Crunch! Kaboom!
July 29th is the publication day for Crunch! Kaboom! Mighty Mining Machines, with Fremantle Press!
Outside the town, in the heat and the dust, where the sky is bright blue and the earth is like rust,
is an iron ore mine that’s bigger than big with mighty machines that blast, drill and dig.
With bright colours, enormous engines and lots of fun sounds,
Crunch! Kaboom! is perfect for kids who love to play with toy trucks and dozers.
Crunch! Kaboom! was written by brother and sister duo Conor Mills and Clodagh Starr, with lots of fun rhyming text and sound effects for each machine. Conor used to work in mining and technology, and was keen that the book be fun but also an accurate non-fiction portrayal of the process.
This book was certainly a learning curve for me; I’ve done lots of books about animals and families, so when Cate from Fremantle Press contacted me with a book about mining machinery, I admit I was a little bit terrified! However, I’m never one to turn down a challenge (or a job), so I took it on! It involved drawing lots of huge machines, following the iron ore mining process from start to finish, so I had a lot of research to do!
I’m very grateful to all the people who upload videos on all sorts of topics to YouTube - the iron ore industry may be a BIG part of Western Australia but Western Australia is very BIG too so it’s too BIG a journey for an illustrator who doesn’t drive - and all those YouTube videos get far closer to those BIG machines than ever I’d be allowed to get!
As sound effects make up a great part of the book, I had a lot of fun designing specific typographic treatments for each sound and machine. I may be primarily an illustrator but I’m also a designer and I love typography! Turning each sound effect into part of the illustration itself, while not losing its place as part of the overall text, was a challenge in some instances, but I think it was worth it!
You can pre-order Crunch! Kaboom from Fremantle Press now, otherwise it will be released on the 29th. Stay tuned for a follow-up post about the launch party next month!