Oliver Jeffers: Incredible Adventures

Even before he started making picture books himself, Oliver Jeffers collected them, both as works of art and because he felt that they gave an indication of developments in the world of illustration.

In the last year of his university course in Visual Communication, he felt the time was right to try creating one of his own. 'The market was on a bit of a downturn at the time and a lot of the books that were coming out were leaving me cold and unsatisfied.'

His first effort, How to Catch a Star, was picked out of the submissions pile at HarperCollins and Jeffers was offered a contract the following day. The story of a boy's attempts to make his impossible dream come true went on to be nominated for the Booktrust Early Years Award and to receive Ireland's CBI/Bisto Merit Award.

'I went about creating a book that just satisfied my own curiosity,' says Jeffers. 'It was a good book at the right time and there wasn't a whole lot else about. If you're not going to aim for the top, why bother, really?'

The follow-up, Lost and Found, is another award-winner, about the friendship between the same boy and a penguin.

In doodling for the first book my mind was numb at one point, and I drew a rowboat, and the penguin separately, and there was potential immediately there for various things and the story just kind of weaved naturally out from there.

In addition to creating picture books, Jeffers undertakes commercial projects and exhibits his paintings; to date, How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found are the only projects for which he has used watercolour. As a result, the 10-month gap between the books caused him some difficulties.

I was working on an exhibition of oil paintings in between and I actually forgot how I had done the watercolour. It took me a couple of weeks to work out the colour combinations to make his face and whatnot again, but I actually think I improved on it.

The two books capture with great warmth the emotional and imaginative life of a child, but the quirky humour and spare illustrations have plenty of appeal for adults too. An examination of Jeffers' website reveals a clear stylistic link between his picture books and his other work.

'You can't hide your hand. If you look at any artist's work, you could select two of their paintings out of a crowd because you can't hide what's naturally there.' As a picture book aficionado himself, he is adamant that even books with appeal to very young children should be appreciated by readers of all ages.

The picture can be very emotive and the words can be deadpan so right away they balance each other out, and you can choose your own adventure. It leaves enough space for anybody, a kid or adult, to apply themselves to the story. There's enough ambiguity about the way the language is used and the way that the landscapes are painted for them to be anywhere and about anybody.

If one knows where to look, it is possible to discern references to a range of artists and media in Jeffers' work. Adults are more likely to note the influences, but Jeffers hopes that children may be inspired to take an interest in art.

'There are influences that are coming into my picture books that don't come from picture books, like Edward Gorey or Tim Burton or Saul Steinberg, people like that, and things like Fellini's Amarcord. The painting references are immense; for example, there's huge Edward Hopper or Constable references in How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found, all over the place; even just the way the light is used and the way the houses are done.

So it's rifled with reference and with heavy artistic influence, and if that's a doorway for young children into a world of art where they can look at it on their own terms, that's a huge thing.

Although he has always intended the story of 'the boy' to be told in three books, Jeffers felt that in order to avoid being typecast it was important to interrupt the triptych with something very different in tone and substance.

His new book The Incredible Book Eating Boy is more sophisticated than the other books and is darker both in humour and in its earth-toned palette.

I felt that it would be very difficult to do anything off on a tangent if the third book was about the boy because, the way the momentum was going for the first two, I felt that if I didn't break away from it at that point it would be very difficult to do so because there would be a certain level of expectation. I think with The Incredible Book Eating Boy I was rebelling against the emotional heaviness of the first two a little bit.

Artistically it is cleverly experimental; the book about a boy who literally devours books, is itself made from books, although Jeffers hastens to add that they were volumes that libraries were discarding.

He uses pencil, acrylic and even Dulux paint on pages from books, graph paper and ledger paper. Even the spine of a book is used as a canvas. Dictionary entries and handwritten inscriptions can be seen and sometimes read through Henry's story.

'I drew the whole lot in pencil first so you'd get the flow,' Jeffers explains. 'I knew that the scene where he's on the stage would be a double page spread, so I knew that before that a certain number of things needed to happen to set it up. It's like creating a comic strip, it's like art directing, it's like creating thumbnails for a film.'

'When they're at the table eating, that's the front and back of a book. I took them off, glued them down and then painted over the top of it. It's as simple as that. The stage scene, that's the cover of an encyclopaedia that I just glued down and painted over.

The sign is collaged over the top of it. It's just various bits of paper cut out and stuck down. It's a mixture of acrylic paint and Dulux one-coat stuff. And then for some of it I contrasted the real roughness and the organic feel with some flat digital colours very sparingly in some places, like the roof or the shadows because I thought that works nicely in some instances, countering the hand-felt rough texture of the paint with really slick, transparent digital shadows.

If How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found have a special place in some readers' hearts, one suspects that The Incredible Book Eating Boy is more to Jeffers' own taste.

'It's truer to me,' he admits. 'There's a great deal of poignancy in the first two, but you run the risk of becoming too twee and chocolate-boxey. They come from a certain place in my imagination. This comes from a different place in my imagination. It's ticking other boxes.'