{"id":1948,"date":"2010-06-02T22:48:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T04:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=1948"},"modified":"2010-06-03T16:52:29","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T22:52:29","slug":"checking-in-with-julian-hector-and-the-gentleman-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=1948","title":{"rendered":"Checking In with Julian Hector and The Gentleman Bug<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Author\/illustrator Julian Hector’s<\/a><\/strong> visiting 7-Imp again<\/a><\/strong> to share some art work and sketches from his newest title, The Gentleman Bug<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, which Publishers Weekly<\/em> has praised for its “quiet humor” and School Library Journal<\/em> calls an “odd love tale.” It tells the story of the scholarly, bookworm Gentleman Bug, a schoolteacher living in the very Edwardian Garden, whose life scoots along just fine, thanks very much, till Lady Bug arrives in town and he falls head over heels in love. He tries a bit too hard to impress her, in what the publisher (Simon & Schuster) amusingly enough refers to as a failed Victorian makeover. It all works out in the end, but I won’t tell you how, in case you want to read this charmer for yourself (though, caveat: Hector’s words below do include some spoilers). Kirkus<\/em> writes that Hector “artfully uses subdued colors, elegant lines and generous quantities of space to lend low-key grace to each scene.”<\/p>\n

Julian’s here to tell us a bit about the creation of the tale, what’s next for him, and a bit more. And he shares lots of art and sketches. I thank him for stopping by…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

CREATION:<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

I came up with The Gentleman Bug<\/em> in the fall of 2004, while daydreaming in a Feminist Artist class at Parsons — with slides of Jenny Saville\u02bcs<\/a><\/strong> obese female nudes on the projector screen. I had no idea what the story was going to be about, but I thought that \u201cThe Gentleman Bug\u201d could make for a nice book title, and I liked the idea of a male ladybug wearing a top hat. I usually start my stories this way: I\u02bcll come up with a character, realize that I\u02bcm drawing it over and over again, then decide that it\u02bcs time to give the character a voice, place it in a con\ufb02icting situation, and share it with people. <\/p>\n


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“This drawing was the eureka moment that the brought the story together.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n


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“The Gentleman Bug’s house.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n


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“The Gentleman Bug\u02bcs study. This was inspired by Darwin’s study {pictured below}.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


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“These are some early character sketches of the Gentleman Bug. In the beginning, I wanted to have less anthropomorphized bugs. These characters worked \ufb01ne in stand-alone images, but when it came time to link them across a visual narrative, I found their mandibles and compound eyes to be too limiting.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

…It took me forever to come up with a story. I had some vague images in mind, and it was hard to write a story that would connect ALL of them. For instance, I knew that I wanted a make-over scene; I didn\u02bct want the Gentleman Bug to appear well-dressed all the time; I wanted to feature some younger bugs; I wanted a carriage scene with the insect equivalent of horses; a party scene; a train and train station; and I \ufb01gured that a gentleman bug couldn\u02bct work without a ladybug, so a love story felt appropriate.<\/p>\n

After about four years, I was still without a story. I didn\u02bct have any new projects to work on, but my editor liked the Gentleman Bug character, so the pressure was on to \ufb01nally write something. To keep myself motivated and thinking about the book, I started drawing lots of characters and settings. I wanted to create a large cast of bugs from which I could pull and place in different situations – this bug is rich; that bug loves a centipede, but his family will never approve; this bug\u02bcs wife just laid \ufb01ve thousand eggs, and he hasn\u02bct told her that he was \ufb01red from his job; that bug is eaten by a sparrow before he can amend his will and provide for his lover and bastard larvae…that sort of thing, all in the hopes that something would stick and inspire a story. I really enjoyed this period and produced sketchbooks full of characters with which I wanted to populate an eventual book. Finally, I drew a picture of the Gentleman Bug reading and, after a brainstorming lunch with my editor, Namrata Tripathi, she suggested that I build the story around that image and have what the Gentleman Bug likes to do (reading) be the source of the book\u02bcs con\ufb02ict. <\/p>\n


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“An early sketch of the gentleman bug\u02bcs students, Batilda Bee, Gregory Grasshopper, Wendy Weaver, and Timothy Tick.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n


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“This is the \ufb01rst color study featuring the main characters.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n


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“Red hat vs. white hat. This is one of the last color studies.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

I had drawn some \u02bbcool\u02bc bugs with nineteenth century counterparts (The Sea Wasp, Lord Nelson; Beau B, bug, Beau Brummel; Meyer De Mothschild, Meyer de Rothschild; Boss Beetle, Boss Tweed), and liked that they could be the Gentleman Bug\u02bcs antagonists. I also liked the idea that the book could be a \ufb01ght between the two de\ufb01nitions of \u201cgentleman\u201d; whereas the Gentleman Bug is \u201cnice,\u201d the cool bugs represent the \u201chigh social status\u201d side of the world and, of course, to get the girl the Gentleman Bug thinks that he has to switch sides to impress her. I wanted the Gentleman Bug to like books but felt that it needed to go deeper than that, so I made him a teacher. The \ufb01nal piece to the story was the ladybug. I wanted her to have an interesting reason for arriving in the Garden, and it needed to tie into the Gentleman Bug\u02bcs favorite thing, books. Thus, I made her a librarian with a soon-to-be-opened library. <\/p>\n


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“The \ufb01rst time that I drew the Garden. I wanted to use this kind of building lay-out in the \ufb01nal book, but in practice, it was too cumbersome. It was hard to build
horizontal scenes with something so vertical.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

MEDIUM:<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

The \ufb01nal paintings were completed at actual size with water colors and charcoal on Arches hot-pressed watercolor paper.<\/p>\n


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“My favorite scene from the book.”<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

WHAT\u02bcS NEXT:<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

I just \ufb01nished illustrating a book written by Arthur A. Levine, titled Monday Is One Day<\/em>, for Scholastic. It\u02bcs a slice of life story that features six families, and I had an amazing time working on it. Currently, I\u02bcm Illustrating a collection of fairy tales to be told in Spanish and English for HarperCollins, and I\u02bcm about to start working on a book that I wrote, titled Vulcan<\/em>, for Simon and Schuster. In the story, the Olympians grow bored watching competitions on earth, so they decide to hold a talent show \u201cand compete amongst themselves.\u201d The problem is that Vulcan doesn\u02bct know what his talent is, and his mother, Juno, is forced to help him the only way that she knows how — by throwing a huge \ufb01t, breaking stuff, and making everyone cry. <\/p>\n


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“This is the \ufb01nal scene {of <\/em>The Gentleman Bug}, but with the earlier characters.”<\/em><\/center>
\n<\/p>\n

* * * * * * *<\/center><\/p>\n

THE GENTLEMAN BUG. Copyright \u00a9 2010 by Julian Hector. Published by Simon & Schuster. Images reproduced by permission of the illustrator.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author\/illustrator Julian Hector’s visiting 7-Imp again to share some art work and sketches from his newest title, The Gentleman Bug, which Publishers Weekly has praised for its “quiet humor” and School Library Journal calls an “odd love tale.” It tells the story of the scholarly, bookworm Gentleman Bug, a schoolteacher living in the very Edwardian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}