Twitchy Witchy Itch

 

 

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Feature Interview

While speaking with Twitchy Witchy Itch author/illustrator Priscilla Tey, we can't help but marvel at the amount of thought and detail put into the conceptualisation of the story and its characters. Read on to uncover all the little details and easter eggs embedded in Twitchy Witchy Itch!

Tell us more about how the idea for the story came about, like, what was the inspiration behind this book.

The inspiration behind Twitchy Itchy Witch really came out of an amalgamation of a few things that were happening. I really love fantasy and I did want to make a book about witches. It started off with just sounds: “witch” and “itch” and “glitch” and “fidget”. There were a lot of repetitive, rhyming sounds that were echoing and bouncing around in my head.

I started to pick apart the idea of itch, a tick, an urge. I started to play around with the idea of sounds and smells, and that rhyming lyrical quality was very important to me. 

Meanwhile, I was doing research about how children think and interact with things and narratives. More specifically, I was looking at how digital tools change our suspension of disbelief when it comes to engaging with stories. I was looking at a lot of books like Hervé Tullet, the concept of playing around with glitches and visual imaging on a tactile book surface became very, very exciting and interesting to me.

Let’s talk about the characters of Twitchy Witchy Itch. Do you relate to any of the characters in your book?

Well, definitely. A writer or picture book artist always draws from their experience, or from what they know. I definitely see a lot of myself in her and when trying to build a character, I usually try to ground it in experiences, or people that I've encountered in my life.

I think in all of us, there's that little bit of OCDness–the need to control situations (at least for me), as self-consciousness creeps in. I was thinking a lot about this one particular character, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, in a 1960s TV sitcom called Bewitched, when I was developing Witch (character). 

Elizabeth Montgomery's character was very bouncy: she twitches her nose when casting her spells. When I was developing her character, I wanted her to be lovable, and I wanted the audience to be able to identify with the Itch character.  

When it came to Glitch and Fidget (characters from the book), it was very much rooted in the language of shapes. I wanted Itch to really feel very bouncy and very lively, so she was mostly based off of circles. Glitch by the nature of pixels was a character based mostly off of squares, and then Fidget being sort of always active and always moving around, I based off of a triangle. I really didn’t want Glitch and Fidget to feel scary or unfriendly in any ways  ut the overall character design is, definitely based off the itch under the compulsive need to clean.

It was really interesting to see that you conceptualised the characters based off shapes. Were there any changes to the characters that you created throughout the creative process of this book? Did you decide, in the midst of creating this that she shouldn't look a certain way?

Oh, definitely. There were so many changes with regards to this book..I think Itch’s conception took me three, four years. When I first started out with the characters, they were a little bit generic. With Itch, a lot of it was based off of a very quintessential imagery of what a witch looks like in the Victorian era in England. She had to be clad in black, because there was this obsession with black during that period of time. I knew from the get go, she had to be very circular.

The other two witches were also clad in black, because I was a bit worried to depart too much away from those iconic witch imagery. At the end of the day, I still need to look at the characters and think, “Hey, that's a witch.” With Glitch and Fidget, as I began to develop the story, I realised that I could play a little with their visuals. I did not need to necessarily conform to that typical idea of what a witch looks like with the pointy hat and circular rim, because Itch already embodied that idea.

I started to look at different cultures. I was trying to ask myself, “What would a witch in other regions or cultures look like, what would that equivalent of sorcery, and magic be?” Some of it, like Southeast Asian witchcraft, can be too dark for children.

in the case of Fidget, I looked at gypsy costumes and patterning to see whether I could infuse a little bit of that into her garment, so that she has an witchy, eclectic feel to her, but at the same time, she isn't like a generic witch.

It was really interesting to see that you conceptualised the characters based off shapes. Were there any changes to the characters that you created throughout the creative process of this book? Did you decide, in the midst of creating this that she shouldn't look a certain way?

Oh, definitely. There were so many changes with regards to this book..I think Itch’s conception took me three, four years. When I first started out with the characters, they were a little bit generic. With Itch, a lot of it was based off of a very quintessential imagery of what a witch looks like in the Victorian era in England. She had to be clad in black, because there was this obsession with black during that period of time. I knew from the get go, she had to be very circular.

The other two witches were also clad in black, because I was a bit worried to depart too much away from those iconic witch imagery. At the end of the day, I still need to look at the characters and think, “Hey, that's a witch.” With Glitch and Fidget, as I began to develop the story, I realised that I could play a little with their visuals. I did not need to necessarily conform to that typical idea of what a witch looks like with the pointy hat and circular rim, because Itch already embodied that idea.

I started to look at different cultures. I was trying to ask myself, “What would a witch in other regions or cultures look like, what would that equivalent of sorcery, and magic be?” Some of it, like Southeast Asian witchcraft, can be too dark for children.

in the case of Fidget, I looked at gypsy costumes and patterning to see whether I could infuse a little bit of that into her garment, so that she has an witchy, eclectic feel to her, but at the same time, she isn't like a generic witch. 

For Glitch, I’ve always wanted to to insert a piece of home, and so I clad her in batik. If you look very closely at Glitch's dress, her skirt is a pixelated batik kind of print. I was looking into the barang and batik prints with phoenix and birds patterns, and wondered if I could create a clear pixelated interpretation. Glitch was very much based off an old granny that I would see from time to time in Singapore, walking around, bent, which is why I make Glitch shorter than the other two. For Glitch. I experimented with peruvian prints at one point but decided to go more with the batik route. For Fidget, it was really like playing with triangles and patterns. she used to have a cloak, but I thought that would restrict her movement too much. I even tried collage at one point the characters went through a lot of iterations, because the very first book dummy that I did was vastly different from what the final outcome was.

 

Pages from Twitchy Witchy Itch

I really liked how you chose to insert of a piece of home in the batik because we don't think of witches in the Asian, or Southeast Asian context. One thing I really enjoyed about the illustration was actually the pixelated effect. Could you maybe share with us how you kind of create this pixelated effect? 

Actually, it was quite easy to do. With my initial drafts, I tried doing everything digitally because I thought it would be easier using Photoshop to offset or distort things. What I realised was that whilst it looked okay, when things got very glitchy, when I pared things down and things got swept away, the whole room became really clean. The illustrations were almost too sterile and too uninviting. When things are gone, the house goes all empty, even though it's supposed to feel very clean and empty.

I think the digital medium just wasn't working too well and decided to go back to gouache and something more tactile. The entire book was done in painted gouache and then I would scan that into the computer, all of the little squiggly itches that you see are rendered digitally. It will be easier for me to control where I put the etches and it gave me freedom to change things around especially to accommodate where text goes, it was then the challenge of taking gouache painting, and bringing it into the computer and simply overlaying glitch textures and cutting up the painting and then literally shifting things to make them distort.

It also meant that when I was in the painting phase, I had to paint things in differently. For instance, Glitch's entire character design, her square edges, her glitchy edges. Those are all painted in because if I were to round them out in the gouache painting and then try to glitch them, it just didn't feel like it was very much a part of her physique. The idea was that she was so glitchy that she basically became a walking square

The same goes with Fidget, it was a matter of duplicating her form. And playing around with transparency layers. It was quite fun working between like the traditional and the digital realms.

What is your favourite part or a part you would like to highlight to readers, maybe some hidden messages in the illustrations, the storyline?

I think most people have picked up enough on the idea that it's really about learning to live with your idiosyncrasies, the things that make you you, your imperfections, that a lot of times the things that we tend to harp on about, what we are very fearful of showing people can be the things that make us very endearing. It's really about the idea of learning to accept and embrace other people's kind of idiosyncratic imperfections. Most of the readers seem to have been able to catch on with that general story and meaning behind the work.

It's really open to any form of interpretations. It can also be the idea of embracing the new, especially with this idea of glitching, because a lot of times we can be very worried about embracing new types of visuals, new ideas, and so it's really about letting our guard down a little bit and then celebrating how colourful things can get when we embrace all those differences.

In terms of the visuals, there's actually a lot of little nuggets inside. Like I mentioned before, Itch’s entire body is based off lots and lots of circles. In her home, everything echoes the same design, aesthetic, everything is rounded, and everything bends and curves. And there's a lot of that that echoes throughout her house just to make things feel very lived in: this is very much Itch's home.

When I was doing a lot of research on the visuals of this house, l looked at a lot of furniture and interiors from that era, and sinuous lines from art nouveau, and things that can look a little bit magical. So it's a hybrid of those two aesthetics. The swirls and ornamentations that you find on cabinetry and even in the legs of chairs, all echo her magic spells – the swirls that she casts when she chants her magic spells. The idea is that it's as if when she does so much magic in her house, parts of her furniture start to almost conform and adopt those like magical qualities like they've settled into that.

You'll notice certain animals like the monkey. He makes an appearance here and there. Thankfully, he doesn't get swept away in her first frenzied cleaning spell, but the poor frog does. The monkey gets swept away in her second cleaning frenzy along with all her friends away.

Pages from Twitchy Witchy Itch

There are little subplots here and there, including the three mice that always run around throughout the entire storybook so yeah, a lot of thoughts went into these little nuggets, even down to her decorations on the wall. I tried to make them as eclectic as I could, thinking she might be an eco-friendly person where she will be trying to salvage whatever she could, and rebuild them into different items.

Even pictures on the wall, I drew what I thought she would look like when she was younger, maybe in school. Even things like this. I was trying to figure out what to put on this parchment, and I thought, “Oh, she must ride a broom, which means that she must have some kind of certification, a licence for riding a broom”. And I imagined that the organisation's emblem would be a crane, something that flies. little bits like that.

Even things that are hanging on the wall to give it a sense that she's a very well-travelled lady with exotic pets. There’re all these little nuggets that hopefully can keep somebody's attention throughout the entire book. 

(Read Twitchy Witchy Itch to uncover all these nuggets of information!)

What is the difference between illustrating picture books for children and illustration in general? Or rather, Why do you choose to write and illustrate picture books for children?

Picture books have always been something that's very close to my heart, I actually do still dabble in all the other facets of illustration as well. The first picture book that I wrote and illustrated was for my O-Level art project. It was a full 32-page picture book. I was always reading picture books, even until primary three, to the point that my parents were concerned if I should be reading more mature literature. 

But I think it was something about the way the words do something and the illustrations do something else. It was that relationship between the words and the images, and what is said what isn’t, the partnership between the two that always intrigued me.

I dabbled with design and characters, and sets and visual development for animation, which informed a lot of visual storytelling for me, especially how storyboarding  communicates ideas by simply framing characters in a certain way. I think that's really important. And it's something that I still look at and practise, and tried to bring into my picture books vice versa.

I think I've always enjoyed that marriage between words and pictures and what they can do. When I was in junior college, I did linguistics, because it was about understanding the power of nuances in words and phrasing. That was really what excites me about picture books now, that partnership.