Windows into Illustration: Jarvis

Now established as bestselling and enormously popular author illustrator of children’s books, Jarvis began life as a record sleeve designer, website designer and an animation director. Though he uses mixed media and a variety of techniques, there’s a warmth and energy to the illustrations that make them immediately recognisable. In this feature, he describes creating a new book, Our Pebbles.

My new book is called Our Pebbles and although it’s not a true story there are lots of aspects of it that are true and real. It’s all about the relationship between a kid and his grandad and the beach that they always go to – pebble beach. It’s a quite gentle story, and it’s a personal story as well. Whenever I start a book, I’m always looking for the best way to tell a story. I pick an image or two to play around with before I begin sketching.

So if I whizz back in time a little bit, I had just bought a load of coloured pencils and had done a bit of sketching and drawing on holiday. I liked the softness of the pencil and actually it’s quite a therapeutic medium to use. I had this gentle story, and I thought perhaps the art should also echo the story. So I made this soft and gentle image of a boy and his grandad on the beach.

But, there was something about it that wasn’t right. It was wistful and gentle, but it wasn’t joyful or exciting. And this book is all about the fun times. I had to stop and think about how I wanted to bring the fun. I started by thinking about Grandad and the pebbles. How would it feel if the pebbles were really solid and not soft. Grandad could also be really bold too. Maybe instead of gentle colours, the colours could be really zingy? So I started to work digitally.

Grandad and the pebbles started to take a bit of shape. He became the funny goofy grandad I wanted him to be – not frail and gentle, he was a big kid now. At this stage there were also two kid characters potentially in the story, and I decided it would be more focussed with just one.

Although I had set the book on a white background I still wanted to have a sense of place, so I began to build up the image subtly, warming up the colours and adding more detail. I brought more textures to counterbalance the solid blocks of colour, and there we have it, it was done. So I suppose in the end it does have a gentleness, but it also has a sense of fun and colour, which is good because I’m always looking for a balance when creating book images.

Our Pebbles is published by Walker Books, 978-1529516036, £12.99 hbk