Behind the Book: Brown Bears

We sat down with Bright artist Colleen Larmour and spoke about her most recent project, Brown Bears. Written by Nick Crumpton and published by Walker Books UK, this non-fiction picture book follows a day-in-the-life of a mother brown bear and her two cubs. Colleen walks us through her process in creating the illustrations for this book.

Published by Walker Books.

Give us a quick synopsis of the picture book. What inspired the artistic style in Brown Bears?

Brown Bears is a narrative non-fiction picture book about a mother bear and her two cubs. We learn about what they get up to in the Alaskan landscape and how the mother bear prepares her cubs for life alone in the wilderness.

I have always wanted to draw a book about bears. They are such wonderful creatures full of humour and personality. I had been exploring my own story ideas with them and started sketching bears from photos online. I sent these sketches and a story idea for a fiction picture book to my art director at Walker, Beth Aves. It just so happened that they already had a similar non-fiction text that they needed an illustrator for. Beth loved my bear sketches and asked would I consider doing the art for Nick’s book. I loved it, so said yes. I parked my own half-baked and nowhere-near-as-good story and used what sketches I had already made as a good starting point for Brown Bears.

From the start I had a colour palette in mind - combining all the lovely brown tones with muted colours and brighter pops. But I never really know how my art will all come together until I start making it. I don’t stick hard and fast to a style and prefer to let the book tell me what it needs. I played around with the first spread for a good month until I got it right. That’s quite long but it was hard and I was trying to combine this wonderful new combo of watercolour, texture and a screen printed effect. Then that was the boilerplate to follow for the rest of the book. It seems to work that way with me. Get one spread perfect and then the rest follow much easier, and faster!

What kind of research did you do before illustrating?

I spent a lovely while watching and sketching from bear documentaries on National Geographic channel and YouTube. Very quick and loose drawings, trying to capture their shape, movement and how they interact with one another. These simple line drawings are some of my favourite but the final drawings needed more detail. I began looking at tone, texture, behaviour and expression. I especially loved drawing all the back scratching against trees! Some of these more detailed drawings appear on the blue endpapers for the book. I thought it was a nice way to include some of the many sketches I’d gathered that otherwise go unseen.

With non-fiction you have to be careful with keeping things accurate regarding location, weather, plants, animals, food, mood, everything. So page-by-page I would research the correct types of trees to include or what berries the bears would be eating or the style of buildings and cars in the background. It all helps to capture the right atmosphere and really adds to the book’s sense of place. Of course, there will always be something I’ll miss and this time it was the salmon. I had to go back to colour them partially red to show that when salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs they are the red colour we see in the book.

What was your favorite part of working on Brown Bears in particular?

Getting to know this bear family. I was quite sad to finish up drawing them in the end. I felt that I’d come to know the mum and cubs really well and had given so much consideration and effort to their movement, expressions and connection. I was sorry not be drawing their lives and adventures anymore. I think all of my preparatory research and sketching added to this feeling. The early planning stage is the part of making a book that I enjoy the most, when everything is possible and unencumbered. Making the final art consistent and perfectly pinned down is the hard bit!

Is there anything specific you hope readers take away after reading Brown Bears?

I hope they will connect with the bears in the way I did. If I’ve managed to get across that affection and interest in the bears then I will have done a good job in accompanying Nick’s beautiful writing.

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Brown Bears is available now through Walker Books UK. To work with Colleen, please get in touch here.