The Screen Thief Blog Tour

We are absolutely thrilled to be taking part in this Blog Tour for Swansea-based author and illustrator, Helen and Thomas Docherty. They really are the perfect picturebook pairing and have just published yet another playful, engaging and colourful story that will entertain by the bucketload.

The Snaffle has arrived in the city and she just wants to play – but everyone is distracted by phones, tablets and devices. They don’t seem to have time for each other. So the Snaffle becomes The Screen Thief and embarks on a mission to change the city into a more playful and more caring place. Ultimately, eating screens doesn’t do this for her, and leaves her feeling lonely, but a wonderful friend called Max is kind and caring and together they put things right.

Clearly ‘screen time’ is a huge issue for parents and teachers and striking a balance is important in all our lives, so this book will appeal to everyone looking to provide more than a subtle dose of encouragement to adopt healthier habits.

Helen’s joyous rhyming text is funny and great fun to read aloud. Thomas’ illustrations are so vibrant and full of detail – we’ve been poring over them over several bedtimes, reading the emotions of the characters and looking how they change through the story.

It’s totally apt therefore that Thomas joins us on this blog tour to give an insight into the illustration process.

Creating the Snaffle: Thomas Docherty on illustrating THE SCREEN THIEF

Throughout the story, the Snaffle goes through a whole range of emotions, so above all she had to be expressive. At the same time she gets up to plenty of mischief, so she needed to be dynamic. I also had to make sure that she was loveable. After all, she acts with the innocent impulses of a small child and that vulnerability comes through at the end of the story.

As always, she went through many versions before we decided on the final design. From the start, her general body shape remained more or less the same. The hard part was solving the question of how to resolve her face and head.  In the end I found that the long ears helped to make her very expressive and the trunk was fun and surprising. It was also good for sniffing and tasting the screens!

It mentions in the text that the Snaffle is small and blue. I was going to be painting the illustrations by hand and I wanted the Snaffle to stand out. I found a bottle of blue ink that I particularly liked, renamed it SNAFFLE BLUE and used it only for painting the Snaffle.

I had a lot of fun hiding the Snaffle in the library, the cinema and the TV shop and I hope children will enjoy looking for her in the illustrations. My favourite moment where she eats a screen is when she is walking away with the ice cream sign from outside the cinema.

When I’m creating a book, lots of the ideas never get included. If there was one set of pictures I would have liked to keep, it was of the Snaffle reacting to the different tastes and textures of the screens. In the end there just wasn’t room for everything.

One early idea that I’m glad was taken out was a moment where the Snaffle is arrested by the police for eating everyone’s screens. It’s just too sad!

The city is full of so many other characters. Originally I imagined these as made up creatures but in the end we went for animals, which made the Snaffle stand out more.

I had so much fun drawing them all glued to their screens, oblivious to everything around them.

Of course the Snaffle wants to join in!

Creating The City

One of the fun things about illustrating The Screen Thief was that it is set in a city. I hadn’t drawn a city before in a picture book and I was excited about all the visual opportunities that this presented. It also meant a huge amount of work as I had to plan the city from scratch.

At the beginning, I tried a slightly futuristic city with rounded buildings and bubble cars. However, in the end we decided that it would be more relatable to children if it was set in the present day.

The most complicated image to compose was the first page when the Snaffle arrives in the city. I tried lots of options including a train station and coming out of a subway. In the end I wanted to show all the main locations in the story on this page, so I went for a roof top view of a square. You can see Max’s house, the Library, the cinema and the park.

I even drew myself a map to make sure I knew where all the other places the Snaffle visits made sense.

The city is full of shops selling all sorts of things (I actually walked past a cactus shop just like this recently!). Of course the Snaffle is only interested in the TV shop…

As always, some of my rough ideas didn’t make it into the book. I did some sketches of inside the animal’s homes and some other locations which would have been fun to include.

Although cities are full of life, the Snaffle soon discovers that they can be lonely places too. There is a moment in the story where despite all the screens the Snaffle has gobbled, she still feels empty inside. What’s missing? Nothing that a screen can give her, what the Snaffle needs is a friend. Setting this scene in a deserted ally seemed to fit the Snaffle’s mood.

The park is not mentioned in the text, but it seemed the perfect place to develop the key message of the story. At the beginning, the Snaffle comes across children in the playground. They are so absorbed in their screens that they are not even playing. However, by the end of the story the park has been transformed into a magical space full of activity. Max and the Snaffle have managed to bring everyone together.

Huge thanks to Thomas Docherty for preparing this blog and sharing his insight and these amazing images.

The Screen Thief by Helen Docherty & Thomas Docherty is out now, available from your local independent bookshop, and is published by Alison Green Books. Cover to Cover may still have some signed copies.

This is not the first time that Helen and Thomas have featured on our blog. Check out the interview that we did with them last year.