It's Monumental!

In her latest offering The World Tour Mystery, Manjula returns to exploring identity creatively with her trademark humour and pizazz. The book takes readers on a twelve stop trip to monuments, sites and wonders of the world with a lively family of six! Bu that's not all. There's some detective work to be done. On each double-spread, there's a clue waiting to be discovered, which helps you guess where the family has just been - and no, the answer is not on the previous double-spread!

Needless to say, her illustrations are simply fantabulous and so here's something for all you Manjula fans - a sooperdooper slider puzzle!
 

Make a game | Monumental | Free games | Pictogame

.

Puzzle Dazzle: The World Tour Mystery

Manjula Padmanabhan's much loved I am Different and whacky Same and Different explores identity creatively and uniquely. Through fun and games, the books suggest multiple ways of looking at the familiar and the unfamiliar as they celebrate plurality through form, shape and perspective. Manjula writes about her latest offering, The World Tour Mystery.

  

This book took shape in my mind mainly because of a party game we used to play when I was little. It was called The Around-the-World game. There was no game-board, player tokens or pictures of places and countries. Instead the names of cities were scattered through the house and the players were told to figure out the correct sequence of places on an (imaginary) world tour. Playing the game involved a great deal of running up and down and all around the rooms of the house, with much excited screaming and calling out of cities. The first person to get the whole sequence correct was the winner. 

I enjoyed this game so much that I thought it might be possible to make it into a book. BUT … dearie me! It really wasn't easy. In my typical way, I started with the thing I wanted to do most: which is, to make drawings of some of my favorite monuments from around the world. Having done that, I thought, it would be quite simple to force the drawings to become a game! And also a book!

Of course, I was wrong.

 

Fortunately, Tulika's editors are both very kind and also very patient. I actually completed one version of the book with big colored drawings of my favourite monuments. In the end, however, we all agreed that it just wasn't working as a book. So it didn't get published. We all felt there was something nice about the idea if only it could be worked out in some other way.

Well, five years passed. During that time, I worked on Same and Different, a sequel to I am Different!. Both books explore the ways in which sameness and differences are interesting subjects to think about. As the idea of the Monuments book continued to twitch and grow inside my mind, I and Tulika began to see that difference/sameness are a really important part of traveling too. After all, people in other countries look different and have unique local costumes, yet -- as we see in the book -- tourists look the same wherever they go! When we line up to board an aircraft, we see hundreds of people, some young, some old, some funny, some strange: yet for all the differences, we can also see so much that's the same: we all drink water, for instance; little babies of all nationalities scream in the same language; everyone looks grumpy if there's a long queue for the toilet.

The first big improvement was to create a puzzle based on the game but not really like it at all. You've still got to figure out the correct sequence of places on the tour, but by finding clues embedded in the pictures rather than by running around a house.The next improvement was to imagine a family going on a trip – and then to think up names and faces and personalities for the members of that family. Finally, the family became the focus of the book and the monuments got fitted into the background. That's how the world looks to us when we go on a real sight-seeing trip: a lot of people in holiday clothes, with strange or interesting-looking structures in the distance.

So what we have now is a puzzle-book called The World Tour Mystery with lots to look at and amusing facts to read, as Mum, Dad, Aunt Mimi, Kooks, Bunny and Bobo travel around the world. I hope you enjoy it as much I enjoyed putting it together! And maybe some day you'll go on a world tour just like it.

Same & Different

Author-illustrator Manjula Padmanabhan on the process of creating 'Same & Different', a Tulika title due for launch soon. Details in a bit.

Update: You can now buy the book from the Tulika site! 

There are two parts to drawing a book: the first part is thinking about it and the second part is drawing it. The first part usually takes a couple of seconds and the second part takes several months!

The idea for Same & Different occurred to me at the time I was working on I am Different! But I was also interested in a new kind of drawing – instead of using paper and paints, the way I did with the first book, my plan for the new one was to draw directly on my computer. 

All drawings require some kind of equipment. For drawing on the computer, the best thing to use is a drawing tablet. It looks like a flat pad, about the size of magazine (but square) and is connected to the computer – in my case, a tiny little laptop called a Netbook. The pad has a cordless attachment called a stylus, that looks and works a lot like a pen. Unlike a pen, though, it can only create drawings inside the computer, not on paper or canvas. So I draw using the pad and look at  the results on my computer's monitor. Using this gadget and also the amazing software programme called Adobe Photoshop, I was able to draw the creatures and backgrounds you see in the book.

Some people tell me, when I say that I drew this book using my computer, "Oh! We far prefer drawings made by hand …" But these are made by hand – not by my feet, or mouth, or eyebrows! All the animals started off as black and white squiggles made by me, which I would gradually shape into heads and tails and eyes and noses, add colour, flipped back and forth and up and down until I had exactly what I wanted. Creating the backgrounds was a lot of fun too.  

I wrote all the verses in one afternoon several months ago* – but of course, as with all books, the first attempts went through several changes before they were completed and ready for printing. My editors at Tulika were very patient and also very helpful as I tried to polish up the rhymes so that they would make sense while at the same time being comfortable to say out loud. I also had to change some of the animals I had originally wanted to use because when it came to drawing them, they didn't suit the puzzle so well. The squirrels, for instance, were a last minute choice after I decided that langur monkeys were just too fidgety to suit a picture in which they were all supposed to look the same or very similar.  

But the very best thing about the book was that the whole thing took about six weeks. Which is absolutely AMAAAAAZING. And what is even more amaaaaazing, the printed book was out about one week after that! From my first drawings in a purely electronic form, inside my computer, all those little animals spilled out, via the printing press, onto paper, onto pages which were then collected and bound as a book, and finally, OUT: to bookshops, to homes and into the hands of readers. Two months, from nothing to something! 

Magic, that's what I call it.

(* There's a funny story here! I had gone to the Tulika office in Chennai – it's a really friendly, happy place, just like the books they produce! – and was just about to leave when someone handed me a 'muruku'. I of course immediately popped it into my mouth and … began to choke. Quite suddenly I simply could not take in a single breath – it was just like in the cartoons, I felt my eyes begin to bulge, my throat felt like it was made of wood – and everyone looking on in horror as Sandhya and Deeya thumped me on my back … until … finally, after what felt like a week but was actually only about 10 seconds, the tiny little crumb that had got caught was dislodged. Phew! I went home, still feeling a little shaky and choke-y and immediately spent the rest of the afternoon writing the verses!)

- Manjula Padmanabhan

HOW TO BE … DIFFERENT!

I AM DIFFERENT began as an idea about the fact that many people are made to feel bad about being different to others. And yet, there are SO MANY WAYS of being different that in one sense every single person, animal, plant and thing is absolutely unique and different to every other person, animal, plant or thing. While thinking about the issue of being different versus being the same, I made a few funny drawings in which I drew a crowd of creatures, amongst which one was different to all the rest. 

I wanted to explore the idea that being different can also mean being funnier, or prettier or cleverer. Or just differenter. Anyway, the drawings were just funny, rather than clever or pretty. For instance, I had one drawing with fifty identical black and white penguins, but amongst there was one which was pink and yellow, wearing sun-glasses and grinning. In my way of thinking, by doing this, I was celebrating difference, rather than punishing it.

This was probably ten years ago. In 2006 I had an exhibition in Madras during which I displayed a series of small paintings in bright colours, using acrylic paint to outline the shapes. Radhika Menon of Tulika came to see this show. She said she liked these funny little paintings with the bold outlines and she wondered out loud whether they would be an interesting way of illustrating a book.

DING! The idea from long ago about celebrating differences, came together with the style of paintings at my show and together, they turned into a collection of puzzle drawings for a book! As with all picture books, the first part of the effort was to get a clear idea about the whole book. Whenever I start work on picture books, I use a single sheet of paper on which I draw little rectangular boxes, each box representing a pair of open pages. This way, I can "see" the whole book in front of me, like a map. I add one single page at the beginning and one single page at the end, so that I remember that the first and last pages of the book will be singles, not doubles. This kind of map is called a LAYOUT. The first few versions of this map is called a rough layout. That's because it isn't meant to be the final version of the book, but is only the simplest of first sketches, just to see if an idea is good enough to print.
 
While thinking about I AM DIFFERENT, I decided early on that I would use sheets of coloured hand-made paper as the foundation of the pictures. So aside from making a layout, I also began thinking about how I would make the drawings. I asked Tulika to tell me what page-size they would like for their book. Based on the size, I would know how much paper I would need in order to cut out the shapes I wanted to use for the "drawings" – which would really be more like a cutting and glueing project than a painting project!

There are some shops that specialize in selling hand-made paper in all kinds of amazing colours and textures. So even before I completed my layout, I ran off to buy the paper. I LOVE buying paper. I came home with a HUGE roll of many coloured sheets. Then I cut small strips from each sheet so that I could keep them in front of me while I made the layout. It was like keeping a box of paints open in front of me, so that I could plan the colours I would use. 

While working on the layout – which I drew several times over – I made a list of objects to use as the "crowd" of similar elements out of which one would be DIFFERENT. It was at this stage that I realized there were many ways of being different! Colour and shape are the most obvious, but there's also orientation and left-or-rightness, and open-or-shutness, and bigness-or-smallness. And so on. I also realized that even in the same picture there might be more than one way of "being different". So even though we provided answers at the back of the book, in one sense, every object really is different to every other object on the page. The puzzle is about looking for a special kind of difference that sets one thing apart from everything else but sometimes the right answer isn't the only answer. I think the page on which this is most true is the one with the keys. Many of the keys are quite irregular, so even though there's only one that's facing the "other" way, there are several that are different to all the others in terms of shape. 

While creating my layout, I tried to match the colours of facing pages so that they would balance each other reasonably well. I also made patches of contrasting colour on which the text would appear and I planned the pages so that the patches would be sort of mirrored on facing pages – if the left hand page had a strip down the outer edge, then the right hand page would have a similar strip on its outer edge and so on. To some extent, this helped decide which shapes would go on which pages.

After cutting and sticking the background colours into place on a backing sheet of white paper, I had a lot of fun cutting dozens of smaller shapes representing all the different objects I had chosen to use as my "groups". I used double-sided sticky tape on the reverse of the paper so that once I had cut out a particular shape, I could position it on the page, then remove the backing from the tape and stick it on. The most difficult shapes were the lizards and after them the cats! The easiest shapes were the leaves and the little coloured squares. After sticking the shapes down, I outlined them with the acrylic paint to create the thick wavy edge which gives the drawings their distinctive blocky appearance. This was fun to do too, but it was also the time of maximum tension. There was no second chance with that paint. Once it was on the paper, I could not take it off or correct a mistake. Once I'd finished all the outlines, I added dots and squiggles just for a bit of fun on the page.

I think the only picture I changed after sticking together the shapes, was the lizards. It wasn't because I had made a mistake but because the first time I made that page, the lizards were all identical except for one which had three feet instead of four. However, after completing the page, I began to think this was a bit unfair to that poor creature! I had decided right from the beginning that I didn't want to define "difference" to mean "deformed" or "damaged" and in the case of the lizard I had clearly broken my own rule. So I gave the lizard its fourth little foot and then I added a design onto the backs of all-except-one of critters so that the puzzle was complete. Fortunately, it was easy to stick the extra foot into place without having to re-do the whole page.

All the while I was planning, designing, drawing, cutting and sticking together the pictures, I was also worrying about the text. It may seem hard to believe, but deciding the exact wording of the text took almost as long as creating all the pictures! I have forgotten exactly how and when the idea of using different languages on every page came along. All I remember is the extremely enthusiastic response everyone had to the idea. The initial formula was a statement, "I AM DIFFERENT", followed by the question "CAN YOU FIND ME?" The plan was to translate this formula into 16 different languages and to provide a pronunciation guide. The decision wasn't made in isolation, but in consultation with the editors of Tulika. At the time, we had no idea how complex the task would turn out to be.

To begin with, the word "different" does not translate easily into other languages. For example, the equivalent word in Hindi means "strange" or "weird" rather than "different". Eventually it was decided to use only the second part of the formula, the question. But even so, there were all kinds of odd little problems! For instance, in Urdu the script runs from right-to-left: should the pronunciation guide in English also run from right-to-left? Or back-to-front? Should the pronunciations be provided in all languages, not just English? Or at least in Hindi and Tamil? And if only in English, should we use accents and special characters to represent the sounds that are not available in English for other languages? Once we began asking questions, there seemed to be no end to them.

In the end we decided to choose the simple option, whatever it was, rather than anything complicated. We figured that most of our readers are smart enough to work everything out for themselves … and they are! Or so we've heard.

- Manjula Padmanabhan, Author

The How of 'Where's That Cat?'

Another thing that just happened was that I decided to base the drawings in the book on an actual street, in Chennai. Every city is different in small ways so making that decision meant that I needed to look carefully at that street whenever I visited Chennai, which is usually every three or four months. My mother and sister and her family all live in Chennai so it seemed like a good plan. On the other hand, I don't live there! So in that sense it wasn't such a good plan. Every time I wanted to know what something looked like I had to jump on a plane and … well, of course I didn't really do that!

Initially, I took a number of pictures of the street that I was interested in. Then I asked my niece to take pictures of the shops along a neighbouring street. Then on my next trip I took yet more pictures of the street, this time of people walking up and down. The strange thing is this: however many pictures I had, they were NEVER enough. The moment I started drawing, I would find that I couldn't remember what colour the autorickshaws in Chennai are or what kind of lungi is worn by coconut sellers. When I draw something from real life, I don't try to copy a thing exactly. Instead I look at it again and again, trying to memorize its main features enough that eventually I can draw it without looking at it.

In the beginning, I had wanted to include a traffic policeman in the story. But I couldn't find any clear picture references to what a traffic policeman in Chennai looks like. The uniforms of policemen in different cities in India are DIFFERENT. If you've never noticed that before, then this is your chance to start noticing. Just look at their head gear to begin with: some of them wear peaked caps; some wear berets; in Bombay, they wear topees. Some wear long dark pants and white shirts. Some wear khakhi. In the past, in Chennai, they used to wear starched khakhi shorts that stuck out stiffly front and back…

So I asked my niece to be sure to include a picture of the local policeman in the photographs she sent to me by e-mail. She told me later that she almost had an accident trying to get a picture and that by the end of the attempt the policeman was glaring suspiciously in her direction. He was also posing like a Hero, with his shiny sunglasses and walkie-talkie radio. And at the end of all that effort, even though I did a couple of drawings with the policeman playing a starring role, he was removed from the story altogether.

There are many stages to completing the drawings for a book and most are utterly boring – such as drawing the frames for the pages so that I can be sure that the finished artwork will fit on the printed page. This is one of the things I really don't like doing which is nevertheless an important part of the work of being an illustrator. Because I don't like doing it, I am usually asleep when I do it. As a result of being asleep, I ALWAYS get the measurements of the page wrong. Always.

So I usually have to make corrections to all the outer margins of all the drawings and I nearly always discover the mistake only after I've finished the colouring. No wonder I don't like drawing the page frames! Sometimes I begin crying at the start of a project, because I KNOW I'm making a mistake in the measurement right then, but since I'll only find out about much later, I feel I might as well get the tears over with at the start.

For the me the best part is the basic drawing. I love doing the actual pencil drawing, when I'm still planning the basic structure of each drawing, and the characters, the background, the ideas are still very fresh. I always do detailed drawings in pencil. In the case of Where's That Cat? I did the original pencil drawings on sheets of tracing paper that I had placed over the page frames because it's easier to erase on tracing paper.

Erasing pencil marks on watercolour paper, which is usually thicker and has a bumpier surface compared to other types of paper, often causes the surface to become "scratchy", with little fibres coming loose and waving in the wind. It's useless trying to paint on paper which has become scratchy in this way, so it's best to avoid erasing altogether. Tracing paper by contrast is perfect for erasing pencil marks. So I made my drawings, erased to my heart's content and when I was ready, I stuck the tracing sheets with small strips of cellotape to the UNDERSIDE of the watercolour paper. Then I shone a light behind both sheets of paper*, so that I could see the pencil drawing THROUGH the thick watercolour paper. Then I re-drew the pencil drawing, in its final form, onto the top sheet.

[*Many artists use a gadget called a light-table, which is a kind of box with a flat surface on top made of frosted glass and tilted at the correct angle for being used as a drawing surface. Under the frosted glass is a light bulb that can be turned on and off, whenever the artist wants to see something underneath the top layer of paper. But light-tables take up a lot of space on a desk. So instead I keep a sheet of transparent plexiglass (a type of strong, light plastic similar to glass, but flexible) for the purpose. When I need a light table, I use the sheet of plexiglass as a drawing board, with my table lamp placed on the floor and behind the now-transparent drawing board. It works fine.]

But even before all of this, I had done a very rough sketch of all 18 pages of the book, as a series of scribbles, to show to Tulika, in order to discuss the story. If a book has no text, then of course the drawings ARE the text! First I did extremely rough sketches with a dash of colour to provide a general idea of what style I was planning to use. I also did a kind of map of the whole book, as a series of little rectangles representing double-page spreads with the characters drawn as tiny stick figures. In fact, it took several months of thinking about the story in this form, before the idea began to settle down properly.

For instance, even though there's a real cat with the name Pooni – and she's very sweet and elegant – that cat is black and white, not orange! But the moment she entered the book, she became orange. The idea of her chasing a crow only happened when I was doing the actual pencil drawings. First she was just looking at the crows, then stalking them and the next thing I knew they were chasing her! But if Pooni is running away from Minnie, the little girl, then at some point, I would have to show Pooni running back again, the way she came. In which case, how would I ensure that Minnie wouldn't see her along the way? Questions like this are a sort of puzzle that must be solved one way or another while drawing a book.

Meanwhile, I also began to feel the need for a line of text on each page. In terms of publishing, this means a lot more effort for Tulika. Even if it's only a few words per page, the text HAS to be sent to different people for translation. Whenever possible, they like to do their books in EIGHT LANGUAGES aside from English – Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi and Kannada! Wow. So that's really a lot of work and time for everyone.

Because I like to get ALL the drawings done before I start colouring them in, it takes quite a long time before I even begin to think about colours. In this case, because I don't live in Chennai, after doing the pencil drawings on tracing paper, I scanned them in order to be able to send them to Tulika by e-mail, so that they could tell me what they thought of the way the characters looked and the general flow of the story and all kinds of other matters big and small.

Every month, I would write to Tulika, to tell them that the book was "almost" finished and yet at the end of each month, to my great surprise, there were still all kinds of things that remained to be done. My editor Deeya would send me little messages now and then to remind me about the passage of time but … the crows kept on misbehaving. The schoolgirls were refusing to walk in a straight line. The Teacher Ma'am was late getting to the street in time to meet Minnie and to help her look for Pooni. All the cycle tyres were missing their spokes. Problems like these kept on happening right uptil the very end. Indeed, even on the very last day, there were problems with the page sizes. Fortunately, Tulika has a very clever wizard called Shiva who was able to solve all those problems by waving his computerized magic wand over the sides and borders. Eventually it was done. And now we're all feeling tired and happy and … busy planning our NEXT BOOK!

- Manjula Padmanabhan, Author & Illustrator

The Why of 'Where's that Cat'?

Ever since the time I worked on a textless, illustrated book, I've been wanting to do a second one. That was in 1986 and the book, published by the National Book Trust, was called Visit to the City Market. That book marked an important milestone for me as an illustrator: it was the first one for which I was both the author and illustrator.

City Market doesn't have much of a story: a mother and her two children take a walk to the market, buying things along the way – and that's all that happens. But as they go from one shop to the next, the reader gets to look at the different kinds of shops they go to, the shopkeepers they talk to and the things that they buy. As it happens, I don't like going shopping! At the same time I realize that we all need to go now and then. So my reason for drawing a visit to the market was to try to make it seem like fun. Drawing something is a bit like getting to know it very well. And when you know something well, it's easier to like it.

Twenty years later, I STILL don't like going shopping! So maybe that's the reason I still wanted to draw a similar book. This time, however, I wanted to look at the whole street, not just separate shops and I wanted to show more people than I had in the first book. Actually, at the time I was working on the drawings for City Market, that was my original plan: I had drawn the whole street and all the buildings with dozens of different activities taking place on each page. But in order to do that, I had to draw the people very small, which made it hard to see them – and harder still for me to draw and colour them. So I abandoned that earlier idea and drew the book with larger figures and just a few shops.

While preparing to draw Where's that Cat? I had an idea about a child searching for a pet cat. The reason is simple: cats are very independent minded creatures, and they DO wander away from their homes to go on short adventures. Of course we don't usually get to see where they go and what they do … but if I could show a child looking for the cat, not only would that give us a chance to look at all the places the child goes to, but we might also catch a glimpse of where the cat goes.

Right until the time I began working on this book, I had thought of the child as a little boy. Somehow, just after I had talked to Tulika about the idea for the book the little boy turned into a little girl. There is no explanation for things like that! They just happen.

- Manjula Padmanabhan, Author and Artist