![\"Sophie](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/SophieBlackall.jpg\" "\\"Sophie")
If you read our blog regularly, you could probably guess that it would be difficult for me—should someone, say, have a gun to my head, absurdly enough—to name my top-ten favorite illustrators. It’d just be hard to narrow, my friends. <\/p>\nIf you read our blog regularly, you could probably guess that it would be difficult for me—should someone, say, have a gun to my head, absurdly enough—to name my top-ten favorite illustrators. It’d just be hard to narrow, my friends. <\/p>\n
But Sophie Blackall<\/strong><\/a> would, without question, be on my list. There is a lightness and a brightness to her work that always makes me smile; at the same time, her Chinese inks and watercolors are capable of either great elegance or supreme goofiness and lots of humor, depending on the story she’s illustrating. For an example of the former, see 2007’s Red Butterfly: How a Princess Smuggled the Secret of Silk Out of China<\/strong><\/a><\/em> (Candlewick), written by Deborah Noyes<\/a><\/strong>, and for an example of the latter, YOU ABSOLUTELY CANNOT MISS this year’s deadpan Jumpy Jack & Googily<\/strong><\/a><\/em> (Henry Holt), written by Sophie’s bud and frequent picture-book-making partner, Meg Rosoff<\/strong><\/a> (not to mention the other picture book titles on which they’ve partnered, which are listed below): <\/p>\n ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Googily.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘Ho ho ho,’ said Googily. ‘Now you really<\/font> have gone too far.'”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n And then, as if I needed more convincing, I saw Sophie’s 2007 snowflake for Robert’s Cure<\/strong><\/a>, “Flying Fox and Three Babies.” It was probably—and this is hard to admit, considering all the amazing snowflakes—my very favorite snowflake of all from ’07. Jennifer at not your mother’s bookclub<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, who featured this snowflake<\/strong><\/a> last year, created her own narrative about “foxtacular elficide” for this snowflake. Hee. And that is the appeal of this particular snowflake to me — the mysterious and unknown and probably pretty wacked-out story that surrounds it. <\/p>\n Needless to say, then, I was pretty happy when Sophie said she’d take the time to do a seven-questions-over-breakfast interview here at 7-Imp. And what, you may wonder, is her breakfast-of-choice while we sit and talk? “I’m Australian, so I have to have good coffee. No offence, but American coffee is more like tea. Mostly I take my coffee to the computer to check email and forget to ever go back and have breakfast, but my favourite thing if I do remember, is sourdough bread, toasted, with berries squashed onto it, sprinkled with sugar.”<\/font><\/p>\n Mmm. I approve of that breakfast with much dedication and enthusiasm. While we’re setting the table, let’s get the basics from Sophie…<\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Are you an illustrator or author\/illustrator?<\/font><\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Illustrator and working on being an author\/illustrator. That is to say I have written one story, but it has taken nearly five years for me to get around to illustrating it. I place the blame for this squarely on the slender shoulders of my young son, who the story was written about. He was three at the time and thought it was hilarious, but from four to eight he was utterly mortified and forbade me from doing it. Of course, I didn’t really humour him, it was just that I had other books to do. Now he is nearly nine and thinks it would be really cool to have a book about him. Especially as there isn’t one about his sister. So that’s the book that is currently on my desk. {Ed. Note:<\/em> Illustration below!} <\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Can you list your books-to-date?<\/font><\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: <\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: What is your usual medium, or -\u2013 if you use a variety -\u2013 your preferred one?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Chinese ink and watercolour on paper.<\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Where are your stompin\u2019 grounds?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Brooklyn, New York, although I’m Australian born and bred. I still cling to the “u” in colour<\/em>. <\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Can you briefly tell us about your road to publication?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Chronicle Books, who published Ruby’s Wish<\/em>, couldn’t decide between three illustrators, so they held what amounted to a bake-off. We were all given the same passage from the manuscript to illustrate, the scene where the grandfather watches the lesson in the garden. I was lucky enough to be chosen, and the only reason I can appear so smug about it is that I happen to know the other two contenders have gone on to do many other brilliant things. In fact, I’m sure they’re really GLAD they didn’t get the job. <\/p>\n I love all the books I’ve done for different reasons, but Ruby’s Wish<\/em> has a particular life of its own. I have spoken at the UN about this book, and have walked into a school in Gravesend, Brooklyn, where three hundred children all dressed in red were waiting to greet me, and I’ve had girls bring along their scuffed and dog-eared copies for me to sign. All of which is every bit as much about the story as the illustrations, obviously. <\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Can you please point us to your web site and\/or blog?<\/font><\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: www.sophieblackall.com<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: If you do school visits, can you tell us what they\u2019re like?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Oh they’re really good for my ego. Most days I sit hunched at my squalid desk, trying to draw, squandering hours on eBay and emerging in the afternoon to embarrass my children in the schoolyard. But every now and then I do a School Visit and, after the initial terrifying moments of having all those beady eyes trained on you, it’s FANTASTIC. It’s seriously wonderful to realise that books have a life beyond my studio; that children really do pore over them and eat them up and love them and think about them for a long time afterwards. I have had brilliant letters from second graders, some adoring, “You are the Best Ilstater in the Wold,” “You are veery goo at draling,” and some brutally honest, “I could draw as good as you if I had lessons.” I also once had a marriage proposal from a first-grade boy. <\/p>\n 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Any new titles\/projects you might be working on now that you can tell us about?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Oh yes! But I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell. There’s one called Wombat Walkabout<\/em> for Dutton, written by Carol Shields, which will be out next Spring. {Ed. Note:<\/em> Illustration below!} This one, for me, was a bit of a love letter to the Australian bush.<\/p>\n Then there’s my book, the first one I’ve written as well as illustrated, Are You Awake?<\/em>, which is the aforementioned story about my bossy but endearing son. It’s for Henry Holt and will be out in Fall ’09. <\/p>\n Then I have something which is making me squirm and hyperventilate it’s so exciting, but I’m really not allowed to talk about that. I’ll just say it’s one of those manuscripts an illustrator fantasizes about. If she likes crows and eggs and pieces of string, that is. I’ll keep you posted. <\/p>\n 1.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: What exactly is your process when you are illustrating a book? You can start wherever you\u2019d like when answering: getting initial ideas, starting to illustrate, or even what it\u2019s like under deadline, etc. Do you outline a great deal of the book before you illustrate or just let your muse lead you on and see where you end up?<\/font> <\/p>\n When it’s time to begin work, the first thing I do is decide on the trim size. Wombat Walkabout<\/em>, for instance, became a square book because wombats are such dear, dumpy, squarish animals, it made sense. Are You Awake?<\/em> began as a standard-sized picture book, but the more I worked on it, the more I realised I wanted it to be smaller and more intimate. It’s funny and fast-paced and I wanted the pages to turn almost like a flip book. So now it’s a tiny 5″ x 6″, which I’ve never done before, and it’s such fun!<\/p>\n If I’m working with my friend Meg Rosoff<\/strong><\/a>, we usually squabble good natured-ly for a bit about the characters. It took considerable convincing to get her to agree Jumpy Jack should be a snail. She kept insisting he ought to be a tortoise. Obviously she was completely wrong.<\/p>\n With other more polite authors, there’s less communication as a rule. One way or another though, the first and most important step for me is deciding what the characters look like. People or animals, contemporary or period. All of those decisions are made early on, and can sometimes be paralysing, like standing in front of a destinations board watching cities light up. So many, many choices, it’s sometimes hard to commit.<\/p>\n Then, with heart in mouth and fingers crossed, I show these to my editors and art directors, always half imagining they will demand their advance back and run me out of town. Recently I had to convince my wonderful, amazing, visionary editor and AD at Simon and Schuster to allow me to make the setting for a new book look like a grim Victorian orphanage, and to have some of the children be sea urchins, and others just a puff of smoke. {Ed Note:<\/em> Sketch below!} Did I mention how amazing they are?<\/p>\n Once the characters are locked in, I draw the whole dummy. I’m one of those angst-ridden, precise illustrators, despite my messy desk. I grip my pencil so tightly I have a callous the size of a gooseberry on my middle finger, and my drawings rarely change much from sketch to final. When the publishers give the dummy the go ahead, it’s time to paint which is the part I love. Stretching a fresh piece of watercolour paper out on the tiny space available on my crowded desk is always exciting. <\/p>\n I use Chinese ink and Schminke watercolors, which come in a very serious looking black tin. Now and then I have to replace individual colours, which involves a special trip to the paint shop, and the man gets out his ladder and pulls down a box and opens another box within that and pulls out a tiny foil wrapped square of cadmium red light, for instance, which costs about a week’s rent but makes me feel like a real, grown-up artist.<\/p>\n Because I live in New York, I hand-deliver deliver most of my books, which is a bit like taking your children to school on the first day. I sit with the parcel on my knees on the subway and reassure it under my breath. <\/p>\n 2.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: Describe your studio or usual work space for us.<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Well, as you can see, it’s not exactly tidy. In fact only about ten percent of my desk surface is actually usable. The rest of it is covered with teetering piles of junk. Somehow, though, like an archeologist, I know where things are in the layers. Above my desk, I stick pictures on the wall. Some of these I’ve had on every studio wall for the last fifteen years. I collect pictures of the backs of people’s heads, and photographs of the messy studios of geniuses. <\/p>\n I also collect Depression-era dolls and various bits of animals and assemble them into funny, unsettling creatures. At least I think they’re funny. I do this mostly on the floor, so on any given day when I’m meant to be working on Ivy and Bean<\/em>, say, I might have a deer hoof and a bird wing at my feet. Don’t tell my editor. <\/p>\n 3.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: As book lovers, it interests us: What books or authors and\/or illustrators influenced you as an early reader?<\/font> <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: As a child, I was utterly devoted to Winnie the Pooh<\/em>. I still can’t believe how much character Ernest Shepard<\/strong><\/a> could inject into so few lines. And Beatrix Potter<\/strong><\/a> of course, and the Australian May Gibbs<\/strong><\/a>, who invented Snugglepot and Cuddlepie<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. Maurice Sendak’s<\/strong><\/a> Where the Wild Things Are<\/em>, John Burningham’s<\/strong><\/a><\/strong> Borka<\/strong><\/a><\/em> and Raymond Briggs’s<\/strong><\/a> The Elephant and the Bad Baby<\/strong><\/a><\/em> were hugely, monumentally influential. Or really, I just loved them, and wanted to literally climb into their pages. <\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Maurice Sendak<\/strong><\/a>, John Burningham<\/strong><\/a>, and Maira Kalman<\/strong><\/a>. And I know this is cheating, but I’d turn them all down to have dinner and a walk on the beach with Edward Gorey<\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n 5.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: What is currently in rotation on your iPod or loaded in your CD player? Do you listen to music while you create books?<\/font><\/p>\n Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: Tom Waits<\/strong><\/a>, Tom McRae<\/strong><\/a>, Neutral Milk Hotel<\/strong><\/a> and MIKA<\/strong><\/a>. I do listen to music and also, once the tricky drawing part is done and I’m onto painting, I often listen to audio books. It’s funny how the illustrations become inextricably linked to whatever I’ve been listening to. When I look at Red Butterfly<\/em>, for instance, I see Moby Dick<\/strong><\/a><\/em> on every page, which is quite incongruous, seeing as Red Butterfly<\/em> is set in 5th century China, nowhere near the sea. And Anna Karenina<\/strong><\/a><\/em> is all over Jumpy Jack & Googily<\/em>. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nOkay, the table’s set, and we’re ready to sit down and talk more specifics over coffee with Sophie. We’ll adjust and make it Six Questions Over Breakfast, since she opted out of the ask-herself-a-question question. Many, many thanks to Sophie for taking the time to chat with 7-Imp!<\/font> <\/p>\n
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Sophie<\/font><\/strong>: First step is to read the story. Then as soon as possible I read it to my two children, who are thoughtful and funny and honest. Then, because I am extremely lucky and have projects neatly lined up like cabs in a rank, I usually have to put it away for a year or two, which always makes me feel really guilty for the author’s sake.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/seaurchin.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"Flowerface\"](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/flowerface.jpg\" "\\"Flowerface\\"")
4.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong>: If you could have three (living) illustrators or author\/illustrators — whom you have not yet met — over for coffee or a glass of rich, red wine, whom would you choose?<\/font> <\/p>\n6.<\/font> 7-Imp<\/font><\/strong> {pictured here is “Winter Swallow,” Sophie’s 2005 snowflake for