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Mum tells a fishy tale

From little things big things grow. “A while ago I designed a logo for a company which combined musical instruments and a fish,” award-winning WA graphic designer Kylie Howarth says.

“The project never went ahead but that little character stayed with me and kept popping up in my sketch books. I always wanted to write something around him.”

Now she has. Howarth’s children’s-book debut Fish Jam is a jazzy aquatic adventure rendered in cool retro tones that has Toot the fish and a buddy the size of a semiquaver searching for scat cats to jam with. And it’s already a hit with the kids.

“When I read it to school kids I do the scat, they do the ‘shhh!’ and they absolutely love it,” the mum- of-two says. “It’s like a jam session and it keeps them really engaged.”

Howarth has always had a love of music, animals and the ocean. She grew up on a Harvey farm where her mum looked after wildlife. “There were always little kangaroos and possums running around everywhere,” she says.

She also grew up playing the trumpet and piano. Since then she has braved lionfish in Egypt, piranha and pink dolphins in the Amazon, marine iguanas and hammerhead sharks in The Galapagos Islands and swum with whale sharks and manta rays at Ningaloo. No wonder she was getting restless as a stay-at-home mum, despite the joys of parenthood.

“I really needed another creative outlet other than just finger-painting,” she laughs.

“My children and I started doing backyard-art sessions and some of the backgrounds in the book are by all three of us.”

Apart from Toot, a strange little beast who is a cross between a trumpet, a guitar and a fish, the really distinctive aspect of Fish Jam is the use of scat throughout.

“It was actually quite hard to get right,” she says. “Everything was initially too difficult for a three-year-old to say (the book is aimed at children aged three to seven). That’s why I think it’s good for teaching language skills, as it’s mostly just rhythmic sounds and you have to focus on articulation.”

With its musical combination of images and sounds, Fish Jam is a score which can be read by anybody to get the body swaying to the song of the sea.

Fish Jam is published by Five Mile Press ($20).Kylie Howarth will be a guest of the 2015 heARTlines Festival of Children’s Literature and Book Illustration. For full details, see mundaringartscentre.com.au/heartlines.