Reviews & Press : : Fatimah's Kampung

The Star, Sunday, March 1, 2009

Labour of love

THREE hundred metres of paper were used to create the story of Fatimah’s Kampung.

“I had to do it on a large scale in order to do justice to the perspectives, details and textures of the scenes I wanted to capture,” said Iain Buchanan (pic), its author and illustrator.

The original art work was up to 20 times the size of the book, but an architect friend was able to shrink the drawings using an industrial copy machine.

Amazingly, Buchanan has had no formal art training, and started drawing and painting in earnest only when he started working on Fatimah’s Kampung: “I taught myself and everything in the book is done by hand – even the most repetitive tasks,” says Buchanan, revealing that the only machine involved was the photocopier.

After the pictures were shrunk, Buchanan coloured them in using ink intead of water colour because he was told that ink has a more transluscent effect.

The result is pictures that glow in varying shades of colours, rich and delicate. Leaves, trees, bushes, grass are rendered in vibrant jewel tones – from emerald to jade to peridot, and all the greens in between.

What makes these pictures especially stunning is their detail. Every leaf and leaf vein is delicately outlined and picked out in fine black ink; every blade of grass formed; every thorn on a bamboo shoot present and correct.

Buchanan studied every thing he drew closely – the “pedantic academic” in him determined to get the details right. The drawings are so fine and the process of creating them so painstaking and tedious that his eyesight suffered. Some pieces took up to two months to complete and the entire project took eight years.

“When he started the book, I had no inkling as to what the project was about,” says his wife, Maznoor Abd Hamid, a retired university lecturer. “When I was first shown the drawing of the kampung on page one, it brought a lump to my throat for it reminded me so much of the kampung I grew up in a long time ago in Singapore.”

Maznoor recalls how she would tease her husband, pretending to peek at his work, only to be told, “Oh no, go away” or “Not yet”.

When she finally saw the completed book she was “stunned”, Maznoor says, “We have no children but Fatimah’s Kampung is a deep and touching tribute to a loving life together. It took eight years to see the light of day but it will last to the end of our days and beyond”.