We love the colorful illustrations in Tim Hopgood’s book, Here Comes Frankie!
Here Comes Frankie!
We are big fans of Tim Hopgood’s books. His illustrations are stunningly bright and lively and his stories are a delight to read. One of our favorites is Here Comes Frankie! a tale of a young boy who lives on a very quiet street, in a very quiet home – even the birds have lost their cheep and the family’s clock has lost its tick-tock. Until one day Frankie decides to learn the trumpet and suddenly things begin to change…. This sweet, uplifting story, full of life and happiness, is bursting with wildly cheerful illustrations which inspired us to create some fun art.
Wax Resist
The illustrations in Here Comes Frankie are a mixture of styles, and look like a collage so we made a picture with many layers. We began with some crayon-resist and water colors. Start by drawing some patterns or lines on your paper using either a white crayon or white candle. Next, paint your paper with water color paint. The waxy residue from the crayon or candle will leave beautiful patterns in your water colors. The illustrations in the book show wonderful textures and patterns coming out of Frankie’s trumpet when he plays it so the curly lines in our picture were representative of that. This crayon-resist technique never gets old and if you add the white crayon patterns to the page without telling your child, then it is a magical surprise for them when the paint across the page.
Book Inspired
Probably our favorite feature of this story is that as Frankie begins to play his trumpet, not only does he produce sound, but he can also see and smell the music. When he plays low notes, dark colors are produced and when he plays high notes, light colors burst across the page. The pages are filled with pictures of fruit and other foods – smelly cheese while Frankie is still learning to play (and not playing very well!) and delicious sweet fruit when he starts to play beautifully. For the next layer of our picture, I provided my son with various pieces to create a collage. I cut up some tissue paper in the shapes of various fruits (lemons, bananas, grapes and apples). We used the left-over water color paint to color some paper doilies and then cut these into smaller pieces, and we cut some pictures of fruit from a magazine. My son then glued these to the page.
and the wild illustrations inside. They were such a wonderful inspiration for our artwork and my son loved putting together all the layers and elements of this piece.
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