One last thing… A good friend of mine recently mentioned that, since reading Dodo, his young son now starts on, incessantly, about wanting doughnuts each time he sees an image of a dodo! So, I’m sorry, if this happens to you too. It’s really just been snippets of reflection on my latest book. Thanks to Picture Book Den for the opportunity to brain spew (my words, not theirs) on their blog.
Talking of hardbacks… Hello, Mr Dodo! will be published (in hardback) in the USA later this month, by Arthur A. If it were up to me I’d love it if the ‘lead’ edition of my books were always hardbacks. About how it makes us feel, as well as the story in the words. I strive to put across this importance, of the book as a whole. Extras that add another dimension to the book (and the story), like the KNOW YOUR BIRDS page at the back of Hello, Mr Dodo! or the SPOT THE JUNGLE ANIMALS in Hector and Hummingbird.Īnd I try to think of the feeling I’d have if I were holding the final book in my hands. The endpapers, the size, the paper type, the layout, the title page, the typography, and the extras. When I start imagining the artwork for a book, I start imagining the entire book. The dodo was a joy to draw too and I’m particularly pleased with his partially vacant demeanour. And the summer setting was perfect for this. With the artwork, I wanted to embrace the opportunity to use bright spot (pantone) colours again, as I had with my debut, Hector and Hummingbird. Within his friendship with Martha, was that ‘Mr Dodo’ remained a bird, Thing about the dodo ‘character’ that was paramount to me though, even They could love eating doughnuts – as no one can disprove that they’d love these sweet fried treats! They didn’t have to be living in Mauritius – as they had been put on boats by the Dutch. And therefore, how interesting liberties could be t aken with the dodo, without stretching the truth too far. How much of it was vague, and how almost mythical they were. With only the timings of when Martha realises the bird is actually a dodo, and the where-and-when of the secret being let slip, shifting in the narrative.Īs I dug deeper into the history of the dodo, I realised just how little was known about them.
It always began and ended pretty much the same way as it does. The story didn’t change much during the process of making the book. Although they didn’t all make it past my editor (Alison Green), it was a still bit of a lark! At one point there were a good handful of bird-related puns in the text. And from the very first draft, that’s how it always began. Many of those themes were influenced by my thoughts on the material listed above and are what really drove the project forward within me. Hello, Mr Dodo! is pretty new to the shelves, but I am pleased when I hear people are noting the underlying themes of the story, beyond the bright doughnuts and advertised ‘friendship’ tale. But it was all in there somewhere, when I was reading a newspaper article about the discovery of a flightless bird, in New Zealand, that had previously been considered ’extinct’ watching 'The Hunter', the Willem Defoe movie, about the rumour of the last Tasmanian Tiger and the planned exploitation of it growing my interest in birds and the natural world and reflecting on my own childhood summers. I’m not entirely sure where the idea, for my latest picture book, Hello, Mr Dodo!, came from. Now Nicholas muses (or in his words, ‘brain spews’!) on his second book, Hello Mr Dodo! His first book, Hector and the Hummingbird, had us grinning and won the Klaus Flugge Prize for most exciting newcomer to picture book illustration in 2016. Welcome to our guest at the Picture Book Den: author and illustrator Nicholas John Frith.
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