Fabel
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Everything here starts as a drawing

A picture-book studio in Woodstock

See what there is
One — pencil roughs
One — pencil roughs
Two — the inked line
Two — the inked line
Three — the wash
Three — the wash
Four — off the press
Four — off the press

About me

I am Thuli Ngobese and I paint the books. The studio is one room on Albert Road in Woodstock, above a fabric shop, with a north window that gives me about four good hours in winter and rather more than I need in January. Everything on this site was drawn at that desk in pencil first, inked, then washed in watercolour a page at a time. No tablet, and nothing traced. I spent six years illustrating other people’s manuscripts before deciding I would rather write the words as well, so Fabel is my own imprint and everything in it is mine from the first rough. Six titles so far, all of them printed here in Cape Town, and a small number of other things — cards, a cloth book, a cushion — that come out of the same paintings. I take on four or five commissioned books a year and I will tell you honestly whether yours is one I can do well.

Books, prints and things for a nursery

Blue duiker in the ferns
Prints

Blue duiker in the ferns

A giclée print of the original watercolour, on 310gsm cotton rag with a white margin wide enough to frame without cutting into the picture. Printed for me in Salt River in runs of fifty and signed on the back rather than the front, because a signature across the bottom of a painting has always looked to me like somebody talking over it. The duiker is the small one you half see on the contour path above Newlands and then decide you imagined. A3 fits a frame off the shelf; A2 you will have to have made.

R480.00Choose a size
The bokmakierie and the long grass
Books

The bokmakierie and the long grass

A hardcover picture book for three- to six-year-olds, thirty-two pages, written and painted here and printed in Cape Town on paper thick enough to survive a page being turned by somebody in a hurry. It is about a bird who will not stop singing and a field that slowly decides it likes him. Sewn rather than glued, cloth over board, so it opens flat on a lap and is still in one piece after a year of bedtimes. There is a bokmakierie hidden on every left-hand page and never on a right, and most children work that out around week three.

R320.00Add to cart
Fynbos card pack
Cards

Fynbos card pack

Six folded cards, each with a different fynbos study on the front and nothing at all printed inside, so you can say your own thing instead of agreeing with somebody else’s. Erica, protea, buchu, restio, watsonia and a pincushion, all painted from things picked on the Silvermine path and pressed flat under a phone book for a week. Six kraft envelopes and a length of cotton string, and no cellophane anywhere near it. People buy one pack and then come back for three, which is the whole of the marketing plan.

R180.00Add to cart
First rain cloth book
Books

First rain cloth book

A soft cotton book for babies, eight pages, washable at thirty and perfectly safe to chew, which is what is going to happen to it. Printed with water-based inks on unbleached cloth and stitched by a sewing co-op in Athlone who have made every one of these since the first fifty. The pages run from a hot afternoon to the first few drops to a puddle worth standing in, and there is a crinkle sheet sewn into the last one. This is the present to bring when everybody else has brought clothes.

R290.00Add to cart
Paper bird mobile
Nursery

Paper bird mobile

Six paper birds painted one at a time in watercolour, mounted back to back so they read from either side, and hung on cotton thread from a pale ash ring. It turns on the smallest draught — a door opening at the far end of a passage is enough — and that is the entire point of it, because a mobile that needs a motor is a machine. It arrives flat in a box with the threads already knotted to length, so you hang the ring and untangle it once. Hang it clear of a cot a child can stand up in.

R640.00Add to cart
Nightjar cushion cover
Home

Nightjar cushion cover

Natural linen, hand screen-printed with a nightjar in charcoal and ochre, envelope back and no inner — 45 cm square, so any pad off a shop shelf fits it. Printed two at a time on a table in the studio, which is why the ink sits a little differently on each one and why I am not going to pretend otherwise. Wash it cold and it softens instead of fading. The nightjar is the bird that sits in the middle of a gravel road at dusk and will not move until the car is close enough to worry you.

R420.00Add to cart

On reading the same book eighty times

A picture book gets read to a child until the adult reading it can do the whole thing with their eyes shut, so I draw for the eightieth reading rather than the first. That means putting something small in every spread that nobody sees at the start — a lizard high on a wall, a second pair of eyes in the grass, a bird that turns up on every left-hand page and never once on a right. The child finds it somewhere around week three and from then on it is their book rather than mine. It is the only part of this job I would call a technique, and it is most of the reason a thirty-two page book takes me the better part of a year.

The Christmas run closes at the end of October

Anything ordered after that still goes, it just goes out in the January post. Commissions for next year I book from March, and there are usually two or three slots left by winter.

Order before October

Say hello

Studio 6, Albert Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. Knock, or write and I answer in a day or two. A commissioned book runs eight to ten weeks from the first rough.