Caryl Hart & Bethan Woollvin Interview each other! PLUS an EXCLUSIVE Artwork GIVEAWAY!
Meet the Oceans by me and Bethan Woollvin publishes TODAY!
To celebrate, Bethan and have interviewed each other about the creation of this book and our thoughts for the series.
Here's our conversation:
Me: The Meet the World series (as I like to call it) started life in 2016 after Emma Blackburn, our Editor at Bloomsbury, saw some animated gifs of planets with little faces that you had on your website. She asked if I'd be interested in developing a rhyming book about a journey through space, with a rhyme for each planet, using your illustrations.
Q: What inspired you to create these cute little characters?
Bethan: Well, I think I had actually created these little planet characters as part of a project I was working on at university, back in 2015. They started off as small little doodles of planets, and I challenged myself to animate each planet into a small GiF. Animating the solar system, if you will!
Q: When you were writing your brilliant rhymes for Meet the Planets, were you thinking about how I might illustrate your story?
Me: I knew you'd be creating characters of the planets with cute little faces but I had no idea how you were going to present these. I love the way you play with perspective and your scenery, with those zingy neon highlights, looks stunning. Also for some reason, I didn't realise the background of the book would be jet black! The contrast between the colours you use and this very matt, black background really makes this book stand out.
Q: Did you ever imagine that your little planet animations would be the start of this amazing project?
Bethan: A lot of my ideas and projects really begin with me finding an object, creature or person which demands its own character, and that’s really how the creation of my planet illustrations and animations came about. But when I first saw how you had written these rhymes, giving each planet their own personality and characteristics, it really kicked my imagination into overdrive! I had no idea that they would snowball into this fantastic series, but I’m really pleased they did.
Q: All the research you put together for Meet the Oceans must have been a lot of hard work! How long did it take you to write the text?
Me: It actually took me several months to come up with the final text. It was a huge challenge deciding which facts to include. I wanted to pick details that could be used to create a personality for each ocean. With only four to eight lines to play with, I had to choose carefully!
Q: When you first saw the text for Meet the Oceans, what was your initial reaction?
Bethan: Sitting down and reading your text for Meet the Oceans for the first time instantly set my brain off, working out exactly how I might bring these oceans to life! Being a visual thinker, I do a lot of designing and planning within my brain alone, and that definitely happened for me the moment I read your text! I think I knew immediately that it was going to be a huge challenge, but I couldn’t wait to get started.
Q: Your text for Meet the Oceans was very inspiring, and I had great fun creating the illustrations for the story. When you first saw my illustrations, what did you think?
Me: I had no idea how you were going to illustrate bodies of salt water as characters but you've done an amazing job of giving them all personalities. You've put so much detail into each image, with dozens of cute sea creatures for readers to spot! I love also that not every illustration is just a view of the sea bed. Some include bits of shoreline and the wildlife that lives beside the sea as well as in it. The way you transition from what is above water to what is below, is really clever!
Q: How did you come up with this magical approach to the overall design of each illustration?
Bethan: It became evident quite early on during the planning stages of the illustrations that the depictions of each ocean and sea would need to be quite visually different to one another in order to keep the story flowing. After quite a lot of brainstorming sessions with our designer, Goldy, we figured out that using things like scale, colour and varying points of view, we could display each ocean and sea in really exciting ways.
There are some oceans within the book, for example, where I needed to illustrate both above water and below water, to show creatures diving into the water as well as the sea beds. Now luckily, with my style of illustration, I’m able to break a fair amount of perspective rules, which certainly came in handy!
Having a colour palette was also very helpful when creating these illustrations for Meet the Oceans. We had a wider palette, which included colours used across the whole book, but for each spread we picked just a few from that palette, depending on the type of ocean and it’s characteristics. I remember spending a really long time working out what shade of blue or green each ocean *felt* like, which was surprisingly tricky.
Q: All of your oceans and seas are such fantastic characters, which one was your favourite to write about?
Q: All of your oceans and seas are such fantastic characters, which one was your favourite to write about?
Me: I think I enjoyed writing the Caribbean Sea rhymes the most, mainly because of the wonderful array of crazy fish names! There were literally so fabulous sounding fish, it was hard to choose, but in the end I went for: Trunkfish, Porkfish, Blue Tags and Jawfish... how evocative these names are!
Q: Which is YOUR favourite ocean or sea, and why?
Bethan: I think my favourite sea has to be the Mediterranean Sea. It was a particularly challenging spread, as it featured a tricky perspective of above and below the sea. But I really enjoyed illustrating all of the gorgeous Mediterranean homes on the coast, as well as that hot pink sunset and all the waving creatures. What fun it was to create!
Q: Writing can be really challenging, but even more so when you’re making the words rhyme too! Did you have trouble with any of the oceans or seas making the rhymes work?
Me: Honestly, it was really hard! It took me a really long time to get every verse right. It was tricky finding words with the right number of syllables needed to keep the rhythm even and flowing. There was a lot of chopping and changing to get to the point of a first draft. And then lots of re-writing following our editor's and designer's comments. When you write in rhyme, changing one word can often lead to re-writing the whole verse! We were also very keen to ensure each page picked out different aspects of the oceans and seas we were describing without too much repetition.
What was your biggest challenge creating this book?
Bethan: My biggest challenge for this book was keeping the balance of the characters right, and I used a lot of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ characters to tackle this - I’ll explain why. As your story personified each of the oceans and seas, it felt really important for them to have big eyes, full of expression. As well as the bodies of water, the little human and dog zooming around in their submarine also need more expressive eyes in order to react and interact with the oceans. But what about all of the creatures you wrote about in your story?! They’re important, too! Well, it quickly became apparent that if every creature in the whole book had that sneaky side eye, you wouldn’t know where to look on each page! It would be full of eyes!
So we decided that we would assign larger eyes to some of the bigger ‘primary’ characters, such as whales, seals and swordfish, and assign small dot eyes to the ‘secondary’ characters, which are mainly fish, crabs and seagulls. But that was certainly very challenging, and took quite a while to figure out.
Q: Our world has a lot of oceans and seas, so many that we couldn’t fit them all into the book! Were there any bodies of water that you nearly included in the book?
What about Meet the Oceans are you most proud of ?
Bethan: Well, I’m really proud of the project as a whole, because it pushed me to think outside the box and come up with something really fun and unique! But what i’m most proud of is the amount of movement I’ve been able to illustrate in this book. My illustration is very flat and static, and it was a real worry for me at the beginning of the project. How was I going to illustrate the oceans and seas, which are busy and brimming with life and movement?! But I rose to the challenge, and spent a really long time studying videos of water, bubbles, waves, swimming fish, seaweed, currents, coral and much more. This helped me endlessly throughout the book, as I was able to give the oceans much more texture and movement. It was certainly a lot of work, but I couldn’t be more proud of how I have brought the oceans and seas to life with my own drawings!
Q: While writing the text for Meet the Oceans, you must have squeezed in your favourite sea creature! What is your favourite sea creature?
Q: If you could choose any Meet the.. title to do next, what would it be?
Bethan: Good question! I think you could do something really fun with pond life, though I think I need a little more time away from drawing bodies of water, it might be the end of me! Aside from pond life, I think the natural wonders would be really fun. Volcanoes, mountains, waterfalls and so on. OR we could go really weird and do a book about time! I’d love to try and personify relativity and wormholes.
Q: I have the same question for you! If you could write any ‘Meet the…’ book next, what would it be?
- Create a piece of artwork of a WHALE.
- Post it on Instagram or Twitter
- Tag @BethanWoollvin and @carylhart
- Mark your entry: #meettheoceansbookplay