Style
Gravett completed Wolves in six weeks as an Illustration course project, and added only the back endpaper spread during the editorial process. Some projects take longer but she wrote and sketched Orange Pear Apple Bear in merely 11 hours, waking one Mother's Day with the four words in her head and staying in bed for "the whole book in one go".
Gravett's books are interactive. She encouraged the pet dog to chew the dummy for Wolves, in order "to simulate the impact of the wolf's teeth". That didn't work so she chewed it herself.
She wanted Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears to look genuinely chewed, so she painted yoghurt on plain white paper and laid it in the cage of the two pet rats. They nibbled it and peed on it, which she scanned to produce background for drawing. The front cover illustration shows the title Little Mouse's Emily Gravett's Big Book of Fears, a mouse looking through a hole it has chewed, and damage along the book edges.
Little Mouse is also a movable book, with "lift flaps and a fold-out map" (quoting a review).
Read more about this topic: Emily Gravett
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)