While You’re Sleeping by Mick Jackson (Author), John Broadley (Illustrator) is a stunningly beautiful book that tells an important story.
Children are always filled with questions and really this is one of the best human traits, curiosity! This book, While You’re Sleeping, is a special one that helps answer questions many kids have about what is happening out in the world while they sleep! Children know that the world does not spinning when it is bedtime.This is in fact often a concern they have, they don’t want to miss out on anything!
While You’re Sleeping tells children about some of the many jobs that happen at night, from hospital workers to taxi drivers to wild animals that come out at night!
My kids specially loved the page that included bats! We have a beloved bat we call Charlie that for most of the year we watch near nightly come out while we wrap up our garden and play time outside. Charlie for months seemed like he was alone, but at the end of summer we were delighted to see two bats, Charlie has a friend! We haven’t seen Charlie this winter, we think he might be hibernating. That though is some research for the kids on another day!
Our Review of While You’re Sleeping:
The thing that you can’t miss about the Children’s Book While You’re Sleeping is the art work. It is beautiful and brilliant and nearly takes your breath away when you sink into the illustrations and all the detail work. It is pen and ink I believe but I don’t know the style.
The kids, being homeschoolers, asked if we could have some art lessons on this style and so tomorrow starts our practice in this line art way. I sent an e-mail off the the illustrator asking about the style as I am not sure where to even start to figure out how we learn more about this art style. Hopefully we hear back or I suppose I will jump into some art groups and hopefully get more information. For now though, we will take some inspiration from the gorgeous pages in this book and go from there.
Needless to say, all the kids, even our oldest who is 21, loved the book and it is a treasure that will for sure be on our book display for years to come.
This book was gifted to us to review and of course all opinions are honest and our own. 🙂
John Broadley Replied!
As mentioned, I had sent an e-mail to this amazing illistrator:
Sorry to be a bother but I wanted to reach out and ask about the style of your work. My children just read the book you illustrated called While You’re Sleeping and it is beautifully done!
They asked if their art assignment tomorrow could be in your style and I wanted to put together a lesson about it but I honestly have no idea what this is called, line art? Any help with pointing me in the right direction would be fantastic. I don’t think any of the kids have any idea just how much time goes into one of your pages but goodness we will all get an idea soon as we try our own hands at all the little lines and patterns!
 All the best,
Kimberly
Within hours John replied!
Hi Kimberley
Many thanks for getting touch and especially glasnto hear that your children liked the book!
I have trouble myself when asked the same question. I tend to describe it as pen and ink drawing with collage.
I have written a blog piece about how I did the drawings for that book for the publisher in the UK which gives some more information…..
https://www.pavilionbooks.com/2020/11/24/while-youre-sleeping-behind-the-scenes-with-illustrator-john-broadley/
Best wishesÂ
John
This was the highlight of my midnight, for I was still awake trying to learn more about this kind of art to help guild my children. I highly recommend reading the blog post he linked to as it explains so much and has such lovely pictures. In short, John draws out in ink patterns and then makes copies of those patterns to later use over and over cut out and collaged onto pages, of course he also does the custom work each page required by hand but this is actually different than I imagined and brilliant! His work is all done in black and white and he uses photoshop later for adding color!
As of yet, I have no idea if the children will be making patterns to copy in our printer and cutting them out or if they will trying to make line art all by hand. With 5 kids, this could really go in any direction but I think it will be a lot of fun, frustration, and wishing we all did it in pencil. LOL Thank you for the inspiration John Broadly!
Inspired Homeschool Line Art
After admiring the pages in the book some more we dove in with line art!
I don’t have kids but I would love to gift this awesome book to my nephew Kayle, i know he’d love it.
I used to read books to my son when I was younger. I love children’s book, would recommend to my little niece.
Beautiful illustration. I really liked the idea behind the book. Really thoughtful.