Deborah Hinde
Author and Illustrator of Hollybee Hope wants a Prickly Coat Published by PictureBook Publishing |
About the author/illustrator
Deborah Hinde lives and works from her home-based studio out in the wop wops at Wharepapa South. For many years Deborah worked as a graphic designer before venturing into illustration and after many years of working with publishers, advertising agencies, design studios and manufacturers, her dream to illustrate children’s book finally came true in 2003 with A Kiwi Night Before Christmas. Since then Deborah has illustrated another 34 picture books and now provides illustration work to both publishing houses and independently published authors. In 2016 Deborah published her first authored and illustrated picture book Hare, her second title Hollybee Hope wants a Prickly Coat , will be released on 1 October 2018. Bibliography Selected titles Hare PictureBook Publishing, 2016 The Kiwi Go Marching One by One by Peter Millett (Scholastic NZ, 2017) Moo and Moo and can You Guess Who? by Jane Milton (Allen & Unwin, 2017) Moo and Moo and the Little Calf too by Jane Milton (Allen & Unwin, 2017) The Spaghetti Giraffe by Sarah Johnson (Flat Bed Press, 2017) Awards: 2018 Notable Book Award for The Spaghetti Giraffe (Flat Bed Press, 2017) 2015 Winner CLNZ Educational Publishing Awards, Teacher’s Choice Awards, Best Resource in Te Reo Maori for Matariki (The Writing Bug Ltd) 2014 Finalist NZ Maori Language Awards for Te Reo Singalong (The Writing Bug Ltd) 2013 Winner NZ Maori Language Awards for Te Reo Singalong (The Writing Bug Ltd) 2012 Finalist NZ Maori Language Awards for Te Reo Singalong (The Writing Bug Ltd) |
About Hollybee Hope wants a Prickly Coat
Hollybee Hope is a hedgehog with a prickly problem – she doesn’t have any. Her father tells her to be patient but Hollybee wants to look like a real hedgehog right now.
One morning Hollybee finds a brush in a bucket and has the-best-idea-of-all-time to solve her problem. Her friends Maddy Mouse and Basil Bunny try to help but nothing works so they visit Nanny Snuffles and ask for her assistance. All goes well until they come face to face with The Terror. It’s then that Hollybee discovers being different is a good thing and comes with a lot of bonuses – like being able to save her friends.
How the idea for the book came about
Hollybee was definitely an in-the-garden idea. Not all story ideas appear to me like that, sometimes if I’m in town or walking an idea will occur to me. I find those ideas the hardest to keep hold of because if I don’t jot them down then and there, they tend to disappear.
So Hollybee came to me in the garden. I often see hedgehogs trundling across our lawn, head down, snuffling and sniffing, and sometimes I see them on the road after a game of squash, which isn’t so good. But back to the garden hedgehogs …
The writing and illustrating process
My story began with a young male hedgehog called Hodge with no prickles who desperately wants to fit in, to be a ‘proper hedgehog’. I brainstormed all the different ways he could solve his problem. I thought the idea of strapping a scrubbing brush to his back was brilliant but that was only one of three solutions I would need.
After writing the initial draft, I put the story aside to focus on meeting illustration project deadlines. I revisited the story several times in between projects, and along with refining the text, I completed thumbnail sketches for the illustrations and sent these, along with the text through to a manuscript assessor. The report I received a few weeks later was encouraging, but it was back to the drawing board to fix a couple of issues.
Writing picture books is like a challenging puzzle – words can be tricky things!
Once I was happy with the story I redid the thumbnails. These give me a world view of the pages, where I can see the flow from page to page at a glance. These thumbnails were then reworked to a larger size and scanned into Photoshop where I began the redraw, adding more detail as I went. Throughout this process I’d been thinking about the characters and working on character roughs. I had a very clear idea about how they would look, other than the main one, but I knew with time something would come to me.
After reading an article about the lack of heroines in children’s books I realised Hodge needed to be a girl. I sat with this idea for a few days, and the more I thought about it, the more ‘right’ it felt. But I couldn’t change the gender without changing some of the illustrations, so mum was changed to dad, and a room was made more masculine.
Next, I laid up the book in Adobe InDesign, inserted the roughs and added the text. I sent that and a file of the manuscript off to my editor Sue Copsey. I also printed out and made up a dummy to test the story on my friends and family. After receiving feedback from both my editor and friends around my title suggestions, I finally settled on Hollybee Hope wants a Prickly Coat. And, with a couple of changes to two of the spreads, I was able to begin the long process of painting in Photoshop, using the same colour palette and style for the backgrounds and the cute detailed characters as I did in Hare.
The book files were completed in late July and after another proofread the files were sent off to the printer in early August. Deposits paid, ozalids and wetproofs received, and a couple of small changes, now it’s a waiting game until I hear from my freight agent that the books have been through customs and are on their way south.
Hollybee Hope is a hedgehog with a prickly problem – she doesn’t have any. Her father tells her to be patient but Hollybee wants to look like a real hedgehog right now.
One morning Hollybee finds a brush in a bucket and has the-best-idea-of-all-time to solve her problem. Her friends Maddy Mouse and Basil Bunny try to help but nothing works so they visit Nanny Snuffles and ask for her assistance. All goes well until they come face to face with The Terror. It’s then that Hollybee discovers being different is a good thing and comes with a lot of bonuses – like being able to save her friends.
How the idea for the book came about
Hollybee was definitely an in-the-garden idea. Not all story ideas appear to me like that, sometimes if I’m in town or walking an idea will occur to me. I find those ideas the hardest to keep hold of because if I don’t jot them down then and there, they tend to disappear.
So Hollybee came to me in the garden. I often see hedgehogs trundling across our lawn, head down, snuffling and sniffing, and sometimes I see them on the road after a game of squash, which isn’t so good. But back to the garden hedgehogs …
The writing and illustrating process
My story began with a young male hedgehog called Hodge with no prickles who desperately wants to fit in, to be a ‘proper hedgehog’. I brainstormed all the different ways he could solve his problem. I thought the idea of strapping a scrubbing brush to his back was brilliant but that was only one of three solutions I would need.
After writing the initial draft, I put the story aside to focus on meeting illustration project deadlines. I revisited the story several times in between projects, and along with refining the text, I completed thumbnail sketches for the illustrations and sent these, along with the text through to a manuscript assessor. The report I received a few weeks later was encouraging, but it was back to the drawing board to fix a couple of issues.
Writing picture books is like a challenging puzzle – words can be tricky things!
Once I was happy with the story I redid the thumbnails. These give me a world view of the pages, where I can see the flow from page to page at a glance. These thumbnails were then reworked to a larger size and scanned into Photoshop where I began the redraw, adding more detail as I went. Throughout this process I’d been thinking about the characters and working on character roughs. I had a very clear idea about how they would look, other than the main one, but I knew with time something would come to me.
After reading an article about the lack of heroines in children’s books I realised Hodge needed to be a girl. I sat with this idea for a few days, and the more I thought about it, the more ‘right’ it felt. But I couldn’t change the gender without changing some of the illustrations, so mum was changed to dad, and a room was made more masculine.
Next, I laid up the book in Adobe InDesign, inserted the roughs and added the text. I sent that and a file of the manuscript off to my editor Sue Copsey. I also printed out and made up a dummy to test the story on my friends and family. After receiving feedback from both my editor and friends around my title suggestions, I finally settled on Hollybee Hope wants a Prickly Coat. And, with a couple of changes to two of the spreads, I was able to begin the long process of painting in Photoshop, using the same colour palette and style for the backgrounds and the cute detailed characters as I did in Hare.
The book files were completed in late July and after another proofread the files were sent off to the printer in early August. Deposits paid, ozalids and wetproofs received, and a couple of small changes, now it’s a waiting game until I hear from my freight agent that the books have been through customs and are on their way south.