Being creative: 1 – Anne Spudvilas

peasant-prince-coverAnne Spudvilas is the illustrator of ‘the Peasant Prince’ – the picture book derived from ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ by Li Cunxin. At the recent Children’s Literature Festival, at Norman Lindsay’s Gallery (on March 20 and 21 2010), she described the journey she undertook to create this book with Li Cunxin.

The first task was to reduce a story, which was first published as an autobiography covering 450 pages…

 “During a holiday at Lorne, in Victoria, soon after he stopped dancing, a friend, Graeme Base, the children’s author and illustrator, persuaded him (Li Cunxin) to list the big turning points he had experienced. This 10-page “general sketch of my life” led to a deal with Penguin. Two years later, helped by two editors, he had expanded the sketch to 680,000 words, then cut them down to 160,000 covering 450 pages.”

(Neil Jillett September 6, 2003. Dance of the Peasant Prince. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549014871.html)

For a picture book, this needed to be reduced further – to less than 40 pages! Quite a task! How do you do something like that?

Anne described the process she often follows as:

  • beginning with thumbnail sketches
  • creating a storyboard with these
  • revision with the author (Li Cunxin)
  • additions of descriptions to storyboards (filling out details)
  • use of a databank of images (to find faces, places and realistic detail of the story)
  • concertina of the storyboard (to see how it flows)
  • research into appropriate illustration techniques ( for ‘the Peasant Prince’, this included studying Chinese brush painting)
  • use of post-it notes to highlight details she needed to check for authenticity
  • continual revision  and review with the author

To create ‘the Peasant Prince’, Anne was fortunate to be able to travel to China for 3 ½ weeks, and be with Li Cunxin on one of his speaking tours. She was therefore able to see some of the places and indeed, meet some of the people he wrote about in his autobiography, firsthand. She was also given access to family photos and memorabilia which she used to bring a realistic feel to the book.

To contrast, Li’s poor beginnings in China, Anne used a low colour palette, including the use of found old newspapers illustrating the meagre inside of his family home. For Li’s life in the United States as a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, she used vibrant richer colours in layers of oil paints and glazes. And the shine on his parents’ faces in the audience scene is glowing in the final pages to represent their great pride in the achievements of their son.

The journey of the illustrator is an interesting tale – a tale about revealing a tale – and the steps along the way are always exciting as they unfold. They are unique for each special book like ‘the Peasant Prince’ and inspiring to hear about. Thank you, Anne.

N.B. Recent titles illustrated by Anne Spudvilas (with links to her website) include:

Baby days | Covers | In my backyard | Jenny Angel | Woolvs in the Sitee

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

curious“All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though that is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But that is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put into his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses…”

Christopher Boone doesn’t behave like most of the kids at his school – and this often causes him strife and trouble. He  usually says exactly what he is thinking, and sees things in a rather black and white manner, with little room for emotion or pretence. He can’t understand the way many people behave, and why his honesty often causes him, and others around him, grief.

On the positive side of things, Christopher is a bit of a maths whizz and enjoys working out puzzles – though puzzling why a neighbourhood dog is brutually killed gets him into lots of strife. He decides he is going to solve this murder mystery and keeps track of things as he writes a story about his discoveries. Difficulties come about when he can’t understand ‘normal’ social cues, and the idea of telling a white lie or avoiding issues to protect others is beyond his comprehension. this is especially serious when the police become involved and secrets from the past are revealed.

As the above quote suggests, there is really nothing wrong with his thought processes, except for how they fit into society’s way of thinking. ‘The Curious Incident…’ is an interesting insight into how many autistic people view the world, as it is written from Chris’ point of view, as it reflects how he views normal daily interactions which we often intepret quite differently.

It is food for thought for teachers and students as we learn to accept the differences between ourselves and those around us. The struggles Christopher has dealing with relationships, adolescence and school are often magnified by his autism, but Haddon’s tale  is intriguing as he reveals the many complexities involved, while providing an insight to how others could empathise better with those who are different – since “everyone has special needs.”

Recommended to anyone with an interest in thinking about how others tick… And isn’t that you and I?

Further reading:

Robison, John Elder. 2007. Look me in the eye: My life with Apserger’s. North Sydney. Random House