ACHUKA Special Guest ~Shirley Hughes"

1. You write in the Introduction to the splendid compendium volume, The Shirley Hughes Collection, "I can hardly believe they are all here; all my familiar characters..." Now that you are in your seventies, it must give you immense pleasure to look back at the body of work you have amassed. Would it be fair to say that your style and illustrative approach have remained fairly consistent over the years?

I was an illustrator of other authors' books before I started to write and design my own picture books. I very much hope that my illustrative style has strengthened and developed since then, but I think my early work is still highly recognisable. Then, as now, I was interested in trying to open up the page to create a three dimensional, recognisable world which invites the reader to enter and linger in at leisure, perhaps fantasise about what isn't in the picture.

2. The Alfie and Annie Rose stories were brand-new when I was reading them to my own children in the early 1980s, but they already had that 'classic' feel about them. To what do you attribute that?

It is difficult to analyse the source of your own imagination. But I suppose I can't work any other way than out of the classic English picture book tradition, but also reflecting the changing contemporary scene.

3. You lay great store by the fact that you draw from life rather than from models, and you fill your sketchbooks with experimental drawings. How do you decide which drawings to use as the basis for a major character such as Alfie?

I keep sketchbooks and draw real people, especially children, as I see them in parks and playgrounds. Then I go home, sit down at my drawing board and make it all up, without using any particular figure. 'Alfie' just appeared on a piece of paper one day, a quick sketch of him running up the street, triumphantly eager to 'get in first'. Drawing him, and my other characters, I am depending on a kind of memory bank of observations of real children.

4. Looking through the Collection, we can see a number of different art materials being used - ink, pencil, pastel, paint. What is your preferred medium?

For colour work I use gouache colour, which comes in tubes like watercolour but has a bit more density, and oil pastels, finished with fine brushes. You build up the underlying pencil drawing to create tone and atmosphere. For black-and-white line I use a dip and scratch pen and Indian ink.

5. One of my own children found certain picture books so vivid, we would have to hide them - being in the same room with them was unbearable. These were usually books that included rather sad rather than especially scary pictures. It's difficult to conceive of any of your books having this unsettling effect. Although there is sadness there, it is always so warmly resolved. Do you think a comforting conclusion is an essential ingredient in picture books?

I do agree about sadness being more difficult for children to bear than scariness. Though some sinister illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Arthur Hughes (eg. 'The Princess and the Goblin') did frighten me as a child. Children's books must all be pitched somewhere between the need to be pleasurably frightened and warmly reassured. I suppose I came down towards the latter, with some exciting moments in between.

6. Your world is punctuated with childish tantrums and selfishness, but the overall impression is one of a domestic round of picnics, birthday parties and trips to the seaside. Is this because, despite what pictures others might paint of domestic and ethnic strife, that's the way you see life still being led; or is it a conscious effort to hold on to a threatened rhythm of living?

I am well aware that family life is not a sweet idyll but a high drama, especially for very young children for whom it is their only sphere, where all their emotions are centred. I find that the domestic scene offers enough humour and story ideas to last me a lifetime. The odd thing is that these stories, rooted in English family life, such as 'Dogger' and the 'Alfie' books, are the ones which are most widely accepted abroad.

7. It's hard to pick out my favourite aspect of your work, but a strong contender has to be your rhymes for the very young. Are you still writing verses of this type?

I always loved verse as a child, partly because there was so much nice white space around the words. I came to try to write it - in my case rhymes for the very young - quite late in my career and I love doing it. Also verse for older children too, as in 'Stories by Firelight'.

8. The wordless story 'Up and Up' would suggest that you may possibly storyboard your picture books first, and then add in the text later. How exactly do you put them together?

A wordless story is a kind of Mount Everest challenge to an illustrator because the whole thing has to be told, like a mime, in gesture, facial expression and movement. 'Up and Up' is one of the most interesting projects I have ever worked on because so much of the input comes from the reader. Children write letters telling me the story, and a great deal about their own lives too. It breaks right across language barriers, not to mention required reading levels, and seems to free their imagination in the most varied ways.

9. Although you don't use models, do members of your own family tend to recognise themselves in the pictures?

Certainly not! At least, they don't admit to it. [My daughter, Clara Vulliamy, is an author illustrator and the children in her books don't look a bit like mine, but I do see a resemblance to her own children].

10. 'Enchantment In The Garden' [1996] was described in the TES as "This book, vast and operatic in its conception, is a far cry from the world of the Alfie books..." Why has your more recent work been historical, and on a broader scale?

Although I hope I will never stop working on simple narratives for younger children, I do also need to expand my horizons as an artist and a storyteller. Books like 'Enchantment in the Garden' and 'The Lion and the Unicorn' give me an opportunity to paint a wider scene, use expressive colour, inhabit fresh places, and contrast the big double-page spreads with some black-and-white drawing, which I was trained to do earlier in my career. They are an enormously invigorating challenge.

11. If you were told that you could no longer produce your own books, but that you were to become the exclusive illustrator of a contemporary novelist, who would you like it to be?

Philip Pullman.

12. You have said that the person from the past you would most like to meet would be Edward Lear. How would you wish to spend the day together?

Sitting under a tree in some sunny place (Italy, perhaps?) with a very good picnic and our sketchbooks. But as Lear was a great landscape artist as well as a writer of nonsense verse, I might find his presence rather intimidating!

13. I think all of us more or less understand how the editorial process works with words. But with pictures things are less clear. Do your editors suggest revisions to your artwork? If so, how, and what manner of changes do you find yourself having to make?

All my stories float about like icebergs in my head for quite a long time before something triggers them urgently to the surface and I reach for a pencil. The words and the pictures are never developed separately. Like a film, one is unthinkable without the other. When I have written the text and got it absolutely right I make a rough dummy for the book, which I do at great speed in a state of high excitement, settling where the blocks of text will go on each page and drawing round it, deciding how the layout of each spread will work and lead the reader on. All this I do by hand (I don't use a computer). My editor will already have read the story, perhaps offered some suggestions. She usually leaves the design of the book to me, though there are in-house designers at my publisher who will help me if I need it. The dummy is the essence of the book, and I work from it directly when I come to do the finished artwork.

14. I gather Dogger is housebound these days. He used to get out to Book Festivals, but no longer. Does he ever receive fan mail? How do you respond to people who write to any of your other characters?

Dogger does not receive much direct fanmail, but quite a lot via me which he finds very gratifying. Many of my younger readers are convinced that Alfie and his little sister Annie Rose are real and sometimes when we meet at Book Events they ask me why they haven't come along too.

15. Which of the younger children's illustrators do you most enjoy?

Patrick Benson, Helen Oxenbury, John Burningham, Charlotte Voake and, of course, Clara Vulliamy.

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