Shaun Tan in conversation with Paul Gravett

From The Bird King by Shaun Tan

There has been a buzz going round the children's book world these past few weeks as hugely talented picture book illustrator Shaun Tan was on a rare visit to the UK from Australia to promote his treasure trove of sketches, The Bird King. After events at Edinburgh Book Festival and Seven Stories in Newcastle, he was to London to launch his exhibition at the Illustration Cupboard and do an event at Waterstone's Piccadilly where he was in conversation with comic books expert Paul Gravett which we went along to hear.

Shaun Tan is well known for his powerful picture books that beautifully combine words and pictures that address themes like alienation, immigration, communication, isolation and cultural misunderstandings. He comes from an art theory background and you can recognise echoes of surrealism and other art movements in his work, but he creates books that people of all ages can enjoy and understand and prefers his work to speak for itself without any allusions or presupposed knowledge. He has won many awards including the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award this year and an Academy Award for the animation of The Lost Thing.

Background

Shaun started the talk with a slide show of some of his childhood drawings, explaining that children draw in thought not the thing itself, which he considers a good discipline to have as an adult.

Shaun was obsessed with dinosaurs as a child and learned to draw by copying pictures from his favourite dinosaur book. He also loved spaceships and became interested in Sci-Fi via The Twilight Zone as a teenager. It was his local librarian who introduced him to Sci-Fi books and he was particularly interested in Bradley.

Growing up in suburban Western Australia, Shaun was bullied at school for being half Chinese, and developed his verbal and drawing skills to survive. His father was an architect and Shaun used his paper and pens to draw with, he said he would have become an architect if his father wasn't already one. At school he excelled at physics and chemistry and was always torn between art and science. He initially wanted to study Biomechanics at university but went on to do a degree in art theory and literature as he 'understood science but didn't understand art'. He starts his books like projects and always begins in the library, a hang over from academic discipline.

He never set out to be an illustrator, he wanted to be a writer, but everything was rejected. He then started to illustrate his manuscripts to attract the publisher's attention and this is what the publishers were more interested in. After graduating he became a commercial artist (including political cartoons) and got his first break illustrating a book for a friend (The Land Beneath the Sea) which he delivered on time so publishers asked him to illustrate book covers and then other people's texts. It was the illustrations for John Marsden's The Rabbits, a picture book about colonisation that really made him noticed. He developed his style through this project and soon began to illustrate his own books.

He wanted to break away from the confines of the 32-page-spread picture book structure and began to divide the page into panels and sequences, influenced by comics and graphic novels in particular The Snowman. He particularly loved how the Snowman reacted to the domestic appliances, which have always held a fascination for Shaun. His favourite character as a child was R2D2 and you can see echoes of this in his character Wall E.

The relationship between words and pictures is of particular interest to him, 'illustrations have to add something to the text or why illustrate them at all?' he asked. Every word counts in a picture book, they add gravity he explained, people believe in them. Words set the pace, the text speeds the reader up. Pictures are like a map. He spoke about the importance of negative space in picture books, comics and poetry.

The Lost Thing

The Lost Thing is the first book he wrote and illustrated and he still regards it as his favourite book as 'it had everything I wanted to say about the world'. Set in a post-ecological world this is the story of a lost thing which is never named or described and follows a classic picture book structure. It took 10 years to adapt The Lost Thing as an animation, 'three and a half years productively' to produce a 15 minute film.

'Eric'

The second slideshow featured spreads from 'Eric', the opening story from Tales from Outer Suburbia about a foreign exchange student who stays with a family and the cultural differences between them.  He explained that he came up with the character by drawing it first. It began as the sketch of a crown and developed into the character of Eric - which looked not quite a demon or a cat. 'It's difficult to come up with a character without any association' he explained.

'Eric' was written whilst they had a Finnish guest who was staying with them at the time. Finnish people famously don't display much emotion so it was difficult to know if he really enjoyed himself.

The Red Tree

He then showed a slide show of The Red Tree, the story of a young person who wakes up feeling low and insecure until he finds a red tree of hope growing in his room. This book is deeply autobiographical - Shaun was depressed at the time, as he explained, 'the flip side to creativity is depression'. For Shaun being depressed was a waste of valuable time and he wanted to turn the experience into something useful, reporting on loneliness and depression. He also treated it as an artistic exercise and used a more painterly style than The Lost Thing. He was willing to create a series of paintings for an exhibition but managed to persuade his publisher to publish it as book. The Red Tree is used a lot by psychiatrists and psychologists.

The Arrival

He last slide show was of the wordless graphic novel The Arrival, the story of an immigrant that was based on his father's experience as a Chinese immigrant. His language is still not very fluent now and Shaun is very interested in communication and the different ways people express themselves either verbally or in other ways.

He wanted The Arrival to have a slow pace, with more pages which were broken into sequences so the reader would slow down. The experience needed to be intimate and drawn out and dreamlike as he explained 'the experience of immigration and history is like a dream' and he wanted this to be reflected in the book. Although using a photo realist style, he wanted the drawings to look like drawings - not like photos and didn't want his work to look too clever or skilful. To achieve the cinematic effect he made plastacine models to draw from for lighting and filmed friends acting out scenes from the book which he made into stills and drew from these.

Shaun's family continues to be a big influence on his work, in particular his father and older brother. The book he is working on at the moment is about brothers and the power imbalance in the relationship.

Read an interview with Shaun

Visit Shaun's gallery of illustrations