It’s only three weeks until we launch The Last Viking!
The Last Viking launch
Friday June 24
6pm for a 6:30pm start
Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre (Old Prison Hospital)
cnr Knutsford and Hampton Rd, Fremantle
RSVP to Fremantle Press on (08) 9430 6331 or email admin@fremantlepress.com.au
Come invade the Literature Centre and help us celebrate.
Here’s the book trailer to get you in the Viking mood…
Norm has spoken previously about some of his influences while writing The Last Viking. This week I thought I’d talk about the influences I had while doing the drawings.
I’ve been a huge fan of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes for many years. It was written and illustrated by the incredibly intelligent and talented Bill Watterson. The comic looked at the worries of childhood with humour and sensitivity. I was a teenager when I first start reading the comic, and I often didn’t understand the deeper philosophical side of each story, but the inventive and expressive artwork was more than enough to get me hooked. It’s easy to see the similarities between Calvin and Josh- both are young boys, both are loners, both have animal friends, and both get lost in their imaginations on a regular basis.
Another major influence for me has been the Asterix comics, written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. I loved the historical references, the attention to detail in the costumes and backgrounds, and the ridiculous puns. That’s all come through in The Last Viking (except for the puns… though I feel that Norman’s gentle, daggy sense of humour is very much in the same vein as Goscinny’s, and also mine). And of course, there is an animal companion- a little white dog, called Dogmatix… very much like Wolverine in The Last Viking.
It’s here: an honest-to-goodness book trailer for The Last Viking.
Everyone’s doing book trailers these days, so we thought we should too. Yep, that’s how Norm and I roll, so easily swayed by peer pressure.
Hope you like it.
There’s only four weeks to go until the launch!
So here’s four sneak peeks to celebrate.
Here’s Josh meeting the bullies…
Prince Knut and his trusty Wolfhound going a-Viking…
a proper Viking funeral…
and Odin, Thor and the Bezerkers preparing for battle.
My favourite part of this last image is the bottom right-hand corner. I put in a bird poo for a joke. At the time I didn’t realise that when people were going to turn this page, that’s exactly where they would have to put their thumb.
Over the last 3 weeks I’ve shown the process of developing the opening scene of Last Viking. I covered the first roughs, some more developed ideas, and the final pencils.
I’d gotten up to here:
and now this week: the final colours.
My first go wasn’t too bad- but the night-time panel wasn’t dark enough. It seemed like early morning, and Josh would (should) be asleep by then 🙂 I wasn’t sure about the colours in the day-time panel either. But I liked the blur of colour from the left-hand panel across the gutter.
When I had tried colours for a few pages, I started to see that sometimes it looked good if just a few things were coloured in, and other parts were left white. So I tried that. And I darkened up the night-time panel.
Continue reading “The all important opening scene- part 4 (final colours)”
The first review appeared in the inboxes of Norman and I this morning…
The Last Viking scored 4 out of 5 stars and made the Top Picks list in the upcoming issue of Junior BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER.
“Norman Jorgensen’s writing and James Foley’s illustrations complement each other perfectly in this charming story about courage and imagination. As in all the best picture books, the words allow room for the cartoonish, expressive art to expand and deepen the story.
Keen readers can even decipher the runic inscriptions adorning the illustrations with the help of the decoder in the endpapers.
This is recommended fun for primary school readers.”
Heath Graham, educator, State Library of Victoria- reviewing for Junior BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER
Over the past two weeks I’ve shown the development for the opening scene of Last Viking. Here’s the first roughs, and here’s some more developed ideas.
This week I’ll show the final rough and pencil outlines, and how I got there.
I’d decided the scene would take place in Josh’s bedroom. He’d be in a cubby house with his dog at night, and there’d also be a panel on the right set in the morning.
Here’s the closest I’d got so far:
My next experiment would be trying a more dramatic birds-eye perspective. I did some smaller thumbnails:
Last week I wrote about how opening scenes work, and showed some early roughs of the opening scene for Last Viking.
I tried various options that didn’t quite work, which helped me become clearer about what I wanted the opening scene to achieve. It needed to do several things:
So with those things in mind, I kept sketching. I did a little set of thumbnails where the double page spread would have two panels. One would be big and dark, showing Josh’s room at night time. Josh and Wolverine are visible only as silhouettes, seen in a cubby made from a blanket. The bulk of the text would relate to this panel and go in a column at far left. The thinner panel on the right would show Josh and Wolverine poking their heads out from the cubby the next morning, with the line, “But other than those things, Josh is as brave as a lion” written close by.
Here’s a bigger version with some tone added. There is still a silhouette of a dinosaur on the far wall. Josh’s skateboard is on the floor next to Wolverine’s cushion.
The opening scene of a picture book is so important:
But if an opening scene doesn’t work, people won’t want to read the book. As Norm has said to me on many a facetious occasion – ‘no pressure, Picasso’. It took me a while to get an opening scene I was happy with, so I’ve put together some posts outlining the process.
The opening text for The Last Viking doesn’t spell out an obvious scene, so I found it quite a challenge to illustrate. The text goes like this:
Young Josh is very brave.
He’s not afraid of anyone or anything – except maybe the dark and the sound of ghosts whistling in the trees at night.
Pirates worry him a bit, of course, and so do boy-eating dinosaurs, and monsters under the bed. He’s also just a little afraid of dragons and vampires.
But other than those few things, Josh is as brave as a lion.
Sort of.
The text introduces the character (Josh) and the main conflict (Josh suffers from fear). So, we have our who and our what. But it doesn’t specifically say where or when the scene takes place. This would be up to me as the illustrator to decide.
Norm had seen some illustrations of mine, where I’d drawn a young boy dressed as a knight and various other characters. So his initial idea for the opening illustration of Last Viking was to have Josh dressed as each of the characters mentioned- a ghost, a pirate, a dinosaur, and so on. However, I couldn’t imagine Josh dressing up as characters that he was afraid of, and I didn’t think it would set the right emotional tone. That is, if Josh is afraid, the picture needs to be scary.
Here’s the very first sketch, and a stretched-out landscape version.
Hi everyone,
as I’m feeling incredibly lazy, but also superbusy, I’ve decided to just show a couple of sneak peeks of the final artwork.
Here’s page 4:
And here’s the panels from pages 10-11.
James Foley 