Jane Hissey

Jane Hissey has become known to children throughout the world as creator of the stories about Old Bear and his friends. Both Jane and Old Bear are around fifty years old - he was given to her when she was a baby. The other toy characters she has collected over the years. Bramwell Brown was made for her son Owen who is now 22. Rabbit was bought in an Oxfam shop in Brighton for the princely sum of five pence - and Jane wondered at the time if he was worth it! Little Bear also belonged to Owen - being little he is very mischievous and loves falling off things! Hoot the Owl was made by Jane when she decided she wanted to do an Owl story and didn't have one.

All the toys in the gang were carefully selected and chosen for different reasons, maybe for their colour, their looks, thetexture of their fur or just that their character seemed to fit so beautifully with the others.

When Jane starts work on a new book, the stories come first, then the pictures. She plans out the story creating a "dummy" book with parts of the story and sketches of the pictures pasted in. She then reads it through to herself to check that the story flows and makes sense - she used to read the stories to Owen but he thinks he is a bit too big for that now!

When she is satisfied with the story she begins the drawings which she creates using colour pencils. All the pictures in the books are created using the toys and other models and the drawings are usually the actual size of the toys. Jane makes everything that appears in her pictures herself. If she needs to include a picture of a cake she will make the cake and then draw it.

A sailing scene set up "on location" in the bathroom will keep the bathroom occupied for days much to the chagrin of the rest of her family! The drawing of just one character can take approximately 10 hours to complete, more complicated pictures can take 20-30 hours. One book can take up to one year to illustrate. But what a fun time Jane has creating the models, composing the pictures and then drawing them. And this sense of fun shines through the pages of all of her books. On leaving school Jane attended art college and trained in design and illustration. Among her tutors were three children's book illustrators who were already quite well known in their field: Raymond Briggs, John Vernon Lord and Justin Todd. She then taught art for five years until the birth of her first child when she found more time to devote to her drawings - writing stories came after the pictures.

Her children have also been involved in the production of her books. They have helped with ideas for the stories and any pictures supposedly drawn by the toys have been works of art produced by her children.

Jane has completed around 20 different books in total with many of these having been reprinted in various guises. As she finishes one book she starts to think about the next but never works on more than one at the same time. We look forward to more adventures of Old Bear and Friends and to the wonderful drawings which bring the loveable characters to life.

Contributed by Chris Tomaszewski

(Published 30th Sep 2013)