Picture Hooks: Talk 1

On Saturday I attended the first of the Picture hooks talks to be held at the National gallery in Edinburgh. The talk was given by Tracey Smith and Vivian French. Tracey has been mentored by illustrator Cate James over the last year, unfortunately Cate now lives in Australia and was unable to attend this talk. Tracey spoke about her experience of being mentored and how it has enabled her to grow in confidence and helped her in trying to find her voice as an artist. The prints that are on display in the gallery derived from her work within a spanish speaking group run in Dundee. She explained how they were talking about language and how we use phrases such as "going back to" or "chopping down" which are not easily translated because they are a special type of verb. These led to her thinking about the cottage she has moved into recently as the phrases used to describe the work that is going on in the renovation process. The images produced are not part of any narrative as such but she wishes to continue with this process. These may eventually form a book similar to some Portuguese picture books that were discussed. As Tracey lives in Dundee I spoke to her about her work at McManus and DCA and her dealings with Claire Brennan from Abertay. Seeing the processes that Tracey uses and hear her talking about them was really interesting. From initial sketches to working on tracing paper to see how layers could combine, roughs done digitally then the final prints showed how her works develop at each stage. Tracey uses a simplistic style but really goes for bold colours such as the blue shown below (four on left).

Vivian French is one of the founders of the Picture Hooks mentoring scheme. She explained how herself and others set up the scheme as they noticed a gap between students graduating and becoming fully fledged professionals. Writers are offered many such schemes but illustrators are not so fortunate. This is a scheme I myself will be likely to apply for after graduating when I feel support might be just what I need. Vivian is an accomplished writer, one who I had previously met when I attended one of her workshops last year. I had a good chat with Vivian about my honours year project and explained my aims and what I was researching etc. She seemed pleased that I was trying to tackle such a tough subject and was glad that I was trying to raise awareness of such important issues. She agreed with my choice to only create a dummy version of the book as most publishers would be very likely to ask for changes to both text and illustrations. Keeping it in such a rough format would allow this process to occur easily without me wasting time on creating a finished product. We discussed the end of year exhibition and I told her I would send an invite as I already have her email. If Vivian cannot attend I will probably send her a digital copy anyway to try and get some valuable feedback.