Chris Haughton Illustrator Shh! We Have A Plan

Illustrator Chris Haughton, who I was lucky to do an Illustration Masterclass with last year, has a brand new Children’s book called Shh! We Have A Plan. The author and illustrator of  ‘A Bit Lost’ and ‘Oh No George !’ has crafted another wonderfully simplistic book.

Chris is great at building up the page turning tension in his books. This always goes down well with young readers and listeners alike.

Chris gives a detailed description of his ideas for the book over on his blog here. I like the way that he shows his workings, sketches and thought progressions there too. Early sketches below.

Chris says ” For my other two books, I am always asked if I used paper cuts, as they look quite like it, but in fact I did not use paper cuts at all when creating the artwork and it was all pencil and digital. For this one though because it had five characters on each page it needed some sort of drastic simplification for it to be read clearly. Not only that but I was keen for the conversations to read across the page, matching each line with the action of the character. There was so much shifting of compositions around on the pages that it became clear the best way to compose each page was by collage. In fact it made perfect sense to create a mainly silhouette image from paper cut and in fact the design of the birds also benefitted from it too. “

You can see how the image above translated into it’s digital book version by scrolling back up and comparing the two.

As ever Chris is also helped to establish Kipepeo cards in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where a group of local women hand screen print this great range of Chris’s designs. You can purchase them here. Chris says ” The intention with setting up this screen print facility is to be able to produce many other new designs, if anyone has some saleable designs that they would be willing to volunteer, I am sure they would be very gratefully received.”  Great idea and as ever fab work Chris.