Steve Augarde
Steve Augarde

I’m going to ask you to ignore something. I’m going to ask you to ignore Steve’s blogger theme and go straight to his copy. Trust me on this. His copy is totally great. You can read and read and read and keep on reading. And keep on being entertained.

I’m a children’s author/illustrator/paper engineer. Also a musician. Nowadays I concentrate more on writing than design work, but I still illustrate my own books – when they let me.

I blog about stupid things – things that interest me, things that make me laugh. Amuse yourself and you might amuse others, I say.

So let’s scroll >> scroll >> scroll until we get to his archives. Steve’s very first post was Monday, September 18, 2006. A coincidence, mine was September 19th, 2005. Only, his first post (Little People), is much better written. Much better everything. Where mine sticks to the facts, he’d treading on babies. Now, who could beat that?

One-in-ten: Most of the time – maybe nine times out of ten – I get things wrong. I try and write something and it’s wrong, try and draw something and it’s wrong, try and figure out some idea for a pop-up book and it’s wrong.

Not only am I used to being wrong most of the time, I accept that it’s an inescapable part of the process of finding what’s right. Very often I can see it for myself. An idea will come up and I’ll soon realise that it’s no good. Other times I need an editor to tell me why it’s no good – or at least why it’s no good for them.

Elephant Fayre: We were supposed to be accompanying the floor show, providing the background music to a performance that never made the slightest sense to us. You know the type of thing – three girls in leotards being the sea, whilst somebody else stands on one leg and chants the word ‘turpentine’ over and over. We took a sceptical view, unfairly perhaps, of conceptual art. Emperors’ clothes and all that.

In loco parentis: Giving a child a book that you’ve never read yourself means taking quite a lot on trust. What might lie between those covers? Sure, the book will have gone through an editorial process, and so as a parent you can reasonably expect the content to be ’suitable’ – whatever that may mean. Nevertheless a child with a book is effectively a child in the company of a stranger, and an adult stranger at that.

Things Once Common, Now Extinct. No.1. Knitting: Working on the munitions production lines had given Mum a taste for the mechanical, and it wasn’t long before she got herself a professional knitting machine. There was no stopping her then. The sound of the Passap whizzing back and forth was part of the background noise in our house, and not a week went by when we children didn’t sally forth into the streets wearing some creation calculated to stagger humanity. Jumpers, mittens, hats, skirts…I think I even had a pair of woollen swimming trunks at one point. Although I’ve been trying to block that particular memory out, and now I’ve gone and thought about it again. Damn.

Illustrator and songwriter of Bump

Found at Steve’s:
Toonhound – cartoons, animation, comic strips and puppets in the uk

An Interview with Steve Augarde by Dolores D’Annolfo

Some artists defy categorization and do not fit neatly into a genre. Steve Augarde is such an individual. His book jacket highlights that fact—he’s written and illustrated over seventy picture books for children, is a paper engineer of pop-up books, and has provided artwork and music for two BBC series. He tops that off by winning a “Smarties” medal for his book The Various.

This is too exciting. I have to go away and think about it for a bit. (wink)


Technorati Tags: , , ,

<< -- Please report dead blogs via the contact form -- >>

Similar posts: