One Halloween in the mid-1990s, artist Ed Briant needed a quick costume for his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "The only thing I had was cardboard lying around," Briant says, "so I cut it, stuck a bit of colored paper on it, and turned it into a mask."
At the time, the British-born Briant—a graduate of St. Martin's School of Art in London—was freelancing for publications like GQ, Mademoiselle, Spy and the NewYorker. He specialized in gouache portraits, occasionally with a touch of collage. But the impromptu Halloween mask gave him incentive to try more elaborate paper constructions. "I started making masks to look like celebrities," he says. Pretty soon, "Rolling Stone commissioned me to do a portrait of the writer Tom Wolfe, and the Wall Street Journal assigned me to do Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, a couple of others."
As Briant experimented with his editorial illustration style, he decided to try some "kid-friendly" paper engineering too. With encouragement from his agent, Holly McGhee, he developed child-oriented animal characters and "started to make whole figures that evolved into full-length models." He experimented in stop-motion animation and took a sculpture class, where he learned to craft internal armatures to support his 3-D creations. With practice, he learned to devise the movable characters that appear in his debut picture book, Paper Parade (Atheneum), written by Sarah Weeks and edited by Caitlyn Dlouhy.
Briant cuts, folds and twists tiny bits of paper into the lively characters of Paper Parade. In this onomatopoeic, rhythmic narrative, a girl and her Siamese cat watch drummers and carnival performers passing their apartment building. Because her baby brother is napping, the girl can't persuade her mother to take her outside. Indoors, she sculpts her own set of animal musicians and dreams of leading a parade.
Briant based the main character on the elder of his two daughters: "I copied her hairstyle at the time, her choice of dresses and things like that," he says. He used two lookalike figures, one small and another 10 inches tall, and he created proportionate models for the girl's wide-eyed, antic gray cat. The models' flexible wire armatures let them bend and swivel, and their facial features were applied with removable double-sided tape, so that the girl could smile, yawn, sleep or awaken in surprise. "This is an idea that I got from stop-motion animation," Briant says. Each basic structure stays the same, he explains, but each one has "a library of expressions, and you just peel off one and put on another one."
In Paper Parade, Briant relied on digital art for most backgrounds (except for a street scene whose set "ended up being about six feet wide"). For his next paper-themed book, which he is developing for Steve Geck at Greenwillow, he plans more complicated scenery. "I developed in my techniques as I did Paper Parade, so it'll look a little different," he says of his labor-intensive artwork. "I'm intending to build little sets to photograph the figures in, so it's going to have much more depth to it."
Briant has another picture book forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press that will feature his "flat art." A newcomer to children's books, he is working with several publishers at once: "Times are tough for picture books at the moment," he says, "and I don't think they're in the mood to offer a multiple-book deal to a first-time picture book artist."
Meanwhile, Briant is pursuing a simultaneous career as a public school art teacher, instructing second through ninth graders on Staten Island. He seems surprised and gratified that his students enjoy Paper Parade. "Recently, I've been taking it in [to class], and even the older grades like having it read to them," he says. "My first day with a particular class, I usually read the book to introduce myself. It shows them what I do and gives them a sense of who I am."
