Tim Hopgood's Reading List

"This is a bedtime read. It’s really quiet and settling. It’s the pictures that draw me in, but I love the pace of this book. The language is soft and comforting. This book is like a big blanket. You can wrap yourself up in it. Visually, I was drawn to the limited colour palette. Colour is something that interests me in picture books, and to me, here it is handled really sensitively, and it works really well. I love the use of the white space on the page. At the beginning it seems quite dark and minimal, but you’re drawn in into this magical night, and I think the use of tone and colour worked perfectly with the poem. I think, visually, it’s poetic. The whole things just works. The words and the pictures work perfectly together. It’s very atmospheric. Absolutely charming. It is beautifully written and really quite moving."

"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."

"Yes, so this for me is about the mood. It’s a summer’s day and not much is going on apart from the chance to go on a boat. It’s so atmospheric. The illustrations are atmospheric, and it just drifts along quite nicely, until of course … chaos! But everyone’s still pleased they went on the walk. He captures the mood perfectly and I’ve always been drawn to his books and the way he uses the page. We’ve got the lovely sketching monochrome drawings on the one side, and then the colour on the other. Sometimes he uses two worlds on the same page. I’ve always found that really fascinating. His cast of characters is fantastic. It just moves along at a great pace, and I love what happens. Also, his drawing, again. It feels very alive because you can see where, at the beginning with the house, you can see where he’s changed his mind about the drawing of it. You can actually see a different shape, or a different outline behind the main one; that brings the drawings alive. You do feel as if you’re looking through his sketchbook. I find that keeps it really fresh."

"I almost can’t believe this was published in the 1940s. I think the first time when I came across it, I felt that the text seemed much longer than you’d have in a picture book nowadays. But it’s still got those small moments I really like. Lovely little moments for instance, when the policeman buttons up his coat, and the wife makes sure she has cough medicine in the medicine cabinet. There’s a sort of adult suspicion of the cold weather, they are protecting themselves from the weather. Contrasting with the children, who just find it exciting and are out trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues. Yes! And then illustration-wise, this is white space used in a slightly different sense, he uses white space to depict the snow. And I can remember as a child being fascinated by this, when they’d have the Christmas edition of The Beano and they would have the white snow on the word Beano. I’d think, ‘How have they done that? That really looks like snow!’ In this book, the snow even covers the cars. It feels really fresh for me. It’s quite bold; the colour is striking and an unusual palette. It made me want to find out more about the illustrator, Roger Duvoisin. I started collecting more of his books. I really admire his painterly style. Another of his books is Sun Up (I think it’s out of print), about a thunderstorm coming. Again, it’s just choosing a single moment and turning that into a book. You don’t have to have loads of other things going on."

"It starts off with two people looking out the window and responding to the rain in completely different ways. I love the fact they’ve even got different fonts. So, there’s Mr. Grumpy in one window and a happy child in the other. The design of the book uses panels on the page very cleverly to tell the story. It’s about how, as adults, we tend to think of the rain as a bit of an inconvenience, whereas for a child it’s really exciting. It’s dressing up, it’s wanting to dance in the rain, wanting to splash in puddles. Yes. But it’s also how your mood affects other people around you. So, in this it’s the grumpy adult, and the cheerful child. It’s beautifully paced. Again, the colours are stunning with lovely illustrations. I’m a huge fan of Christian Robinson, and I think what works so well in all his illustrations, you know, he just captures emotions very well. It’s quite simple, yet you know exactly how everyone is feeling. In every picture. I like the way he strips everything back, so you’re just left with what you need to know. I think that’s really clever. It’s really bold. Again, it’s a really fresh way of working. Things are in there for a reason, and it’s not just decoration. But then the whole, the way this is constructed, it’s just so well thought out. It’s a lovely ending. I love the fact that the little boy inspires the old man to enjoy the rain. It comes across really clearly. It works so well. I think it’s a lovely, lovely book."