Easy as ABC: famous artists collaborate on children's colouring book

In a new book for charity, 26 leading artists including Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Grayson Perry and Polly Morgan have outlined a design for a letter of the alphabet, leaving the buyer to colour in the rest
13 November 2013

If you've ever stood in front of a work by one of our leading contemporary artists and thought you'd like to change something in it, then a new project is just the thing for you. From next week, good bookshops will be selling The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs, which features drawings by a stellar group of 26 artists, including Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin, who have based their designs on a letter from the alphabet.

J is for: Pietro Ruffo draws a jet plane crashing into a jungle where a jam jar spills into a waterfall
Drawing by Pietro Ruffo

The project was initiated by Charlotte Colbert, of Humpty Dumpty Publishing, and Lauren Jones and Alix Janta, the two people behind Alteria Art, which produces affordable artists’ prints. It will raise funds for Kids Company, the charity founded by Camila Batmanghelidjh to support vulnerable inner-city children: 10 per cent of the book’s profits and all the funds from a special auction at the Serpentine Gallery on December 12 will go to assist Batmanghelidjh’s vital work.

O is for: the Chapman brothers make their letter O into a page full of eyeballs in The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs
Drawing by Jake and Dinos Chapman

The artists were sent the same wonky typewritten instructions in a tube with a pot of ink, a pen, brush and pencil, and two sheets of paper. Their task was simple: to create a landscape-format image “suitable for children of any age”. Colbert says the idea was “to allow children to reinvent art or take a masterpiece and scribble over it, make it their own and redefine the relationship that one has to contemporary art, because sometimes it can be quite distant and daunting in a gallery context”.

'A Is For Animal': Tracey Emin depicts her cat, surrounded by love hearts, for The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs
Drawing by Tracey Emin

The artists have clearly had fun but some have had to exercise more restraint than they normally would. “We’re hoping that some of the artists will colour in their pieces,” Colbert says, “because for a lot of them, especially those who work a lot with colours, it was really frustrating to stop at the outlines. So, at the auction, that might be an option — some artists will offer to colour their pieces in for a higher bid.”

M is for: Paula Rego's drawing of a monkey for The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs
Drawing by Paula Rego

Meanwhile, you can view the originals in an exhibition at Sotheby’s in Bond Street next month.

Grayson Perry

While many of the artists who feature in the book are stepping outside their usual media to make the drawings, Grayson Perry is very much at home. “I am a basic linear draughtsman. I’m an outliner,” he says. “Somebody once said that by putting a line around an object you’re kind of taking ownership of it, you encapsulate it. If you’re just doing the light falling on it, you’re observing phenomena, but by putting a line around it, which often isn’t there in visual reality, you’re turning it into a symbol. It’s a more cerebral version of drawing. You’re almost making a diagram of the visual world, rather than making an impression of it in the form of light.”

Perry admits he’s “not particularly interested in drawing things how they look. That’s boring. What’s the point in drawing in that way? We’ve got iPhones for that nowadays, haven’t we?”

While he says he “took the brief literally and just did it very quickly — everything I could think of beginning with the letter P”, fans of Perry’s pots and tapestries will recognise his sharp characterisations and social commentary in details like the pitbull gnashing its teeth in the middle ground. As with Morgan, there’s room for toilet humour, too. “You’ve got to have a P for poo — kids like poo, don’t they?”

Polly Morgan

T is for Trotsky: Polly Morgan drew her pet dog for The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs
Drawing by Polly Morgan

The animals in Polly Morgan’s art are usually stuffed; silent players in macabre and fantastical scenes conjured using her finely tuned taxidermy skills. But for the book she captures an animal that is very much alive: her dog Trotsky, determinedly cocking his leg and peeing.

“My dogs are Trotsky and Tony, so T is a letter I associate with the animal,” she says. “Since few others will, I needed to use the T for a more recognised symbol — what better than a lamppost!”

Trotsky is a Staffordshire bull terrier. “My favourite breed,” she says. “Battersea Dogs’ Home is full of them and I’d have taken them all if I’d had the space.”

So how did he come to be called Trotsky? “Neither he, nor I, have Marxist leanings,” she says. “His former owners named him Tusk and it just wasn’t rolling off my tongue. For the first few days he trotted along everywhere behind me and I nicknamed him Trotalong, Trotalot and finally Trotsky.”

Morgan’s is one of the sparest of the drawings but she suspects it will delight the book’s readers. “I knew two important things: they needed an outline to fill in and toilet humour goes a long way with children.”

Yinka Shonibare

Y is for: Yinka Shonibare chose to draw an expressive Y for The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs
Drawing by Yinka Shonibare

Like many of the contributors, Yinka Shonibare is not best known for his line drawings — he’s a painter, photographer and video artist but primarily a sculptor, creating tableaux of mannequins often adopting the poses of great paintings and always clad in his signature material: brightly coloured batik, the involved history of which he exploits to reflect on empire and colonialism, the social and cultural back stories against which much historical art was created.

For his contribution to the colouring book, he has created a “a playful Y”, he says, “sliding in the way that children do — the Y has the energy of a child”.

Did he study colouring books before deciding on his image? “We all carry around with us childhood memories, so I didn’t necessarily have to go and look at anything other than to refer to my own memory bank,” he says.

Three of the balloons trailing in the wake of the skidding Ys are filled with patches of the batik.

“I guess I want people to have that dialogue with me, to still think, ‘That’s Yinka doing that’. I wanted to keep that dialogue with my artistic persona going, even in that context.”

One of the few artists with a letter that directly connects to his name, he enjoyed its shape: “It was a fun one to work with,” he says, with a laugh. “We’ve all been told to avoid adult subjects, and Keith Tyson has X, so I hope he’s been careful there.”

The Artists’ Colouring Book of ABCs is on sale from Friday, £15.99.

A box set in a limited edition of 250 with a hardback book and a screenprint by Jake and Dinos Chapman is available for £150 from yoox.com and 10 Corso Como (10corsocomo.com). The exhibition is at Sotheby’s, 34-35 New Bond Street, W1 (sothebys.com) Dec 7-11. facebook.com/pages/Humpty-Dumpty-Publishing

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