Kids love Oliver Jeffers' stories. On the other hand, Adults may love them more. The illustrations that pour across his books are filled with details and surprises. Now, with the release of his new book, Here We Are, Jeffers is making the move to digital.
"I wouldn't say that I'm technologically savvy, if something goes wrong, I just scream for help and leave rather than fix things," he shrugs. At 40-years-old, Jeffers is slow to change and a self-defined misoneist.
A best-selling author, Jeffers has written and illustrated some of the world's most-loved children's stories. His 2005 book, Lost and Found, won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Written for his two-year-old son Harland, Here We Are is his first piece of non-fiction. It explains the very basics of the world, from the solar system to the importance of diversity. "Be kind," the book concludes, "there is enough for everyone."
Jeffers first came up with Here We Are at the end of 2016. Living in New York, Trump's election and subsequent Muslim travel ban got him worrying for the future of his son. With the subtitle Notes for living on Planet Earth, this book would be young Harland's guidebook to a confusing world.
As Jeffers started to plan the book, the political mood in the US became all-too relevant. His team set out to get it published as quickly as possible. "It was done in record time because the sentiment of the book was very relevant to what was happening in the world," he explains. "We were bending over backwards."
Normally, the artwork takes months to complete and fine-tune, but this time, it made sense to get it out as soon as possible. "I only finished the artwork halfway through the summer and then it was almost immediately sent to print because we had been proofing as we went along." The printing companies hate that, Jeffers explains. "It was only because everyone believed in the book that they were prepared to make these sacrifices."
It was in this hurry that Jeffers took to social media. "I started to draw as a sort of commentary when things were happening in the world," he says, "I wanted to post my work on social media."
Meanwhile, if he was going to get Here We Are done in time, he needed a way to work around the clock. "I would've had to stay in the studio all night and my wife would've been a single parent with Harland." This wasn't an option, forcing Jeffers to experiment with digital tools.
Two years earlier, he had experimented with various styluses, but they were clumsy and inaccurate. He would often draw in an auditorium in front of a big audience on a live screen. Going to draw an eyeball on the iPad, it would dot an ear rather than the face. It was like drawing with a fat thumb. "I never liked the way Steve Jobs said, 'Why make a stylus when you have five of them at the end of your wrist'. It's like, have you ever drawn anything? You don't draw like that! You draw with two fingers not one." It wasn't until a friend showed him the Apple Pencil that his mind began to change. It was more intuitive and more true to life than any digital tool he had used before.
The real problem was the drawing program he would use on his iPad. Most apps were made for the screen rather than print, so sizing was an issue. "There were a couple of early social media posts where I was using different drawing apps, but when I went to print them out, the resolution was tiny". When it came to the book, this was an even bigger problem.
"While the iPad Pro is big, it is not as big as what the book would be," he says. "It was frustrating." After months of research Jeffers and his team found ProCreate, which could fit the dimensions of his book perfectly.
"It's almost like the way the old Disney cartoonists used to make animations," he says. Back then, the backgrounds of animations were always hand-painted but more detailed digital drawings were layered over them. All of the large shapes in Here We Are were physically painted on a piece of paper and then scanned and tweaked in Photoshop. Now, Jeffers estimates that 45 per cent of Here We Are was made digitally.
"I realised I was looking at it wrong," he says. "It occurred to me that this was just another way of making art."
Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, published by Harper Collins Children's Books, is out now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
