Chris Haughton
AS AN ADULT
I love to travel and I have ended up working in lots of different jobs all over the world. In San Francisco I was a waiter, in London I was a 'handyman' in Paddington train station (that's where they found Paddington bear) in Hong Kong I taught English to very small children and in India I taught at an art school. I am from Ireland originally. In Hong Kong the small children I was teaching didn't understand me very well, so to keep them looking at me I had to make funny faces and draw pictures on the blackboard. I also read them lots of books but only ones with pictures so we could both understand. If the book was in Chinese I just made up the story as I went. While I was there in Hong Kong I started illustrating for newspapers and that is why I called my website vegetablefriedrice.com. I spent a lot of time in India and Nepal and I got interested in doing work with Fair Trade. When I came back to London I started working with a great company called People Tree. They make clothes and bags and things so I helped them with some designs, with their profits they help build schools and hospitals.
AS AN ILLUSTRATOR/WRITER
I always wanted to do a children's book. I adapted a cute little bird that i had drawn for people tree, and I wanted to try make a simple story about the bird meeting all the other animals in the forest. At first I had him as a clever bird who had to pass all the animals of the forest to go from the top of the trees to the bottom to feed. He cleverly passed a snake, a tiger and an elephant etc, but my editor and I wanted it to be more friendly so i thought of him being lost and meeting them that way. The bird eventually turned into an owl because I wanted his eyes to be at the front so he can make better facial expressions. So the book turned out to be totally different! But even though the story was very different some things I wanted to keep. I wanted it to be a little bit like a pantomime so that you can ask questions 'Will it be Mommy Owl?' Is that Mommy Owl? They are the fun parts about reading books with children. I also wanted to hide the Mommy Owl in all the pages so you try and spot her if you look carefully. The most important thing was I wanted was for it to be able to be read nearly without words so that children can understand everything just by looking at it.
THREE THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
- Colouring in is easy if you do it on the computer.
- My book actually first came out in Korean so although I had written it, I couldn't read it. I could only look at the pictures.
- My editor tells me I’m like the squirrel in the story. I get a bit ahead of myself. I just want to get finished with writing the story as soon as I can so that I can get to drawing the pictures. Then I have to re-draw the picture because I hadn't thought of the story enough. I should listen to her more often.