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My name is Ed Emberley. Both my work and my fun are combined in one. I write and illustrate
books for children. And I have illustrated over the past number years about 100 books.
I do things that please me, and I hope they please others. I don't like to work the same
way all the time. I would prefer to experiment with different materials. I find that when
I'm challenged, the challenge brings me energy and I have fun. The reason I do children's
books, when I started working I decided to do something to please me, and at the same
time would not try to analyze why it please me. Does it please me because it brings me
memories of childhood? Perhaps. Mostly it's a visceral, the inside a reaction when I look
through the children's books , I just listen to this voice, and the voice said, "I'd like
to do that." And that was the end of the conversation. Everyone who likes my books is like me in
some way. If you like my books, and you never met me, there's something about you that's
just like me. And that's the person I can speak to. If I try to speak to everybody,
I speak to nobody. I only can speak the Ed Emberleys there are in the world. Whether
they're girls or boys, whether they're grown up or small, my duty is to present me out
the other mes in the world, and that's what I do. Welcome to Ipswich, 45 minutes north
of Boston on the coast of Massachusetts. This is the Emberley home. We've lived here since
our children were in pre-school. The house was built around 1690. The Ipswich River is
a tidal river, that means that twice a day we have 10 feet of water in front of the house
and twice a day we have no water in front of the house. So be very careful where you
park your car. They call this the keeping room, the main living room, this kept cover
between the two windows. It kind of is a good metaphor for our lives, which is a jumble
of this and that. There are little things, big things, colorful things, not so colorful
things. Most of them are old. Most of the houses in this area were dissembled. They're
all pegged and put together. There are large beams like this, and you can take them all
apart like a little toy, like Lincoln Logs or Lego. In the early 1700s this house was
an antique, if George Washington were to come to this house at the Battle Bunker of Hill
this would have already been an antique, so this is an old house. This is the art studio.
This is where I do all the artwork by hand. You see all the markers standing around, and
the shelves all around here and all different tools. On the right hand are all the books,
the books that I do, not the books that every artist does. You know this is a big orange
drawing book, so inside are all the orange drawing book things. So what I have to do
is if I am going to make a book with the color orange and the color black, two drawings have
to be made. You see how the pumpkins, see all the slices right there? Well there are
the pumpkins, and the orange things that you see at the top would go like this and go off
to make pumpkins like that. They call these overlays. It's a solid print plus the overlay,
and each one of these books requires a different number of pieces. But there is no picture.
There is no picture that exists of the book. The book is our method. The book is our medium
when the book is the final printed book. This is Michael's original room. It's been converted
into a computer work room and some of the work that we've been working on with Rebecca,
which is where a lot of the work from Rebecca's done. This wall is used to lay out a whole
book. The sides of these are pieced by wire, and there are pieces of paper that got hung
up like this. This is a double page spread. And it's necessary for us to print something
to make absolutely sure that this line is exactly where we want it, and also the printer
uses this as a guide to actually print the color. The wall that you see here is a small
part of the collection of books we just happen to own. We haven't been keeping books over
the years. There are drawing books in here, there are books on the books on the woodcuts,
there are picture books in here, there are flip books here. There's a for "The Wing on
a Flea", which is the first book. There are books that have been done recently on the
computer. This one was absolutely done by hand because it was done with my thumbprint,
which is pretty simple. And it's a book that shows people on how to draw things using their
thumbprints and the word "Ivy Lou." So there are step by step illustrations that tell you
how to make people's faces, how to make different kinds of hats, how to make action, and how
to make animals. That's very successful. I use it a lot in the classroom. There's also
books that were done specifically with what the computer's able to do, which is the computer
is able to make all those circles and rectangles and triangles. And so I thought maybe I could
use them and if I put them together in a clever enough way, then the pictures wouldn't look
too static, plus you would be to get some action out of it. The total number of picture
books I have done are about 100, 100 titled, and more I hope in the future. Well I had
an interesting experience in high school. I was not a very good student. I was taken
away from mathematics, transferred to a special class, where they taught art all afternoon.
They had a professional watercolorist. He taught boxing and watercolor painting. I worked
for at least two years with this teacher, and maybe three years. He taught talked to
my parents and said, "He really should go to art school." My parents said, "Yeah that's
such a great idea. We can't afford it." "You can afford this art school, it's a very good
art school, it's the Massachusetts College of Arts. They'll charge you 100 dollars a
year, you pay 50 in the fall another 50 at Christmas time. In art school , at the end
of the four year period, I met Barbara and went in the army, rather than put it off.
And because I had a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, they thought what I would be good at
is digging ditches for the engineers, so I was a ditch digger, I used to dig targets.
So they thought BFA would be terrific for that. Luckily, sometime around half way through
they discovered I could paint signs. I could actually twirl a brush and paint a sign, so
I became a sign painter. I got out of the army went to Rhode Island School of Design.
So you had to take something new , so what I took was Clothes and Advertising Design
. So I had a chance to work with type for a year. For the first time I was handling
lots of color, I was thinking about, type sizes, type faces. I got out and walked around
Boston, went down by Fenway Park, and there was a little building right at Kenmore Square,
and there was a place in there that was looking for paste up artist, that is an artists who
paste type down. So I brought my portfolio from the art school, which happened to have
a lot of silly cartoons in it. They said, " We want someone to order type and glue it
down. Well, you do these drawings too?" I said, "Yeah." "Okay, then we're going to hire
you to do the drawings." So they started immediately that day and started doing small drawings,
of which not much was expected of me. But I did even better, you know, because I enjoy
doing it. A year and a half later, I have published for them these books that are called
clip books. And they are books that were made for small companies and businesses, and they
could go through and cut the pictures out . They had permission to cut these pictures
out and use them. Just as they do today on the computer, but this an actual paper thing.
The tools that I were using were the oil painting brush or a watercolor brush which is a red
sable, or a good, old, fine mapping pen called the Chrochro pen, and I used the techniques
that are one hundred years old, some of them two hundred to three hundred years old. I
had no new materials whatsoever, certainly no computers. But not even a felt-tip marker.
In fact, I still remember someone coming into the school with a felt tip marker for only
100 dollars, and the felt went in one end, and then they mixed color, and put it in the
other end, and said this is the latest thing. This is the fine artist's great pen. This
one is interesting. It's a good example right here. You can see the thick end of the brush,
learning to take the brush and go down and make them thick and thinner at just the right
time. And then a few lines of a pen but mostly with a brush it was done like that. But of
course the Chrochro ben had the same problem. The Chrochro pen is very, very fine . That's
finer than any pen point you've seen on a fountain pain, about half the size of that.
And the pressure is exact. If you press too hard, you splutter. The pen digs into the
paper and splashes. And if you don't do it heavy enough it doesn't make the mark on the
paper. I was not headed deliberately to be a children's book illustrator. I wanted to
be a person who drew pictures, and I would say after a month of reveling in the 50 dollar
checks at the end of the week, I started looking for freelance work by mail. I started getting
magazine illustrations for children, magazines' greeting cards, stuff like that. In fact,
that's what precipitated my leaving of the advertising firm, because I was working nights
and working weekends. So I went to Boston, those of you who know about Boston down there,
Prudential Center, and got an office with three other artists. We all shared the rent.
Went inside and for a year I said I'd do anything anybody asked me to do for one year. The end
of the year, we will stop, and we will think about the facts, about the future, and the
past to figure out what's going on next in decisions, about what we can do in the future.
And the first day, this is rather interesting, I just felt like doing a children's book.
And the first four days that I was freelancing on my own, I did the sketches for "The Wing
on a Flea." What I did was, I said well I'll do something really nice and arty. That's
a nice arty page. Nothing on it except little scratchy lines that indicate the marshes.
Like that, a little tiny triangle, so that so was easy. Again a chrochro pen, hundreds
of chrochro lines, like that, and some shapes like that. And it looked good. And it was
chosen that particular year by the New York Times, it was a very important, prestigious
award. It was one of the ten best illustrator's book of the year the year it was chosen. So
that was the start of it. The thing that was presented to me was that if I work for Little
Brown, and did a book a year, and I made 50 dollars every time a book came out, and I'd
start getting royalties so many pennies a book, I was never going to be able to make
a living because not every one of those books were going to sell. So I said there's one
solutions to that; I'll start illustrating other books. What I'll do is I'll do a woodcut
book. I'll do something that's is entirely different, absolutely, entirely different.
So it looks like an another artist did it, which would make me happy, and so I started
to say well the things that's the furthest from a pen line, the furthest from this line
is a woodcut. It has a lot of solid blacks and, mostly solid blacks, and very few thin
lines. So at a certain point I decided what I'm going is I'll make a woodcut. This is
a wooden drawing that I made, just to make the inquiry to the publishers. See the chiseled
marks in there? Like that you chisel out, you rub ink on the surface and pull the print
out. When you get through, you get a picture that looks like this. You can see all the
solids, and compared to this it's quite different. They look like two different artists did it,
but it's the same artist. Now I had fun doing this. This has a lot of accidentals in it,
things like little pieces that stick out. This is extremely neat with no accidentals.
I just loved it to pieces. We have another Paul Bunyan, that's a little bit closer to
the real Paul Bunyan. It's bigger than I am anyways, and taller. And it was done to promote
the Paul Bunyan book. Now for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to make
a giant woodcut. This will actually be printed. And so the drawing was roughed out, as I do
with all the woodcut books, most of the work is done with knife and with the gauging. You
can see here how the knife cuts out here and large pieces of wood are chipped out, so these
are prime, these are 12 inch prime boards that are put together. And powdered rosinco
does service like this with black ink. Then a piece of rice paper, which is a nice transparent
paper like that, and you rub it, and you rub the surface. And when you do, you get a print
that looks like that.