Learning Week Task

As part of this brief we are asked to document a recipe that we decide to use for our final double page spread. We were provided with a list made up of recipes from World War One, asked to purchase the ingredients, undertake the recipe, noting each key stage with photographs. We were then asked to put together a portrait A4 sheet showing our experience making our chosen recipe step by step.

I chose to make the bread and jam pudding mainly because I'm a sucker for bread and butter pudding (or should I say, pudding in general), and I couldn't stand the thought of how some of the other recipes might have tasted. The dish was incredibly simple to make as there were only a few ingredients and the steps were really easy to follow.

I'd say that with the amount required for the recipe, it would comfortably feed four people after a meal (I think my husband and I were ambitious to try and polish it off between ourselves in just one sitting) and would cost about 20p per plate of food served. It took roughly about half an hour to make, about ten minutes to measure all the ingredients out and complete the first few steps and about twenty minutes in the oven. Obviously with anything practice makes perfect, so if I attempted the recipe again I think I could prepare the ingredients much quicker and get them in the oven much faster. On the grand scheme of things though, this wouldn't make that much difference to the overall time it takes to make the pudding as it would still need the same amount of time in the oven. 

As for improvements, I forgot to buy butter so the pudding welded itself to the dish while it was in the oven. Next time, remember butter. I also didn't have breadcrumbs so improvised using oats instead to add a different texture which I think worked pretty well. If I was doing things differently next time, I'd like to experiment with different jams or maybe a combination of jams, possibly try mixing the jam into the bread rather than just dolloping it on top, and also try using stale bread as the recipe originally stated to see whether this would make a difference to taste as the bread I used was fairly fresh.

The recipe definitely made me reflect on the narrow choices available to those on the home front in England during World War One. With food shortages caused by panic buying and food hoarding, less food being imported from other countries and also food rationing being introduced, I can imagine that using scraps and leftover food became a part of life and I'm surprised that people managed to get by on so little. Compared too modern day it really makes you think about how much food is made available to us so conveniently and also about how much food we so willingly throw away. 

Children's Book: World War One, Children & Food

This project is part of a range of activities that are taking place to commemorate the WWI centenary to broaden the range of people engaging with the history of the conflict. 

One of the intended outcomes of the project is the production of a range of resources for schools, which will be able to be downloaded from a website including a WWI cookery book/booklet for children in primary schools. The aim is to include approximately 10-12 recipes and each page should include relevant images, chosen recipe and supportive background information and/or fun facts. For example: why the ingredients were important, their health benefits, how much they cost and where they were from/could be found. It is intended that each cover/reverse and recipe spread of the book can be downloaded on their own. It is also intended that selected work can be put together as an ebook or as individual handouts to give to children in the classroom. 

Sample Double Page Spread for CBeebies "I Can Cook"

"I Can Cook" is the BBC's vehicle to help get children to cook simple dishes with the aid of an adult. Not only does it teach about cooking but it also helps children understand where food 'comes from'. Many think it just comes from a 'supermarket' or similar but the BBC helps explain how vegetables grow and where certain ingredients come from in some of their programmes. 

I chose to produce a sample double page spread for this recipe.

The aim of the task was to create visuals to help introduce children (age 5-7) to just one of the various recipes available. All of the recipes on the website seemed to be pretty wordy so there didn't seem to be a way around avoiding large quantities of text (given that it's a recipe and all the text is necessary). I decided to choose a clear, handwritten font for the bulk of the text so that it is easy to read by both the child and adult accompanying them. The title and numbers are a little more stylistic to add a little variation to grab the child's interest and to also suit the aesthetic of the recipe. I settled on leaving the text in white boxes to help with legibility and integrated these with colourful borders. 

Given the fact that a lot of the double page spread would be text, I decided to add visuals to balance this. I determined that the main image should be a photograph of the meal that the child would be cooking, as this is always useful in order to see what you're aiming for when preparing food. I then included colourful borders (again, on theme with the recipe) and illustrations of cacti and various animals found in Mexico and South America, all overlaid on a wooden chopping board. The illustration style is clean and simple to appeal to various ages, and is bright and eye-catching to draw the eye in and lead it around the page. 

Art Styles: Information/Reference Title Aimed at 9-11 Year Olds

These books are educational and therefore contain more text than image. The illustration style becomes more detailed and realistic, providing and presenting information in a clear and concise way.  The colours used are true to life as the book will probably be used for educational purposes, and therefore they provide reference points for the real world. Because of this, they are typically not as bright in colour.

These illustrations are combined with small sophisticated type and typefaces to create simple no-fuss layouts that are easy to navigate by the reader. 

Art Styles: Picture Book Aimed at 3-6 Year Olds

These books tend to get more advanced and sophisticated. There is a whole range of children's picture books available, ranging from hand-drawn illustrations to bold, computerised graphics, yet most have the same features.

When compared to the baby books, these picture books are physically larger as the child's hands have grown and now have a more detailed visual language as the illustrator gains much more freedom. Illustrations become softer, with less contrasting colours and more complimentary colours that are often true to life. The character's involved in the story play a larger role and start to develop more personality, tackling morals and life lessons, and humour is often introduced.

There is much more text to engage the child in the narrative, sometimes in fun and quirky typography, which parents can read out loud or children can read to themselves.

Textures, pop-ups, flaps and more interactive elements feature (especially for younger audiences) to engage and excite.

Art Styles: Baby/Toddler First Objects Book

Like most books for babies, the illustrations are printed on board instead of paper with smooth corners to keep both baby and book safe, and are usually small and square so that the child can hold them comfortably. 

Simplistic illustrations make objects more obvious and identifiable in order to encourage learning. The colours are vibrant and bold to attract the attention of babies and small children, often in exaggerated shapes and contrasting colours so the reader can distinguish between colours. 

Features are usually kept to a minimum to aid with recognition. Some (such as the example given above) include textures on each page for the child to explore and encourage interaction. 

Usually words are kept to a minimum (one or two per page) as the target audience may not be able to read yet. 

Brian Wildsmith

Brian Wildsmith was raised in a small mining village in Yorkshire, England, where, he says, “Everything was grey. There wasn’t any colour. It was all up to my imagination. I had to draw in my head…”

Wildsmith is an illustrator who made his name in a rainbow explosion back in the early Sixties with the simplest of children's books, an illustrated ABC, that set a brightly coloured flame burning throughout the publishing world. Even now, the prolific artist turned author, who has written 82 books, thinks that first one was his best. "It was the time of Carnaby Street and The Beatles. There was a new era of creativity in England, and that book was the beginning for a creative expanse of children's books.”

His books, which have sold more than 20 million copies around the world, have something of a didactic theme. Many have a moralistic tone – like the one about the owl and woodpecker who initially hate each other but end up getting along. Or they teach children about concepts such as collective nouns: Animal Gallery includes such delights as a leap of leopards, a party of rainbow fish and a crash of rhinoceroses. But what they don't do is risk boring a child with too many words. The pictures are key. Wildsmith believes that beautiful picture books are vitally important in subconsciously forming a child’s visual appreciation, which will bear fruit in later life – and that children really do appreciate details as well as colour.

The techniques Wildsmith uses to create his illustrations is vast - paint layered upon paint, splattered paint, crayon layered over paint, collaged paper. These techniques create the most incredible bold and intense backgrounds for his illustrations. All the animals are in gorgeous detail, with defined brushstrokes for hairs and whiskers, and their facial expressions seem to give them little personalities of their own. Each illustration is so complex, and with individual brushstrokes and different mark-making evident in the images, they draw you in and make you want to look closer.

I love the tiny details in the images, such as the interaction between the different species of animals, and also the easy-to-miss details on certain pages. This displays the amount of thought obviously put into the composition of each page.

The stories that these images accompany are sweet, although slightly retro in style. I am especially fond of the fact that the stories often see every type of animals - different sizes and shapes and colours - all working together, and living in harmony amongst each other. Although this may not be true to life, it's lovely to see - a raccoon causally chatting with a mouse, or frogs and butterflies frolicking together happily - such situations are sure to spark a child's imagination. The intense colour and vividness of the illustrations are sure to appeal to children, and the gorgeous animal illustrations are perfect for introducing children to different animals they may have yet to encounter.

Beatrix Potter

I grew up with Beatrix Potter and, to this day, I still find that her work offers a certain sense of comfort and nostalgia. I find it inspiring that she allowed herself to be absorbed by the nature surrounding her, whether she was in her back garden or lost in the countryside, making intricate sketches of wildlife, wild flowers, moss, lichens, fungi and fossils. We both share a fascination for the natural world. 

Potter’s extraordinary flair for storytelling distinguishes her from many other children’s book illustrators of the ‘golden age’ (such as Randolph Caldecott) who, rather than writing their own stories, illustrated traditional fairy and folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes. Text and illustration are equal components in Beatrix’s stories. She paid great attention not only to the precise meanings and sounds of individual words but also to their physical appearance on the page.

Her animal characters endowed human emotion and habit that compliment the animals' nature, rather than counter it. It is this absolute familiarity with the way a rabbit stands and sniffs the air or a cat stiffens on hearing a sudden sound that accounts for the success of Potter's animal stories, or "little books" as she liked to call them. Dressing a rabbit in a coat and making it walk on hind legs is not guaranteed to be charming or even particularly interesting. What Potter managed to do was meld animal musculature and movement with its human counterpart, so that she makes it seem possible and even probable for a mouse to thread a needle, for a cat to tuck its babies up in bed or a rabbit to fold a snowy umbrella as it enters a cottage for a Christmas party.

One of the most essential elements to Beatrix's unique realist style is her power of observation. Acutely observed detail in elegant compositions combined with playful washes of watercolour became Potter’s iconic style. The texture of her watercolour was achieved with half pans, using a soft layer in the background and applying more layers of colour to the foreground. Once the paint has completely dried, Beatrix would use pen and ink for line work and detail, to create an illustration that is visually inviting yet clinically exact. Light greens and mauves soon became recognisable as the Potter palette.

Although she died in 1943, Beatrix Potter is still one of the world's best-selling children's authors, loved by people of all ages. She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the 'little books' that have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over 100 million copies.