December 3rd - Mike Brownlow

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How to Draw Robots

Robots have been filling out Christmas stockings since Santa made his first ride, so as the festive season draws near lets connect the circuits and open the lid on the mechanics of drawing our metal friends. And who better to lay down the nuts and bolts than robot supremo Mike Brownlow. Don't touch that dial!



I love robots. Robots have figured prominently in science fiction for a long time, and were a vivid part of my childhood.

I had robot toys and read robot comics. 

Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, West World, Metropolis and Forbidden Planet all left their mark on me. 

So it’s little wonder that I’ve drawn and painted loads of the things over the years, little and large. 

 
When I came up with the idea for Little Robots back in the late ‘90s, it was partly because robots had never, to my knowledge, been featured as the heroes of children’s picture books, let alone a TV series. I felt as though I had a blank canvas to play with. 

The robots I finally decided on were a mixed bunch – short and tall, round and skinny, loud and shy, fast and slow. 

And that’s the joy of it. Robots, frankly, can be anything you want them to be – as complicated as the Terminator, or as simple as Tiny. 

If you take the simple approach, they can be easy to draw because you need only work with the most basic of shapes. Bodies can be boxes. Arms and legs don’t have to be complicated things with joints and muscles, they can be metal tubes, like those of Bender in Futurama. Robots can have two legs or three or more; they can have wheels or tracks or jets to fly with. Their hands can be simple pincers or suckers like those of the Daleks. Their faces need consist of nothing more than circles, triangles and rectangles. Stick a few rivets on the body and you’re done.

But if you want to try something more complicated, I’ll point out a few problems I remember encountering when I was drawing my characters in Little Robots. They might serve as handy do's and don'ts. I wanted them to look properly 3-dimensional and work from all angles, partly because I had a secret hope that one day they’d make it to the TV screen as animated characters. I also wanted a grungy, mechanical look to my robots, as if they’d ‘grown’ out of a junkyard, or been re-discovered in a Victorian inventor’s old laboratory, rather than having a shiny, hi-tech appearance, so these are some of the things I thought about…

• Faces. If you’re dealing with small children you’ll have to invest your robot with some personality. Immobile and expressionless robot faces like those of the Cybermen (for me, always far scarier than the Daleks!), are really creepy. Logically, robot faces won’t naturally have any mobility, as they’ll be made of metal, so you’ll have to cheat like crazy to enable them to show emotion. I tried to think of a robot face as being made up of cogs, hinges and widgets that moved about in a mechanical way. It was easier to imagine them being animated that way. Alternatively, I’ve created robot faces made from a TV screen before now, so that a variety of expressions could be shown in a plausible way.

• Think of other mechanical devices that might be used on your robot to emphasis its metallic nature – TV dishes instead of ears; telescopes for eyes; springs and shock absorbers for the arms and legs; rivets and screws; pressure gauges and flashing lights.

• Creating your robot’s world. A good exercise is to go into a typical garden shed, DIY  toolbox or an ordinary kitchen for that matter, look at all the gadgets you can see and, (with the appropriate permission!) try assembling some of the objects into a mechanical creature.
Similarly, if you want to create an unusual, mechanistic environment, try taking old pots, pans, cans, perfume bottles, widgets and doo-hickys from your cupboards, and assemble them into something resembling a townscape.  Turn some of the bits and bobs upside down or sideways, and you’ll find unusual shapes reveal themselves. Draw the shapes and embellish them until they become your own robo-town.

Reclamation yards and antiques fairs are other wonderful places to come across strange and unconsidered objects. Victorian mangles, old hoovers, spare parts from 1950’s cars, sci-fi memorabilia – there’s a world of inspiration waiting there for you!

• I wanted to give my robots a variety of finishes to make each stand out from the other so, for example, some had a shiny appearance, some had a rusty look. As an experiment, try drawing a rusty piece of metal, then a reflective piece of metal like a car bonnet. It’s a tough visual problem but you’ll learn a lot about observation. 

• At some point you’ll have to decide how your robot is going to move around. Some sort of logic, however warped, has to be applied, so if your robot has arms that hinge, try to consider the nature of the joints and whether they appear practical. What powers the limbs? How do they twist and turn? Consider the movement of the jaw, and the flex of the foot, and the way your robot collects information from the world. The best characters have a back story, and in this case that should include how they convincingly move through their world.

Finally, school visits. When I go into schools I’ll often do How-To-Draw sessions with the children, but I’ll also take various printed sheets, such as the two shown here, that can be photocopied for use in class after I’ve given my talks. 

 It’s an easy way for teachers to do follow-up work with the children. If they’re too young to do creative writing or drawing, many of them like to take these sheets and colour them in, cut them out and stick the bits together. I encourage them to use the sheets as a starting point, and to go on to make their own robots, which often results in some spectacular results! Why not try something similar?

Have fun!

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Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates  was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.

Interview with Nick Butterworth

SCBWI is proud to welcome Nick Butterworth as this year's illustrator keynote at our annual Winchester conference. With over 12 million children's books sold, Nick is a familiar name to anyone versed in British picture books. His style is synonymous with exquisitely crafted characters. But his repertoire of achievements ranges far wider still, as Mike Brownlow discovered in a fascinating and exclusive interview for Words & Pictures.

Hi Nick. First I’d just like to say how thrilled we all are that you’ve agreed to be our Illustrator Keynote Speaker! Speaking personally, there are lots of well-thumbed copies of your books around our house. The Percy books in particular were great favourites with my daughters when they were growing up. 

 

As well as writing and illustrating your many books, you’ve also been involved in several other areas of the business, including TV and animation, so frankly you’re the complete package as far as we’re concerned! We’re really looking forward to what you have to say at our Conference in November.

Can you tell us a little about your early years? Were you an arty child?

I don’t think ‘arty’ has ever really described me, man or boy. But I have always loved drawing and making things. My parents weren’t arty, either, and I never went to art school, so whatever basic ability I have has been developed through observation and experiment. If I saw something I really liked by another artist or illustrator, I would wonder how it had been achieved and try to do my own version of it. I copied my older brother’s drawings of Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. When I discovered Ronald Searle in the Molesworth books, I tried to copy his work. Mad Magazine was a rich source of inspiration when I was a young teenager. I still marvel at Mort Drucker’s work. I could name a lot more victims of my plagiarism!

Eventually my own style began to emerge, with some of the original ‘contributors’ more in evidence than others and, I’d like to think, just a little originality of my own!

          You have a huge back catalogue of books that you’ve written and illustrated. But I believe you started out in a different direction, going from school into an apprenticeship in a printing school and shortly after that into a design firm in London – Crosby Fletcher Forbes, the forerunner of Pentagram. What do you think you learned from taking this route as opposed to going to art college?

First of all, I learnt to get up in the morning! I had to be at work by eight o’clock on a Monday morning, ready to put in a forty hour week. It was a bit of a shock to a sixteen year old used to shorter days at school with weeks and weeks of holidays too.

At the NHS Printing School (a printing establishment run by the National Children’s Home to provide a grounding in a worthwhile trade for boys from the Home as well as to print all the publicity matter) I learnt about printing processes.

I took to typography like a duck to water. (I had an affinity with letterforms. At a younger age, I had copied my brother's versions of Old English lettering which he used to write his ‘Name, Form and Date’ on his school exercise books!) My grasp of typo helped me secure a position with a small design unit in London, Frank Overton Design Associates.

Frank, as the president of the Society of Typographic Designers, was a stickler for detail in typography and I learned a lot from him. He was well connected with prominent designers in both America and Europe. He’d rubbed shoulders with people like Saul Bass, Charles Eames, Misha Black, Milner Gray and Wim Crouwel. He opened up a world of design to me that I knew next to nothing about.

Working as number four in the pecking order of a firm comprising four people also meant that I was fourth from the top! At the age of nineteen, when most of my contemporaries were at art school and still some way off their first job, I often found myself accompanying Frank to client meetings and presentations and, before long, was going alone to take design briefs from clients and make presentations myself. It was a very good grounding in the real world of graphic design.

With the benefit of this experience I applied for a post as assistant to Colin Forbes (then of Crosby Fletcher Forbes, soon to become Pentagram) and was pleased and not a little surprised to be chosen from forty applicants, to help establish the new corporate identity for Cunard Line for which CFF had been commissioned. 

        You and two colleagues set up your own graphic design studio after success as a freelance. What sort of things were you working on?

When I went freelance, I teamed up with two old school friends. Leon, Bernard and I had been in the same art class at school. Bernard’s leaning was towards typography and Leon was definitely an illustrator and I was somewhere in the middle. We were Baxter/Butterworth/Cope, affectionately known to our clients as the BBC!

I had the most experience and, vitally, contacts and so we picked up work from clients I had established a relationship with. Cunard Line. The Post Office. British Telecom. We also found ourselves working for a women’s underwear company! The wife of our old art teacher was the advertising manager of The Lovable Company. It was very  . . . interesting work.   

       Not long after that Mick Inkpen joined your studio. How did that come about?

I knew Mick’s elder brother, John (now an architect in Colchester) and he enthused about his brother’s work, painting and especially his cartoons. Mick was (and is) a bright spark, all set to go to Cambridge but decided to take a year out and the BBC (my BBC!) took him on as a junior in our studio. In the end he decided against taking up his university place and just kind of stayed. He was talented and a fast learner. When, for different, amicable reasons, Bernard and Leon went their own ways, Mick and I continued to work together and our collaboration became even closer when I decided to do less graphics work and concentrate on illustration.

"I thought children’s books offered a marvellous opportunity to develop a series of illustrations in a way that editorial or advertising illustration rarely did."

       A few years on and you had the publication of your first book, B.B. Blacksheep and Company. Can you remember what reasons pulled you towards children’s books, and away from design work?

Mick and Debbie Inkpen had a small collection of children’s books they had bought because they liked the illustrations. I would often browse these when I visited them. I thought children’s books offered a marvellous opportunity to develop a series of illustrations in a way that editorial or advertising illustration rarely did. The absence of having to have a commercial application also appealed to me. When my son Ben was born, I became reacquainted with children’s books from a child’s perspective and we quickly accumulated a sizable collection.

My first foray into illustration for children was actually meant to be a series of greetings cards based on nursery rhymes. I produced six illustrations and began to hawk them around card publishers. One suggested my illustrations would make a better book than cards. I duly approached children’s book publishers who almost always had a book of nursery rhymes already on their list. The suggestion was made that I might try them as greetings cards! I found myself going round in a circle until, after about a dozen rejections from as many publishers, I struck lucky with Macdonald Educational who, by some apparent oversight, didn’t have the obligatory book of nursery rhymes!

       I’m intrigued by your collaboration with Mick. You’ve worked on many books together over the years. How do you think you influenced each other? And what was the division of labour on the books you collaborated on? You both write and draw so beautifully, so who did what?!

I moved into illustration whilst Mick continued in graphics. When I was commissioned by the Sunday Express to produce a regular strip for the children’s pages of the magazine, I was suddenly faced with producing a story and six or nine illustrations to go with it, every week. To relieve some of the pressure, Mick helped by doing some of the colouring of my line drawings. He was also a very good sounding board for story ideas as well as a perceptive and benign critic!

From this beginning we developed a way of working together in bookwork. One of us would write a story. We would visualise it together and then I would draw and Mick would colour. It was a good division of labour that only came to an end when the close collaboration which necessitated us working in the same room, was made more difficult by my move to Suffolk.

"‘If I gave you a million children on a Sunday morning, what would you do with them?’"

         I hadn’t realised that you and Mick also had a career at TV-AM as co-presenters of a children’s show. How did that come about? Was it fun to do, or a terrifying prospect?

When the Sunday Express decided to revert to using Rupert stories instead of my Upney Junction, I found myself wondering if there was life after magazine publishing for my strip. By chance, I came across a copy of Books for Your Children, the magazine founded by Anne Wood. Anne had been producer of The Book Tower for Yorkshire Television and it suddenly occurred to me that there might be an opportunity for my stories of a group of mice living on a deserted railway station, on TV. I cold-called Anne and was amazed by the response. She said she had seen and liked my nursery rhyme book and that she had a note to herself on her desk: ‘Nick Butterworth. Television’.

Anne had recently been appointed producer of children’s programmes on TV-AM and was looking for ‘talent’ (!) We met in a hotel in London and she asked me, in her forthright manner, ‘If I gave you a million children on a Sunday morning, what would you do with them?’ I waffled some sort of answer that bought me some time. What would I do with them? I didn’t know – but I’d think of something!

Or rather, we’d think of something. Mick and I put our heads together and once again came up with a proposal that suited our natural abilities. Steve was born. We invented a young boy who would feature in a story every week in a different occupation. One week, Steve was a despatch rider. The next he might be a lift operator, or a doctor. Once he was a lepidopterist!

Mick wrote most of the stories. We produced the illustrations together but with key parts left blank. This was so that when I told the stories, direct to camera, I could draw in the missing elements to complete the pictures. It was a bit hairy, because it was recorded ‘as live’. There was very little in the way of editing facilities for children’s programmes at TV-AM! We’d prepare two sets of drawing. If I mucked up after that, well, one of the takes had to be used!

       Illustrative style is always a mysterious business. Why we choose to draw noses or eyes a particular way and not another; what proportions we give to our characters; what we guess will work best for the intended audience, and so on. How did you settle on your own distinctive style? Who were your main influences?

As I said, I’m a bit of a magpie. I’ve ‘absorbed’ all kinds of styles and techniques from observing other people’s work. These days my own identity is more established, but I still want to experiment and try different things.

Besides the early influence of Searle and Mad magazine, I liked Alan Aldridge’s airbrush work. You can see an influence in my nursery rhyme book where I created pictorial capital initials for the text of the rhymes, inspired by Alan Aldridge’s beautiful initials in The Ship’s Cat.

I could list those I admire more easily that identify what influence they might have had. Michael Sowa, Bob Gill, Paul Hogarth, Janet Ahlberg, Milton Glaser, Peter Cross, Chris Riddell, Helen Oxenbury . . . this list could go on and on! 

       How do you typically start your books? What was the genesis of Percy the Park Keeper for example? Do you keep notebooks and sketchbooks?

Ideas often come along at the most unexpected moments. The idea for Jingle Bells, a Christmas story about two mice plagued by a farm cat, came to me while I was gazing absent-mindedly over sunlit spring fields from a hotel room during the Hay Festival.

"I have a file in which I keep all sorts of scribbled notes and drawings with ideas that have floated into my head at inopportune moments."

The idea for Percy the Park Keeper, more conventionally, popped into my head as I walked through my local park in central Romford. It was a wintry day and the park was empty. When I came across the park keeper’s hut with the door open, it struck me how cosy it looked inside on this cold and frosty morning. An idea immediately came into my head. Someone could live in a hut like this. The park would be his garden and the animals that live there too, would be his friends. I went home and started to write: ‘It’s cold in the park in winter . . .’ Well, it was. I’d just come back!

I have a file in which I keep all sorts of scribbled notes and drawings with ideas that have floated into my head at inopportune moments. Once when I was jet-lagged, I’d been lying awake for ages. My mind was racing and all sorts of ideas kept coming to me. Eventually I got up at 5am and wrote down four or five story ideas. Amazingly, three of these have made it into books!

      Percy was made into several animated films a few years ago. How did you find that experience? Did you have much involvement in its development from book to TV?

HIT entertainment acquired the rights to make four half hour specials and a series of thirteen ten-minute episodes. An inherent problem when a picture book is animated (particularly with a half hour episode) is the inevitable need for more material than is contained in the book. A story can become bloated, being longer than the idea in the original book can support. Or it might be that the input from other individuals is not entirely sympathetic to the ethos of the book.

An author needs to be able to collaborate and not resist each and every suggestion from others. But he or she also needs to be able to say a firm ‘no’ when presented with ideas that threaten to undermine the essence of the original work. Most authors, I think, will fail on the second count more than the first.   

I did have the right of consultation to some extent but as soon as serious money was being spent on animation, I didn’t have much input! There were things I liked about the final result and some things I wish I’d been able to influence more. I learned quite a bit from the experience and it didn’t put me off coming back for more with Q Pootle 5, although I’m glad, this time, to have been more than simply the rights holder, authorising the process.   

      A few years on, and it’s the excellent Q Pootle 5’s turn to make it to TV! He’s currently airing on CBeebies, but this time round it’s noticeable that you’ve formed a production company, (Snapper Films,) with your son Ben to make the series. Was that so you could retain more control over your ideas?  How difficult an enterprise was setting up the company?

More of this in ‘another place’ as they say! But yes, creative control was a major factor in our deciding to form a production company. It has been a very steep learning curve and there have been some difficult times, not least in raising finance. But the rewards of working with my family and seeing the series take shape have been huge. I have grown used to working alone. To suddenly be involved with up to eighty people has called for big changes in my working practices. I’ve even had to learn to commute all over again!

      Have you other animated projects in development? Is animation taking up more of your time these days than books?

The short answer is, ‘yes’ but I will have to leave that as a short answer, as I’m sworn to secrecy at the moment! But I certainly wouldn’t like to say that I’ve abandoned books. Heaven forbid.

1    Do you do many school visits and festival events? Do you find them enjoyable?

I very much enjoy going into schools and to festivals. I don’t do as many as I would like. I love sharing my enthusiasm for books, for stories, for reading, for illustration, with  . . . well, anyone who will listen!

1     This will be like being asked to favour one child above another, but of all the books you’ve worked on, is one closer to your heart than others?

You’re right. I couldn’t possibly pick one – especially, as I type this, the shelves above me are loaded with the very books in question. They’re all listening. They’re thinking, ‘What will he say?’  ‘Who will he choose?’  ‘Me! Pick me!’  ‘No, no . . . Surely, it’s me! –  didn’t we have a great time when, you . . . you know . . . ?‘

Yes we did have a great time. The best.

Many, many thanks for taking part!

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Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates  was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.

Ten Huge Congratulations to Mike Brownlow!

Many congratulations to Mike Brownlow on the publication of Ten Little Princesses, a fantastic companion volume to Mike's very successful Ten Little Pirates! These lovely ladeez are fearless and intrepid in the face of terrible danger and give pink the kudos it deserves. 


Over to Mike for how the Princesses arrived in a bookshop near you and some more exciting news...


'Last week the ‘Ten Little Princesses’ were let loose upon the world, giggling, screaming, swooning, as well as being brave and resourceful as they battle their way through a Dark, Dark Wood.

'This picture book is a follow-up rather than a sequel to an earlier book of mine, ‘Ten Little Pirates’. Following the same format, I wrote the words and Simon Rickerty drew the pictures. ‘Pirates’ was written in rhyme, and has proved an unexpectedly successful formula. It’s sold well, with the paperback version having been re-printed 6 times since February, plus co-editions with several countries, including the States. A Christmas version with a shiny red cover is due, and it will soon be featured on Bedtime/Lunchtime Stories on CBeebies.

'It’s amazing how many doors a few good sales figures opens! Buoyed by the success of ‘Ten Little Pirates’, Orchard approached me with the idea of doing a second book along the same lines. ‘Pirates’ was thought to have a boy-bias, and so the idea was floated to do a book aimed more at girls. Princesses were an obvious choice. I was fine with this as it was easy to find a wealth of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters for the princesses to do battle with.

'As well as the counting element, (a bit like Ten Green Bottles but with more incident,) there are lots of noises throughout the book, and when I’ve read them out at school events, both of them are great for involving the children and getting them jumping about.

'Simon has excelled himself again with the illustrations. The cover, over which I had no control, is a very girly colour though, raising the whole uncomfortable ‘pink’ question and gender stereotyping. The paperback, due out in February 2015, will not only be pink, but thanks to a foiled cover, very sparkly as well. However pre-release figures are again very strong, and everyone at Orchard is really happy with the way things are going. So happy, in fact, that they asked if I was all right with the idea of making the ‘Ten Little…’ books into a series. I thought long and hard about this -- at least a couple of nano-seconds – before saying yes.

'Accordingly I’ve already written ‘Ten Little Dinosaurs’, which Simon is halfway through illustrating, and ‘Ten Little Monsters’, which is at 1st draft stage. At least two more are planned after that.

'So, when I next do a school visit I’ll be carrying a dressing-up bag full not only with pirate hats and plastic swords, but sparkly crowns and tiaras. Maybe I’ll throw in a few fangs and claws as well, because my Ten Little Princesses have quite a few trolls and dragons to overcome. Life is never dull for fairy tale aristocracy.

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Mike, we wish you lots of success for the series! Congratulations too on some excellent decision making and hope you'll send us some pictures of your sparkly, crowned, tiara'ed, and fanged school visits!

Simply Super

Mike Brownlow 

Superhero Supply Co.

We were on a mission. We had our orders and knew we must carry them out to the letter. The Manhattan skyline glinted at us across the East River as we marched along the streets of Brooklyn. We were close. Just a few more blocks now. Then suddenly there it was – a modest little store, chirpily advertising its unusual wares to the world. 


“If you are invisible, please make your presence known to a member of staff” one of the signs on the door warned. Inside we stood marvelling at the goods on display. They were wonderful, and they were very definitely weird. We searched the shelves, found the items our friends had asked us to buy for them, and placed them by the checkout counter. 

"Ah, a tin of Immortality and a can of spray-on Mind-Control," intoned the assistant, " Excellent choices. Can I interest you in a cape today? We have a special offer. And we would like to remind our customers that no purchases can be made until the Vow of Heroism has been read."

We were in the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. "The choice of many a well-regarded Brooklyn Superhero" it boasts. "Dastardly plots will be foiled. Swinging into action our speciality. Serving Brooklyn and the Greater Metropolitan Area." 

The capes looked tempting. You could choose from two colours, blue or red, both of which came in several sizes. 

"Hm," mused my wife, "Medium or small?" 

"Perhaps Madam would care to view them on our specially constructed pedestal?" 

Madam tied on a cape, stepped onto the pedestal and the fans were started. She struck a suitably heroic pose and the cape billowed pleasingly in the uplift of air. Definitely the medium. Much more of a flowing line to the cape in mid-flight. My daughter favoured the cute and sassy sidekick cape, although the 58” black satin number (“Save the day, then own the night”) was tempting. 

Capery

But frankly, whatever flavour of superhero you might aspire to be, there was something here for you. Gallon cans of Omnipotence jostled besides Photon Blasters; Evil Blob Containment Units next to Cyborg parts and accessories; Mind Control serums next to Mylar Force Field Shields (“Deflects most laser-type beams”). How about a secret identity kit or the sidekick placement service? And what self respecting crime fighter could afford to be without a Humanoid Onesie to relax in at the end of a busy day battling the Forces of Evil? 

Carb Gumption

I sidled up nervously to the sales assistant. "Er, I hear you have a portal to another world in here," I muttered, not certain how this statement would be received. The young man glanced at his colleague. The two of them nodded at each other. "Yes sir. That is correct. May I enquire as to the nature of your interest?" I explained and they nodded sympathetically. They obviously got a lot of this sort of thing. I was ushered down one of the aisles of shelves, but it was a dead end. The aisle led nowhere. Seeing my confusion, the assistant smiled sympathetically. "It’s behind here. Would you like to go inside?" Would I? You bet your snug-fitting, non ride-up, superhero tights I would. He flipped a catch and pushed. The whole bank of shelves gave under gentle pressure and moved inwards. I was ushered through and the secret of the Inner Sanctum was revealed. 

The portal is revealed!

There were no dripping stalactites or machines to whisk me to a different dimension. Instead, I could see comfy sofas, tables, benches, chairs, computers and row after row of books. On the walls were examples of the sort of stuff they make here – stories written by school kids. For this was no ordinary store. Strictly speaking its main function isn’t as a store at all. 

The portal

The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company is actually a front, a front for an after school literacy programme to help students aged 6 – 18 to develop their writing skills, and to help teachers inspire their students to write. There is free access to writing workshops, publishing projects, and one-to-one help with homework and English language learning. And what’s likely to attract young kids through the door to do that kind of thing? Well, by hiding the door amongst all this superhero exotica for a start. 

Through the portal door

The organization responsible for the Superhero Supply Company goes under the name of 826 NYC and is a non-profit making charity. It’s actually modelled after 826 Valencia, in San Francisco’s Mission District, founded in 2002 by Dave Eggars, the multi-talented, award winning novelist, and a group of energetic and passionate volunteers. You can hear him talk about 826’s inspiration and early beginnings in a TED TALKS video here… 

826NYC has assembled a large team of volunteer writers, artists, educators and publishing professionals. They offer an impressive range of after-school workshops, field trips, in-school projects and programmes that include Storytelling and Bookmaking through to TV Writing classes. The mentors and writing coaches set the students challenging tasks. Challenging but enjoyable. The point is that this is probably the first time that these kids will have had intensive, one-to-one tuition like this. They thrive under this individual attention and the results can be transformative.

The writing and tutoring room

826 NYC is committed to making sure their students have an outlet for the stories and scripts they produce. The students are helped to publish and distribute their work, be it in their own magazines, specially produced books or in The 826NYC Review or The 826 Quarterly. The initiative has helped thousands of young people throughout Brooklyn and New York City to nourish their creativity, develop as writers and grow as people. 

And it’s not just Brooklyn and San Francisco that have 826 shops and tutoring centres. Many of America's major cities have similar facilities, each with its own theme. Brooklyn, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, was naturally the perfect location for anything to do with Superheroes. San Francisco, on the other hand, has a Pirate based store, (“Cannons Don’t Sink Ships: Pirates With Cannons Sink Ships”), Los Angeles boasts a Time Traveller's Supermart, (“Whenever You Are, We’re Already Then”) and you have got to check out the website for Chicago’s Boring Store, an undercover secret agent supply store. There are other schemes in Seattle (the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co,) Boston (the Bigfoot Research Institute,) Michigan (the Robot Repair Shop,) and Washington DC, (the Museum of Unnatural History, where their big seller is canned Primordial Soup.) The same standard of wit and imagination is maintained from store to store and wandering through their goods for sale is a joy. 

The boring store

Ok, the items in the stores don’t really enable you to see through walls or leap tall buildings in a single bound, but their descriptions are beautifully written and very funny. What impressed so much was the level of wit and thoroughness that had gone into the making of the store. Two small display signs read, "Do not open any boxes or cans. For further information on our products, please ask a store representative or use X-ray vision", and “We are sold out of this item. Time Travellers: both the past and future are fully stocked.” That sort of attention to detail takes commitment as well as talent. 

Gravity cans

Of course it must have been enormous fun to set up. I can imagine caffeine, or possibly alcohol fuelled, late night sessions with writers competing for the funniest lines. Everything in the store was locally funded, locally built. The construction and design were done pro bono. The cans of Gravity, Anti-Gravity, Omnipotence, Intelligence and all the rest contain coloured sand or harmless gloop, but they, like everything else in the shop only cost a few dollars and the profits go straight back into the programme. By buying one of the Store's items you are in effect contributing to this extraordinary, non-profit charity, which helps inspire children from all backgrounds to gain critical skills and write with enjoyment and confidence. And in return you end up with a neat conversation starter on your shelf at home. 

It was time to go. We gave the Secret Salute of Valour as we said farewell to this Super Store. It had been an energizing visit, and of course it made me think... could we ever do something like this over here, in London or elsewhere, to help our young people have the same opportunities as their American counterparts? With prescriptive teaching and the loss of reading for pleasure in our schools, surely there’s a need. SCBWI BI is an affiliate of an American parent body. Could the same thing be replicated with the 826 organisation? And if so, what would the London chapter of an 826 outlet be? The Steampunk Outfitters and Provisioning Company? The Baker Street Detective Supply Company? The Diagon Magic Emporium? (Has anyone got JK Rowling’s telephone number?) 

Shop front

If you’re ever in Brooklyn, do look up the Superhero Supply Company. The address is 372 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215. Tel: 718.499.9884. www.826nyc.org. They can help with all your Nemesis problems. But please note: the Secret Identity Naturalization Office is now closed on Thursdays. 

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Mike Brownlow is a writer and illustrator of books for children. His website, (which is in need of a jolly good spring clean,) is www.mikebrownlow.com

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 29th April

What does it take to get a book published? Is it simply a matter of persistence and luck? Can we writers/illustrators influence the process at all, or should we just get out of the way and let the gatekeepers decide?


These are the questions that the first of today's Blog Break selections had me pondering. Mike Brownlow's Ten Little Pirates has been a great success, yet it came very close to not happening at all. Mike's candid and fascinating article is the first of two great posts from Picture Book Den this week. The second comes from our Regional Adviser Natascha Biebow, who shows us Ten Really Cool Picture Book Openings.

Sam Zuppardi is pursuing a rather different project than children's books at the moment, illustrating the pieces for a board game called Stormy Weather. It looks like a lot of fun, and in an attempt to get you to stump up for the Kickstarter campaign, Sam has been posting his illustrations of various weather-controlling machines. Check out The Light Sharpener, The Thunderiser and The Solar Wind Tunnel.

I mentioned Patrons of Reading last week, and Jane McLoughlin has just become one! Her first duty for Kincorth Academy in Aberdeen has been to write the foreword for an anthology of pupils' work, and she shares those inspiring words on her blog.

The writing process blog tour is unstoppable. It cannot be stopped, I tell you, until it has consumed every creative person with a Blogger or Wordpress account! This week's poor unsuspecting innocents are Maureen Lynas, K.M. Lockwood and (making his Blog Break debut) James Nicol. Thankfully, someone had the good sense to tag Mark Jones, who tries his best to make the blog tour implode by writing his entire entry in the persona of a "crazy mutant shrub."

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is a former Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine.

Nick's life as an author is filled with ups and downs, so he made a graph of them! Ride The Roller Coaster of Writerly Emotion.