Windows into Illustration: Matt Carr

Matt Carr caught the eye with his debut Superbat, which uses speech bubbles, sound effects, and the bold colours of action hero comics to create an accessible and visually striking picture book. On publication of his new book, Spyder, he discusses his approach to creating books, and his signature ‘graphicness’.

I don’t really class myself as a proper illustrator. I’m a graphic designer really but I have ended up doing different types of illustration for my day job. When you work for yourself you end up having to say yes to everything to make ends meet. So when I started doing my first kids book it took me a while to find a style that worked. In the end it happened organically and sort of reflects my ‘graphicness’ (if that’s a word!?). I start each book with a storyboard with little rough sketches and I do a colour cover to help sell in the idea. I make my books square so that when they are open they are like a movie screen, so my illustrations are almost like stills from a film. Then I send it to the publishers, who add their ideas and thoughts. Strawberrie Donnelly and Pauliina Malinen-Teodoro at Scholastic have been amazing, in the most part they leave it as it is but Strawberrie is brilliant at speeding up or slowing down the story with her art direction. It’s been a real learning curve because usually I’m a one man band and with my first book Russell The Scared Crow, which I self-published, I made all the decisions (good and bad!) but it’s great to have all their experience helping me to refine the story until it works perfectly.

Once the storyboard stage is done (I usually have shoehorned as many jokes as I can get away with, back in) then I do a full size sketch dummy of the book and this is sent back for approval. With my latest book Spyder I wanted to try and play about with scale and perspective to show how small she really is.

So then it’s time for the colour to be added. This is fun as my work has always tended to be very colourful and we print it in bold pantone to make it zing! I also use a small palette of colours to make it simpler. For Superbat I used Superhero colour, but with a retro feel, so instead of blue it was a kind of greeny blue.

So the method I came up with is to draw up the sketches properly, then trace them in black pen. Then I scan them in and then put it together like a sort of jigsaw puzzle, colouring it and ‘snagging’ it as I go. This gives each illustration a sort of handmade feel but with a sharp graphic style. The illustrations look pretty simple but they actually take a lot of time to piece together. I think that not having an outline makes them look a bit different too. With Superbat I also painted over each spread to give it a slightly textured feel, but with Spyder I didn’t want to as it’s more of a slick story. As I say I sort of got into doing kids’ books by accident and I’m sort of making it up as I go along but I’m happy with the results so far!