I’m pleased as punch to be premiering the book trailer for Michael Hall’s rather magnificent picture book RED today.  The simple tale of a blue crayon labelled with a red wrapper, it’s rather subtle and brilliant.  Naturally I wanted to know where Hall got the idea for it in the first place.  Here’s his response to that query:

My interest in crayons began when I fell in love with Mickey Myers’ Crayola prints (see below) in the 80s. Crayons — when represented in two dimensions on paper — make an appealing subject. They are also joyful and unpretentious, and they can work as a metaphor for many things. I used them several times in my graphic design work.

At one point, I made a series of drawings by scribbling one entire crayon—until the crayon was too small to hold—onto a piece of toothy paper and gluing the crayon’s label below the drawing. Each one seemed like a picture of a life. There were many variations; one of them involved pairing one colored scribble with a different colored label.

Later, when I began making picture books, I knew that at least one of them would be about crayons, and the mismatched label idea seemed like a good place to start.

At first, I couldn’t let go of some of the more grown-up aspects of the metaphor. My first draft followed Red, a blue crayon with a red label, until he was completely used up, and the crayons put his label to rest in a grassy field. The berry crayon delivered the eulogy: “When I look up at the clouds, I can’t help but feel that he’s still with us.” And the last page — a picture of the ceremony beneath a crayoned blue sky — read: “And he still was.”

Needless to say the tale is vastly different from this first draft.  No crayon funerals are in evidence now.  Just a great book with a kicker of an ending.

Enjoy the trailer!

Many thanks to the folks at Harper Collins for passing it along.