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Elīna Brasliņa
Latvia
Elīna Brasliņa has illustrated around thirty books which collectively have been published in more than forty languages. She has also worked in production design, on animated films, and as a translator from French to Latvian. Her books have been recognised in many awards, including a nomination for the Kate Greenaway Medal.
In this post, Elīna talks about the creation of Let’s Draw a Story!, a visually stunning and energetic picturebook about a mother and child who work together to create a story. Elīna has illustrated many books in her career, but this is her debut picturebook as an author.
Elīna: How did Let’s Draw a Story! come to be? The simple answer is that I had a sudden epiphany (or was it a crisis?) and desperately wanted to submit something for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrator’s Exhibition. And so, with less than two weeks until the deadline, I grabbed the first idea that popped into my head and ran with it.
In truth, it had been simmering in me for a while. I had been illustrating other people’s stories for ten years, but had yet to write my own. I had, at some point, wanted to make a book in which every spread would be dedicated to a specific technique – drawing, painting, monotype, linocut, collage – a book that would explore the creative process, but I didn’t have a story. And, most importantly, I had become a mother, and that unlocked something in me. For one, I was painfully aware of how precious my time had become and wanted to do something worthwhile with it.
Also, my daughter had recently started drawing and I was in awe as I observed the various stages she went through – at first, a jumble of lines and scribbles, from which ever more vivid and well-defined characters emerged.
She found her words, started asking me to draw things for her, and I obliged. And she was obsessed with stories. Yes, she liked being read to, but more than anything, she wanted me to invent stories about her; seemingly never-ending stories with a revolving cast of friends, family members, animals, cartoon characters, supernatural beings and inanimate objects. And we would tell these stories together. She would constantly jump in, ask questions, course-correct. Back and forth we’d go, sometimes for hours. It was both exhausting and remarkably gratifying.
So I realised this would be my first book – a story about creativity and motherhood. After I found out my illustrations had made the cut and would be included in the Illustrator’s Exhibition, I, with some gentle prodding from my publisher, jumped into another week of frenzied work, trying to patch together something resembling a storyboard so I could apply for a grant – yet another close deadline! – and get my picture book off the ground. My daughter had a cold, my husband was away on a business trip, my brother came over to help, the TV blared on in the background, and bits of paper flew around as I sketched, cut, pasted, scanned at a manic pace. It was exhilarating.
Ah yes, I haven’t gotten to the story yet!
Well, it’s a story about, among other things, storytelling. I started out with five spreads, somewhat vaguely connected, and now had to fill in the blanks. Before becoming an artist, I spent four years at university, studying French, linguistics and literature, and had some familiarity with narrative theory. The first draft of Let’s Draw a Story! was based on the idea that narratives, regardless of “surface detail”, have a limited number of underlying structural elements. This was also true in my daughter’s case: the stories I told her had to adhere to a certain formula, and I would be corrected if I deviated too much. So the story of the book coalesced around the idea of a journey, involving such tropes as “leaving the safety of your home”, “finding friends along the way”, “hunting for buried treasure”, “barely escaping at the last minute”, “fighting a monster”, “reaching your destination” and so on. In truth, the story, even in its final version, is somewhat loose, meandering and mainly a means of finding ways to draw what I wanted to draw. This is a very “picture-first” picture book, with very little text.
The main thing I wanted to achieve in the illustrations was to convey the inner workings of the creative process, and the way our imagination comes to life and projects itself onto our surroundings. I was somewhat deliberate in not marking a clear boundary between the real world, which includes the storytellers themselves and their tools, and the imagined world of the story. That’s why we see crayons and erasers coming to life and mingling with fairy tale creatures, and glass jars with brushes and pens turning into a dark forest, a dirty pile of cast-off pencils becoming a mountain, and hands both holding tools and morphing into characters themselves. At the moment of creation, borders dissolve, everything moves and shifts, and anything around us and within us is a source of inspiration.
And that’s also why I wanted to include my daughter’s drawings in the illustrations – not just because we actually draw together sometimes, but because her discovery and exploration of drawing was a key moment in the conception of the book. And, importantly, the main character, which my art director lovingly dubbed “little pea”, is also based on my daughter’s early drawings. It’s a sort of stick figure, just a circle with a face, hands and feet. Its lack of distinct features, hopefully, makes it an easy entry point into the story; basically it could be a stand-in for anyone. And, similarly, the child character, while loosely based on my daughter, also has no name or specified gender.
The mother is arguably the most layered character in the book. Like the child, she also has an avatar in the story they tell together, but this is something that I added later on. I remember, after the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, my publisher told me how someone had seen my two illustrations in the exhibition and, having looked at the book (then still in its draft stage), was puzzled. Why wasn’t the book more focused on the mother as an artist? I had to sit back and think. In my eyes, even at that point, the book did have the mother’s story in it; it was about a mother letting a child into her inner sanctum, her creative space, leading them through it and then stepping back, letting the child take the reins. It was how I had felt, having to put my artistic ambition on hold to make room for my daughter.
I realised that I wanted to make this a bit more explicit in the book by including a Little Mother character in each spread. Like any real mother who goes through an identity crisis when their child is born, she is forced to change. She shape-shifts into a bird, a centaur, a dragon, a mermaid; she is the proverbial “art monster”, but in miniature, because she is unable – or won’t allow herself – to grow. She desperately tries to get something done, gets foiled again and again, grieves, loses her temper, but regains her inner balance in the end. This is the hidden story within the story, which holds the key to understanding the book’s message as I see it: yes, having children is hard, and having to reign in and redirect your creativity is also hard, but it is so worth it.
And, once you get through it, you become unstoppable.
Illustrations © Elīna Brasliņa. Post edited by dPICTUS.
Let’s Draw a Story!
Elīna Brasliņa
Liels un mazs, Latvia, 2024
This picturebook explores storytelling as a shared experience by posing and answering a series of questions like “how does it start?”, “what happens next?”, and “Is there a happy ending?”. It’s a book for and about children who, rather than settling down to listen to a story, actively want to shape it.
Full of fun details and illustrations that can be pored over again and again, this picturebook sheds light on the creation of art: the seemingly simple process of drawing and imagining, which actually requires so much attention and work.
