A Monster Calls

The book ‘A Monster Calls’ was written by Carnegie Medal winning author Patrick Ness, (based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd) and released in the UK in May 2011. I’m pleased to say the book has now been taken on by publishers worldwide, and has already been awarded the Galaxy Children’s book of the Year 2011, and has just won the 2012 Red House Childrens Book Awards too.

I’ve talked a fair bit about the book already, and you can read an interview which discusses the techniques on Jo’s wonderful blog, ‘Wear the Old Coat’.

The Red House Awards ceremony was a wonderful event. I know how much it means to Patrick to win an award based entirely on the votes of young readers. I’m chuffed to bits he won, he truly deserves it.

During the event I was presented with an album of children's drawings, inspired by the book. It is without doubt the BEST gift I have ever received, I was really moved looking through it on the train journey home. If you were one of the children who voted for a book, or created one of those lovely pictures, thankyou. I’ll put a couple of the drawings at the bottom of the page, for everyone to see...

The cover (below) was the second image I worked on. Covers are always tricky, as you are trying to sell the entire package in one image. We wanted it to feel threatening, and we needed to depict the ‘monster’, but not in the manner of horror fiction novels which frequently show creatures in full and gory detail.

I have very fond childhood memories of being in the back seat of a car watching fields and farmland rush by. During the hour of twilight, the familiar objects began to lose their definition, became dark, anonymous forms. The countryside at night through the window of a car was both frightening and compelling; the everyday merged with the unknown, and this is how Patrick’s story felt to me.

The following image of the Monster sat on a garden shed I enjoyed making, mostly because it was a simple idea. It was largely relying on composition and form which are usually nailed down at the sketching stage. For this reason this is the only image that actually came out as I imagined it to. Most illustrations tend to take on a life of their own, which means they are less easy to predict, and prone to end up in the bin.

Monster in the sitting room, a sort of Alice in Wonderland moment. Conor, the figure in the foreground, was painted very quickly in ink with a tatty brush - a temporary sketch while I worked on the rest of the image. I must have drawn at least 40 versions of him later on, but ended up using that first sketch as there was something awkward and unsettled about him. Subsequent drawings were just too self conscious. I’d love to have another go at this, I think I could force the perspective more - get under the chair almost, and beneath the monster’s head.

A really difficult image to do, conceptually. Conor pushing another figure, with the monster behind. I tried to get the action to feel immediate, ‘on the B of the Bang’ as it were. The final image travelled across something like 6 pages in the book

CONCEPT WORK

SKETCHES

Here are a few early drawings for the cover, quite crude, but I thought it would be nice to put some ideas on here that didn’t get used. The Monster was all wrong at this point - too spindly and manic - or too fat, it took a while to find the right proportions for him.

And here’s a few of the drawings I mentioned....