Alice Melvin on Creating The High Street
Alice Melvin’s beautifully detailed illustrations make The High Street a book filled with places to explore, tiny details to notice and stories hidden behind every door. Her distinctive work combines a love of books, miniature worlds and carefully observed everyday life.
In this guest article, originally published in 2015, Alice shares the childhood memories that inspired The High Street and explains how its unusual format, story and intricate illustrations came together.
The High Street
The High Street, my third book for Tate, was inspired by childhood passions. Growing up, I loved miniature worlds, and spent many an afternoon creating houses and shops out of cardboard boxes. I would get completely absorbed in the detail: papering the walls with wrapping paper, finding pretty patterned fabric for the curtains, and making teeny-weeny books for the little bookcases! I also had a collection of tiny tin houses that I would open with great care and excitement to reveal hidden interiors executed in painstaking detail.
Once I had established the framework of the text and the book’s physical format, I began to draw. It was an enormous illustration task and took over a year to complete. I initially underestimated the amount of work involved, but thankfully Tate were very understanding when the artwork deadline had to be pushed back.
My original intention was to screen-print the artwork, as I had done with my previous titles. However, as the drawings developed, they began to move in a new direction. I started scanning my ink drawings and assembling the compositions on a computer. Colour and texture were added digitally to all the individual elements, including crates of tiny tomatoes, bunches of flowers and trays of buns. These were then gradually built into the finished pages.
The process created some enormous Photoshop files because I kept every element on a separate layer, moving things around until each page looked just right. It was extremely time-consuming, but cups of tea and a huge library of audiobooks saved my sanity while I worked!
Woven into The High Street are aspects of my own life. For example, upstairs in Mr Hughes’ Hardware Shop is a youthful version of my woodwork-loving dad, Hugh, making a dolls’ house based on the one he made for me in real life. Mrs Millard in the music shop is based on my husband’s nan, Christine Millard. Sally also visits Foggin’s Sweetshop, just as I did as a child on the way home from school.
The real Foggin’s was a newsagent run by the kindly Mr Foggin and bore little resemblance to the grand sweet emporium Sally visits. However, to a schoolgirl, the row of tantalising sweet jars behind the newspaper counter was every bit as wonderful.
One challenge of working so intensively on a project over such a long period was that my drawing style changed and evolved along the way. I therefore had to redraw sections of the earlier illustrations to keep the book stylistically coherent. If there had been no publication date looming over me, I might still be working on The High Street, forever adding more tiny details!
The High Street was a wonderful project to work on, and I still have to pinch myself that something I created has actually been published. Having been passionate about children’s books throughout my life, I feel honoured and humbled when complete strangers tell me that my books hold a special place in their lives.
Thank you to Alice Melvin for sharing this fascinating insight into the memories and creative process behind The High Street. Original illustrations and photographs are courtesy of Alice Melvin.
Looking for more books filled with beautiful illustration and imaginative design? Explore Smallprint’s carefully chosen children’s books for every age.
