July
- August 2004
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This column focuses on our international SCBWI regions. If you are a member of SCBWI living outside of the U.S. and would like to start a chapter in your area, or if you are planning on traveling overseas and would like to contact one of our international SCBWI chapters, please contact International Regional Advisor Chairperson Erzsi Deak or visit the SCBWI International Chapters Website. |
by Stephen Aitken
There was a time when people went to the Himalayas of India to get away from the world and find the deeper meaning of life. I remember my first journey here 25 years ago, traveling on a bus that had a plywood floor and not a single spring or shock absorber on the gruesome 15-hour ride. The sign when the bus reached its destination read, Valley Of The Gods, and I felt as if I had reached the end of the livable world. Days would pass with no electricity and no kerosene fuel for my primitive cooking stove, and the mud hut was a poor refuge in the sub-zero Himalayan winter. Even a "lightning" phone call to an international destination would take hours to connect, and the delay in the voice transfer was so marked that a conversation was practically impossible.
The Internet, cell phones, satellites and digital television have changed all of that. Dedicated phone lines, international cell phones, email signatures, and personal websites have empowered creative people to a degree never before realized. The digital age is changing how illustrators and writers work. For the illustrator, a Google search with the images setting selected will retrieve pages of thumbnail photos and links to more images on almost any subject. Awebsite is more than an online portfolio; it is an international shingle, a digital canvas, a public library and a transport vehicle for sending creations anywhere in the world. The geography factor has gone!
Most publishers that I work with allow me to upload documents and images through email, or via a secure folder on my website. My initial queries, in most cases, are still done by regular post but once contact is made, it is surprising how cooperative editors and art directors can become when they find out the location of my studio. In any event, since much of my illustration process is digital, in Photoshop and Painter with a drawing tablet, there is no "original" art work to be sent through the postal system.
Most of my illustration work up until a few years ago was realistic, if not quite technical in nature. However, in the year 2000 I was approached by a Norwegian publisher to develop a series of illustrations to accompany a scholarly work on Old Norse mythology. The project developed into a set of divination cards entitled Odin’s Journey (available at: http://www.northvegr.org/vik/books.php). I thoroughly enjoyed the project – the artistic freedom, the research meetings with the writer and the depth of symbolism in the Old Norse mythology. This was the project that kick-started me into the children’s market as well.
The potential to meet people of like-mind and interest is growing by the day. Through my website, I met a good friend, mentor, tutor and ultimately co-author. Sylvia Sikundar, who lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada, was browsing my website and noted that I was living in India so she hit the "contact" button. Sylvia was writing several picture books set in India and asked me for assistance on naming some of her Indian characters.
We struck up a rapport and were soon exchanging several emails a day. Sylvia asked me to look at her manuscripts and to my surprise she liked my edits, my visual input, and she patiently tolerated my lack of experience in dialogue, plotting, and character development. I had illustrated several children’s books and though an experienced editor and science writer, I had lots to learn about writing fiction for children. The excellent track changes feature of Microsoft Word allowed us to go through more than a dozen revisions of those picture books, complete with comments and ideas for future books. Sylvia asked me if I would stand as the co-author as she felt that I had become so much a part of them. In the meantime, I had written several picture book manuscripts and asked her if she would help me develop them. Ultimately she became the co-author of several of them.
To date we have written close to a dozen manuscripts, including early readers, chapter books and picture books. Last fall we met in New Delhi and negotiated a contract with Scholastic India for the Indian rights to our manuscript, Sonu and the Metal Elephant, which will be published later this year. I am the illustrator for this book as well. In the six days that we spent in Delhi, we developed a proposal for an environmental series with a family of fictional characters, and plotted and outlined the six-book series upon the request of the publisher.
Living within a culture that is different from the one that you were brought up in provides daily inspirations. The festivals of Holi, Divali, Dusherra, the gods and goddesses, the Hindu and Muslim legends and myths, the man at the corner store with the handle-bar mustache and the heavy British accent – all are fuel for characters, parking new plots and perhaps evolving into new manuscripts. I feel like the CNN guy with the video phone talking to the television viewers, except it’s not war I’m broadcasting through my keyboard and my paintings, it’s LIFE, in all its color and variety.
If it all gets too much, the production deadlines, the cell phone ringing and the website updates, then I just grab my watercolors, my portable easel, and digital camera and head off into the hills for the day. Sitting under an apricot tree, away from the warm spring sun, two white Brahma bulls plowing the wheat field nearby, I feel that I have been sitting here forever. My life has become a strange juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern. Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of life: the simply pure and the technologically advanced in a state of perfect equilibrium!
