“I like this book,” said Seven Years Old, looking up and smiling. “Whose is it?” He’d spotted it lying among a pile of accounts and an old Grocott’s Mail and that answered my first question: aren’t these illustrations a bit dark and subtle for a children’s book?
“I like this book,” said Seven Years Old, looking up and smiling. “Whose is it?” He’d spotted it lying among a pile of accounts and an old Grocott’s Mail and that answered my first question: aren’t these illustrations a bit dark and subtle for a children’s book?
Table Mountain’s Holiday
Written and Illustrated by Lucy Stuart-Clark
Published by Bumble Books, an imprint of Publishing Print Matters (2013)
ISBN 978-0-9802610-3-5
Around R250 at Van Schaik's book store
Reviewer: Sue Maclennan
Lucy Stuart-Clark studied fine art at Rhodes, specialising in print-making. Last year she completed a Master's in Illustration at Stellenbosch and is working as a freelance illustrator in Cape Town. The images in her children’s book, Table Mountain’s Holiday, were achieved with gouache resist.
“It’s a technique I learnt from a lecturer during my masters at Stellenbosch,” she explains. “She thought it would help me to loosen up my line work and I fell in love with it right away. My illustrations were then hand-coloured with chalk pastels.
“Although it can be quite time consuming, the process of almost working backwards (and the happy accidents that sometimes take place during the process) reminded me a lot of printmaking.”
The story goes that Table Mountain – which is represented as a sort of Stegosaurus only with a cuter face – goes walkabout among Cape Town’s most famous landmarks. It’s not my home town, but I almost felt like it could be, as “TM” feeds the squirrels, takes a boat ride and takes a dip at Muizenberg.
Seven Years Old’s favourite illustration was one of four waiters at the Mount Nelson Hotel going out of their way to serve TM tea and a cucumber sandwich. Mine was TM watching a movie at the Waterfront – I loved the faces in the audience.
Although the production is high-quality, the book has an informal, impromptu feel. The text is typed (think typewriter not laptop), cut and pasted and handwritten on what looks like lined scrap paper. Stuart-Clark explains:
“I did my initial drawings on that cheap nasty blue paper from scrap books (simply because it was the paper that I had on hand), and was very surprised that the paper held up under the rinsing part of the gouache resist technique. In order to keep that scrapbooking feel, I started to work on different colour sheets of sugar paper for each illustration.
Table Mountain’s Holiday was chosen for the 2013 Bologna Children’s Bookfair Illustrators’ Exhibition.
I still can’t decide whose book it is.
How she did it
"I would sketch my drawing and then paint white gouache thickly over the paper, leaving my pencil line work exposed. When the gouache is dry, I would then gently cover the whole sheet of paper with black Indian ink. The ink will therefore remain only where it has directly touched the paper. Once the ink layer is dry, you rinse your drawing under running water and the gouache begins to dissolve, leaving behind irregular black ink line work and some happy accidents where you may not have covered the paper properly with gouache (I sometimes used this for effect like the swishing water in the shark cage diving scene)."
