Mini Grey: Bear-Faced Biscuit

Mini Grey came to children's books via an English degree, theatre design and six years as a primary school teacher, but once she found her vocation success came quickly and easily: Biscuit Bear is only her third picture book.

It was during her years as a teacher that she became interested in the genre. 'You use books as a starting point for different sorts of work,' she says. 'I loved Lane Smith - I loved subversive retellings of fairy tales like The True Story of The Three Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man - Babette Cole, Anthony Browne, and also Allan Ahlberg's stuff - I loved reading happy family stories ... I realised that if I could have a picture book published it would be the fulfilment of a long-felt ambition.'

To learn some of the skills specific to book design she took an MA in sequential design at University of Brighton. Her tutor there put her in touch with an editor at Jonathan Cape; the meeting led to her first book, Egg Drop, which is based on the nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty'. 'I'd been thinking, what if he was obsessed with flight? If he'd just waited he would have hatched out and been able to fly.' Next came The Pea and the Princess – told from the pea's point of view - and then Biscuit Bear, which is based partly on the story of the 'Gingerbread Man' and partly on a memory of a childhood baking experience.

'I'd remembered this one bear-shaped biscuit that I made when I was about five. When it came out of the oven it was super-cute. I'd baked it in an aluminium tart case and I couldn't eat it. I put it next to my bed and kept it there for a long time. I don't remember what happened to it in the end. Maybe it was surreptitiously thrown away. So I thought, what if it came to life, what would it do? There's a bit of The Sorcerer's Apprentice there - what if it didn't know it was a biscuit and had ambitions to make friends and do big things?'

An inevitable side-effect of bringing children and cooking together is the mess made of the kitchen. In Biscuit Bear Grey suggests the chaos of toddler Horace's baking session by using effects such as crackle glaze, which make the illustrations take on something of a life of their own, much like the main character. 'You paint an emulsion over a layer of the crackle glaze and it makes the paint break up,' she explains. 'It's excitingly random because you don't know what will happen. I also made some stains – coffee and fingerprints and what have you - and scanned them into my computer and printed them onto the paper. The best fun thing is flicking watercolour paint around and seeing what happens, because the different colours come through. Accidental things are good fun. It's easy to get tighter and tighter when you're doing the artwork, so you have to fool yourself into feeling spontaneous, trying to keep playful.'

Grey maintains this sense of fun even when using her visuals symbolically. 'When Biscuit Bear wakes up in the night there are loads of clocks in the background. They're there because they're saying it's night-time, and time's going by, and they're asleep. I don't have to just depict what the real background is. I can do a background that is abstract; you don't have to be too tied down to literal spaces. I also knew I wanted to use lots of real biscuits [in the scene when Horace is asleep]. One would have to do lots of research on the biscuits, and buy lots of biscuits and scan them in, and then maybe eat them!'

Like Lane Smith and Lauren Child – 'Everybody gets influenced by everybody else. I'm shameless at snitching things ,' she admits – Grey uses type as an integral part of the illustration, with words tumbling all over the pages. 'I like to have the words and pictures in there together fighting it out,' she says. 'The words are another visual element to tell the story, and it's an exciting feeling of power to know that as well as animating the pictures, the words can help to tell the story. You can use them to take people on a journey around the picture.'

Despite its streak of anarchic humour, which culminates in a hilarious, chaotic circus scene of knife-throwing, flame-swallowing biscuits, the book also has moments of sadness: the family dog eats Biscuit Bear's newfound pals. 'I suppose if you make something you've got to be prepared for it to be destroyed,' says Grey. 'Things tend to get broken in my books. Happy endings are great, but sometimes it's all broken and you've got to start again.'

Like Biscuit Bear, Grey's forthcoming book, Traction Man is Here, features a character that comes to life. 'It's the story of an ordinary, everyday, superhero action figure doll who has lots of adventures in different places - he has adventures in the bath and on the planet duvet. Then he's given an outfit that he finds it tricky to be heroic in, so he has to try to feel heroic.'

As a relative newcomer to children's books, Mini Grey is surprised to have won the Smarties gold medal. 'I feel very privileged to be part of that shortlist and I am amazed to be picked for the gold. I feel quite honoured to have this happen. If you look at the picture books out in 2004, there are so many exciting, innovative ones around. Now is an amazing time for picture books.'