The Tiny Seed

"I’m a huge fan of Eric Carle. That kind of bold colour style, it just works so well. Recently I read an interview that he’d given about the use of colour and he explained how you needed the white space to make the colour really jump out. So that’s something that I’ve been looking at, and he does it so well. In The Tiny Seed I love how it starts with this massive challenge of life. One of the seeds is smaller than the others, will it be able to keep up with the others, will it make it? A seed is one of the biggest wonders of the natural world, how is it that a single seed can make it against all the odds? I love the pace of this book, and there’s humour in it. Straight off, one of the seeds flies too high to the sun and burns up! That’s really dramatic, and just the scale of the journey that the seeds go on makes for a brilliant picture book. … room to think! I felt, in the past, as an illustrator, I was encouraged to fill the page with colour, but I think you can have too much of a good thing. I think I’m starting to realise that if you control it more, that you can use it to create more impact. This is what Eric Carle is a master of: controlled use of colour and then a really strong sense of layout. I think he had a graphic design background as well, I seem to remember. I think he was an art director; he has this strong sense of design of the page. Well, yes, that’s another thing that’s interesting. It’s accessible isn’t it? There’s a charm about it, you think, ‘Oh, I want to have a go at doing that’, rather than, ‘Oh I could never do that.’ It teaches a lot with very little, I want to say with very little effort, and I don’t mean that, but you know what I mean. That sort of thing is harder to do than people realise. I love how when we come to spring and it explains about spring, and how everything’s been working together, but still the tiny seed hasn’t begun to grow yet, and you’re wondering whether it will be too late. I think sometimes nowadays we get caught up with the idea that more has to happen in a book, but I’m not so sure. I think for children you can celebrate these really small moments, and it’s a good thing to do. Slow the world down and then look closely at one thing, and again, Eric Carle, he’s a master at this."