A Silent Movie

A clapperboard in the top corner announces the rules of the game: this is a silent movie, so most of what you see has had the colour drained out of it. Grey crowds swarm over collapsing sets, a fake building topples, ladders lean everywhere, and cameramen crank away at their machines while stunt performers tumble past. Then, scattered through the grey, small patches of full colour break through: red-shirted extras, a blue car, an orange tent, a green tree. The trick is simple and it works, because your eye keeps snagging on the colour and you have to remind yourself that colour is not the thing you are hunting for.

This comes from the world of Martin Handford, the English illustrator who created Wally (or Waldo, or Charlie, depending on where you grew up) in 1987. The scene belongs to Where's Wally? In Hollywood, published in 1993, where every page is a different film set. Handford drew each of these crowds by hand in pen and ink with watercolour, and a single picture could take him two months. He has said he never planned Wally to be hard to find at first, the character was just a way of giving readers somewhere to start in all the chaos. Look for the small details he tucked in for their own sake: the pie fights, the collapsing ladders, the man carrying a length of film reel like a ribbon. Half the fun is the stuff you find that you were not looking for.