about how my nascent illustration career was developing. One of the people who attended the talk was Libby Hamilton, a picture book editor, and she contacted me the next day to see if I wanted to chat about a possible project. I told her my idea, it really was just the germ of an idea at that stage, and she miraculously decided that it had potential. And not only that, if this project was realised, the designer on my book would be Ness Wood. This felt like a dream. I was so excited about my story, but I didn’t have an ending. As a child I would rely heavily on the “she woke up and it was all a dream” conclusion. Libby assured me that an ending would come. All I knew was that the child definitely wouldn’t be getting a real pet.

I asked Libby if I could use the real lion from the syrup tin and the monkey from the coco pops, and she suggested that I design my own range of food packets. I knew I wanted to make the whole book using screen print, and that worked brilliantly for the food packets. But I really struggled with the main character, the little girl, Maisie. Then my husband suggested I treat her in the same way as the animals, imagine her as a character printed on a food packet, and that was such a helpful piece of advice. I drew Maisie as if she was on a food packet, then I drew her holding a pig (we ended up not including a pig in the final book) and drew her doing various different activities, which was a brilliant Orange Beak tip.

I had my characters but still no ending. Libby is brilliant at injecting meaning into a story, and she felt that at the end of the story, Maisie should get what she needed, rather than what she wanted. But what did she need? Libby mentioned a friend who once lived above a greengrocer’s shop who didn’t have money to decorate their kitchen, and so they collected the fruit and veg boxes and cut out the illustrations and used them to decorate their kitchen wall.

My 6th birthday party. Photograph by George Wright

And then I remembered that when I was a child, my Mum and Dad decorated a wall in our house with beautiful seed packets that they’d collected, and when I came down in the morning they’d hidden two little decoupage rabbits amongst the vegetable packets on the wall. That had felt very special to me, that they’d done that just for me. And so the conclusion to the story emerged. Mum knows how to make Maisie feel loved and understood. And that was what she needed.

And as for our pet problem in real life? Well my cousin Maisie found a special pet for my daughter. Waggles is a mechanical dog and a very much loved member of our household now. And we don’t have to pick up his poo in a bag.

If you’d like a copy of Animal Crackers, please support your local bookshop signed copies are available now at Phlox Books