Some of you may have noticed that the colors in my book, Mister Seahorse, seem brighter and textured in a way that looks different from my other books. When I was creating Mister Seahorse I actually cut the shapes of the seahorses first and then painted them. (Usually I paint whole sheets of tissue paper first). Also, in Seahorse, I crumpled the tissue paper first, then uncrumpled it, and only then painted it. That’s how I achieved a certain effect (this is a little trade secret of mine that you may want to try).
One careful reader recently wrote and asked why there wasn’t an acetate sheet after Mr. Pipe’s page, breaking with a pattern established earlier in the book.
While I was working on this book, I didn’t imagine an acetate sheet after Mr. Pipe and so I didn’t include one. And like many decisions I make along the way, this one was partially conscious and partially intuitive. While I knew that including one more acetate sheet would be problematic once it came time for the book to be bound (because there would need to be an additional spread of art work which would make the book 34 pages instead of the conventional 32), my decision was not simply technical. In most of my books I tend to disrupt the pace and rhythm of the story toward the end so as to signal to the reader that the book is coming to a close. I think the absence of a fifth acetate sheet does just that; changes the pattern and pace of the book in an effective way.
