Emily Gravett: Rabbits, Dogs and Children's Book Week

Relaxing peacefully in Emily Gravett’s living room are an adorable black lurcher named Edith, who is ensconced comfortably on the sofa, and Otto, a lovely long-nosed Saluki, who lies under the window basking in the sun.

Edith is a relative newcomer to Gravett’s household, but Otto has been around long enough to feature in Dogs, which inspired this year’s Children’s Book Week poster. She describes the commission for the book week artwork as ‘an honour’.

Famously spending her late teens and early twenties on the road as a traveller, Gravett was nearly thirty by the time she went to art college. She has built a glittering career with startling speed, with nine picture books published in four years and another two on the way.

Her first, Wolves, was her final project at college. It won the Macmillan Prize in 2004 and the Kate Greenaway medal in 2006. Two years later she won the Greenaway again with Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears.

Gravett creates beautifully spare picture books for the very young. Her work for older readers is more complex, often darkly humorous and sometimes infused with a sense of danger.

Central to all of her books are her distinctive pencil drawings, which are classic but far from old-fashioned. ‘If I’d made everything very straight I could have been a very different illustrator,’ she says. ‘It would have been very traditional. I don’t particularly want to do that. It looks classic, but with a twist.’

Gravett draws every day, starting a new sketch book when she has a book idea or doodling in an old one when she doesn’t. Drawing was the reason she went to college, and she was surprised to discover that many of the other students on her course did not feel the same.

‘There was a small centre to the class that drew, but the rest of them would make things or stick things together. There were life drawing classes, but that was it. I always assumed you’d be taught to draw, but you weren’t.’

‘If you can draw I think that’s what you should have to do,’ she says, citing Alexis Deacon and Catherine Rayner as contemporaries whose work she admires. ‘Some people, I think, try and stylise things. You can see it.

'Sometimes when it’s too stylised it’s beautiful, but quite a lot of the time it looks like they’re trying to do something rather than just letting themselves be themselves.’

She believes that her own drawing has improved over the years. ‘Just because of the amount of time I spent drawing I started to get a feel for which materials work for me and to know my limitations a bit more.’

‘I used to use pen and ink when I was younger, and that is a lot tighter. I think pen is too harsh. I still use it occasionally if I’m trying to get a particular effect, but it just ties me down a bit too much.’

Now she favours Faber Castell-Pitt oil-based pencils: ‘They don’t run underneath the watercolour so you can draw the pencil on first. They’ve just got a really nice line. I have used brown in the past, but I particularly like the soft black one. It’s about as close to an ordinary HP pencil as you can get, but without the silveriness.’

Wolves, Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears and Spells are sophisticated works in which Gravett experiments with content or form.

Her new book, The Rabbit Problem, eschews the traditional linear narrative and the book itself is an elaborate work of art. Gravett got the idea for it after hearing a radio programme about thirteenth-century Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who sought to discover how quickly rabbits would breed in a year given ideal conditions.

‘I have this horrible feeling that people are going to start asking me about the Fibonacci problem and ... I can’t even remember the sequence'

She did plenty of research before embarking on The Rabbit Problem and a book about Fibonacci’s work still stands on her shelf. ‘I have this horrible feeling that people are going to start asking me about the Fibonacci problem and without reminding myself I can’t even remember the sequence, which is awful.’

The Rabbit Problem takes the form of a calendar, which Gravett hopes will be hung on walls; she insisted on retaining the hole in the cover despite her publishers’ doubt as to its necessity. Each spread corresponds to a month in the rabbits’ lives, with an image of rapidly multiplying numbers of the cuddly animals alongside a dates page containing typically humorous notes and assorted collages that depict the challenges the rabbits face in a given month.

‘The Rabbit Problem is definitely a sit-down-and-look-at book,’ Gravett says. ‘Don’t read that one as a bedtime story! It’s a discussion book rather than a reading book. I don’t know how that’s going to go down, but we’ll just have to hope. I did try to put a narrative into it, but it just didn’t flow right.’

‘At first I was thinking there would just be rabbits on the page. Then if you’re going through the 12 months, you think about what would typically happen and you work out what the problem might be and you work out all the ways you could show that. How would you show that they’re hungry? Maybe a ration book.’

Among the book’s other ingenious delights are a knitting pattern for a stripy hooded top for rabbits alongside a scanned-in version of the real thing (knitted by Gravett’s mother), a baby book, a cook book and an eight-page newspaper.

‘I go through lots of junk shops looking through knitting patterns and then I alter them,’ she explains. ‘The seed packets are real. I scan in the backgrounds and then I change them. Because I can scan in things I can take real things and turn them into fantasy things, which is much more fun.’

Given her expertise with a scanner, it’s hard to believe that Gravett was once a self-described computer-phobe. ‘We had a couple of lessons at college which I didn’t understand at all. Then I made a matchbox book which I really wanted to put inside a matchbox but I couldn’t make a book small enough to go into the matchbox so I had to alter the matchbox to go round it.

'So I thought, if I could make a matchbox to go round something then I could put something inside the book as well. With Wolves I was doing the same thing, scanning in the ripped pages. It just seemed a logical way to do it. And now I love my computer. Lots! It’s like having a sketchbook, but in the computer. You can really mess around with things. That’s why The Rabbit Problem took a year. You can’t imagine the amount of fiddling that went on!’

Gravett’s favourite subject at college was book-binding so perhaps it’s no surprise that she is as concerned with the book as artefact as she is with the story it tells. The glued-in pamphlets and pop-up at the end of The Rabbit Problem were time-consuming and expensive to produce, but she enjoyed the chance to experiment.

‘It was before the recession. I might have to rein it in a bit! But I hope to keep exploring the form. I love the way books feel and the fact that just changing the texture of paper makes a difference.

'I love the way books feel and the fact that just changing the texture of paper makes a difference.'

'I think the form should be as important as the content. Even when you’re doing a really simple book, it’s very pleasing if it’s a certain shape or if you’ve got the quality right of the cover, or the endpapers, even where the barcode goes.’

Sometimes she prints out a work in progress and binds it into a book so that she can see how it works in practice rather than on the screen. ‘It’s quite different to sit down and turn the page and say whatever you’ve got to say out loud. It’s also easier to see the edges.’ In this case it also made counting the rabbits easier.

‘I reckon somebody will count them, and it’s a book about maths so it has to be right. There have to be the right amount of babies and the right amount of adults, which is a nightmare. At the beginning they follow down, so you imagine what would they look like if they had a baby.

'By the end I’d abandoned it and as long as the original rabbits were there I was all right. It was twisting my head: “Oh God, who’s that one? And how many teenagers are there?” It was a bit over the top.’

After numerous recounts by Gravett and a team including partner and publishers, it was discovered that she had put in five rabbits too many.

‘It was on the page with the second to the most rabbits. I had to take the five rabbits out. It was really hard because that page was drawn in one go. Normally I’d work in layers, but I thought I wouldn’t be able to spatially work it out unless I did it in one go. I photoshopped them out very carefully!’

Gravett’s next book, Blue Chameleon, will be out in February 2010, and will see a return to the stylistic simplicity of Orange Pear Apple Bear. Although the execution of more complex works like The Rabbit Problem is a greater technical challenge than her books for younger readers, Gravett finds that coming up with the ideas is equally difficult in both cases.

‘I wish there was some sort of formula for coming up with ideas because it would make life a lot easier! But there just isn’t. Sometimes it’s something you’ve heard on the radio, like The Rabbit Formula, and with The Odd Egg I really wanted to do something about the duck and just wrote down loads of ideas.

'With the younger books you have the idea, the concept, do the preliminary sketches and you just do them quickly. You want them to look fresh so there’s no point in labouring things too much. They’re more about the drawing. I want them to be as beautiful as I can make them.’