Leigh Hodgkinson: Smile Please

Many people who have seen Charlie and Lola on television will be surprised to learn that the images were drawn not by Lauren Child, the creator of the books, but by the series art director.

Having to flawlessly imitate someone else’s style must be a strange experience, and it certainly was for Leigh Hodgkinson, who was trying and failing to get her own work noticed at the time.

Though art directing the first series of Charlie and Lola gave Hodgkinson her big break – Child’s agent is now also her own – it also precipitated a creative identity crisis.

‘Obviously I love the stuff that Lauren does,' she says, 'but when it’s your job to draw the way she draws and think the way she thinks for eighteen months, to have that ability to express myself creatively in the way that I want to taken away...

‘I did my degree in graphic design and it was one of these courses where you could dabble in everything.'

'I did have a wonderful experience and a great time, but I want to do my own thing, so that became the overriding concern.’ She gave up the day job to focus on her own books and a year later her first book, Colin and the Snoozebox, was published.

Hodgkinson is all too aware that people might spot similarities between her work and Child’s in terms of line quality and texture, but, she says, it’s probably the reason she got the television job in the first place.

‘I did my degree in graphic design and it was one of these courses where you could dabble in everything. I was doing this stuff in my films before I was aware of Lauren’s work. Also, because people are using digital technology, scanners or cameras, it makes this whole multimedia technique of collage that much more accessible.’

After two books featuring Colin the cat – Colin and the Wrong Shadow followed Colin and the Snoozebox – her latest book, Smile!, stars a new character, Sunny McCloud. The three books are humorous, and look very contemporary, but they have a charm that will appeal even to those who don’t usually warm to ‘quirky’ picture books.

For Hodgkinson, finding the right tone has always come naturally. ‘It’s just the way I write. I think it’s really important for it not just to be frilly and sound fun. There are all these other layers going on of what it means, and the emotional journey of the character.

'So while on the surface it might seem nice and fun and whimsical I hope there’s a layer underneath which is reflecting a more serious message, whether it’s not feeling wanted, like in the first Colin book, or struggling to come to terms with being happy with yourself, which is the second Colin book, with Vernon the mouse, and with Smile!, just using something like a smile as a metaphor for happiness.’

In the Colin books Hodgkinson scanned in textures ranging from sandpaper to bubble wrap to her parents’ bath mat. Colin’s fur is taken from a photo of the cat she had as a teenager.

‘With textures and photographs that you’ve taken yourself, people will read the story, but there’s an extra history of it for myself. The tablecloth on Colin and the Snoozebox in the scene with Mr Marshmallow, the polar bear, that was my husband’s pyjamas. That was years ago and they’ve been thrown away, but I loved them. It’s like having a patchwork blanket and having all these lovely memories attached.’

She has found that at times getting the balance of textures right can be tricky, for changing even a background can completely alter the feel of a page. When Colin sets off in search of his shadow, a ball of green thread traces his path along a washing line, behind a basket and over a fence. The white background perfectly highlights the shadows, but Hodgkinson originally composed the scene differently.

‘It had grass, and bits and pieces in it, but it looked so busy that you didn’t really follow his journey. I had to think: what’s the point of this page? We’re meant to know that he’s travelling around all of these things chasing the shadow, but if you’ve got so much in it, things get lost.

'It’s knowing what to pull out to push forward the narrative or the emotion or whatever it is that’s important about that composition. Sometimes you’ll get lost in it in terms of what it looks like and get seduced by it as an image instead of thinking, actually this has got a function as well.

'Sometimes that can be difficult if you like it looking a certain way, but in your heart of hearts you know it’s not right for the story. You always have to go with what’s best for the book and that can be difficult, because as an image maker you want the image to look beautiful.’

Smile! has a different look and feel from the other books. The book itself is larger, and in portrait format instead of landscape. Frequently, a single image will take up an entire double page spread, in contrast to the multiple panels of the Colin books; there are also fewer textures, and the background colours are flat.

The result is a book with a cleaner look, for which Hodgkinson credits her editor and designer at Orchard. ‘It was Giselle and Kate’s idea to make it a bit more graphic and simple. By paring it back a bit it draws your attention to the things that you’re meant to see.

'My usual instinct is to cram so much in because I’m so scared of people being bored when they look at it. This was a big brave decision that I don’t think I would have made if it was just for me, but I think it works really well and it’s added to the boldness of the book.’

‘The textures and different art materials I used were quite specific, so it has quite a specific look. There’s only the watercolour, the tissue paper and the colouring pencil and ink.’

The text is a mixture of handwriting, standard type and cut-out paper laid out in a conventional way, so it has visual interest but is also easy to read.

‘It’s a nice relationship between the typed text and the handwritten, so it’s almost like they complement each other in the same way that a flat colour of the background will be placed next to something that is a bit more textural.

'All of the textures are layered tissue paper and glue. I love tissue paper. I love it. The textures are really subtle, but there’s something really nice about it, especially when you cut it and it’s not exactly straight, or you rip it. It’s very tactile and a nice thing to work with.’

Until a year ago, Hodgkinson worked in her garden shed. Some of her materials were stored in drawers while others were clothes-pegged around the place. These days her studio is in Clerkenwell, but she’s brought the washing line with her.

‘Every now and again I’ll go and steal something from the shed, clip a little bit of fabric and take it in to work. I could use all of them or none of them. All those lovely colours and textures around me, even if I don’t use them, are there as a reference to a reaction about how it makes me feel when I see them. So it’s as much about that as about using them in my work directly.’

Among the items pegged up at the moment are a watercolour elephant, an ink drawing of a peacock, and a page of purple potato-printing, all of which are for Limelight Larry, the book she is working on at the moment.

Although she uses traditional materials in her work, she finds the computer frees her to experiment, and to make mistakes. ‘It’s like nothing is precious and everything is disposable. That’s not to say it’s meaningless. But if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.

'So you try something else. Maybe I’ll try this potato printing for the leaves on the trees, but then they’ll look rubbish so I’ll forget about them. And if they’re pegged up there, it’s like: “Oh, actually, wouldn’t that be a nice ear for a bunny rabbit?” So it’s kind of like visual recycling, but not in a lazy way, more in an “I never thought of making a rabbit’s ear like that so let’s see what that looks like” way. So it’s a way of experimentation and exploring, which I really love.’

‘There’s something I find really uncomfortable about being faced with a blank piece of paper. It’s like I only have to touch it with a pencil and I will have messed it up.

'If you do a finished bit of real artwork you have to be confident that that’s the line you want, that’s the colour you want, that’s the aesthetic of paint you want, and then it’s there. Whereas if you do everything separate, you can think, I know I want it to be paint, but I don’t know if I want it to be red.’

‘So I’m not bothered about it looking perfect or the line being perfect. I’d much prefer something to have a raw energy about it, so it looks alive, rather than to keep redrawing or repainting until it’s perfect but it looks dead.

'For me, that’s the key: for it to have an energy about it is what’s important. I don’t really think it matters whether you can do that in the computer or in real life. It’s just using different tools to make things real.’