Windows into Illustration: Greg Stobbs

Greg Stobbs is an illustrator, street artist, and associate lecturer. He’s worked internationally on a range of projects, from installations to interactive art pieces, and created the illustrated digital backdrops for the BBC’s CBeebies Christmas pantomime. In this piece, he describes his approach to illustration in Cloud Boy, the first book he has written and illustrated.

Illustrating is usually a joy, and I’m very lucky to do it for a job, but on occasion during the making of Cloud Boy, it was hard. Developing drawings based on feelings of self-doubt, not fitting in, masking, faking, not understanding what was different, and being quite overwhelmed brought back a lot of painful memories.

While it was important to share how wonderful it is to be able to drift off into your imagination, it was equally important to illustrate how that is perceived by others and how there is often a tendency to want to fix young people so that they fit comfortably in with the collective norm.

Although it isn’t the first page in the book, the Lighthouse spread is the first page that I drew for Cloud Boy. I wanted to illustrate in as bold a way as possible just how far Bobby could float, how far his imagination could take him, and the potential risks and dangers that might occur when he has that impulse to drift. To really bring that to life, it had to be a full-bleed double-page spread.

I love the look of lighthouses and what they represent. They symbolise a kind of care for somebody who might be in trouble, as well as hope, safety and awareness. Whenever possible, I like to include one in the backgrounds of my picture book illustrations—everyone needs to feel like someone is looking out for them now and then.

This is what the Lighthouse spread looked like originally. My illustrations start as thumbnails and quite loose pencil sketches, where I am trying to find the flow of the page or spread. I think a little about how much text is going to be needed, how much breathing space characters and elements might need, the connections between the characters, and what it is that I want readers to feel when they look at it.

Here, I wanted a lot of space for Bobby to fly into, so much of the real-world detail is packed into the left-hand page, while the right-hand has lots of room for Bobby’s imagination thread.

At this stage, we didn’t know that we would be using that incredible fluorescent pink, so I was just working out how to illustrate his thoughts in a way that would stand alone from the solidness of the real world. You can see here that we didn’t have all the characters completely worked out either.

I like to make grounds with paint and pencils and textures, and then build scenes and characters from cut-outs before adding detail. Here are some watercolour sections on textured watercolour paper. This gives that feeling that there is depth to the illustration and that you can feel or touch it.

I hop back and forth between traditional and digital techniques partly because I like what both of those things offer. Traditional techniques bring that human element, with imperfection, roughness and reality, while we also live in a time where digital media is ubiquitous and brings its own aesthetic. Why not use both? Another reason is that I can get bored if I spend too long working in one technique; that ability to move between ways of working keeps my interest and allows for a state of creativity in which I am directed by the illustration and what it needs rather than enforcing strict rules upon it.

When working with the brilliant Rob Lowe and Katie Haworth at the OUP on colours, we decided to bring some of the vibrancy of my wall works into the illustrations. Bobby’s imagination is a fluorescent pink that has to be printed as a separate layer. These kinds of decisions make a huge difference to the overall look of a book. The imagination thread needed to feel like it was separate from the real world, and the choice of colour helped achieve that.

For me, something still felt missing. I thought transparency might fix it, so I added Bobby’s thoughts and animals as simple, slightly see-through overlapping shapes. There’s a kind of magic in transparency which I like to utilise. It worked perfectly for this!

I try to find a good balance between double-page spreads, vignettes, full-bleed single pages and spot illustrations. I also love an opportunity to turn the book up a different way and change the composition and format.

Things change a lot from the start of the process, with the story, the characters and the book evolving all the time, but the message remains constant: to understand and celebrate all the different kinds of brains out there.

Cloud Boy by Greg Stobbs is published by Oxford Children’s Books, 978-1382054904, £7.99 pbk.