On Illustrating, with Jon Klassen

Jon Klassen, winner of the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Illustration, talks to Open Book about his prize-winning (and heart-warming) illustrations for Cats' Night Out (Simon & Schuster) by Caroline Stutson. Take a peak inside the book here.

Open Book:

The lively, detailed yet subtle illustrations for your award-winning Cats' Nights Out really bring Caroline Stutson's delightful counting rhyme to life. Tell us a bit about the illustration style and technique that you decided on for this book.

Jon Klassen:

Thank you! The illustrations were done with a combination of making textures with paper and watercolour and digital drawing and colouring. Because the text is for younger children, the shapes are all pretty simple, but you can make them more interesting to look at with different textures and line work that give a better idea of the materials you are implying, like bricks or cement or metal. The cats themselves are all meant to be pretty similar to each other. Since it is sort of a counting book, the backgrounds do the work of moving the story along, and cats are the things you recognize from page to page.

OB:

Cats' Night Out is your first book for children. What was the creative process like?

JK:

It took some experimenting at first. I usually work on animated movies, and doing the artwork for that seems like it should be pretty similar to illustrating books, but there are a lot of important differences. The idea that the artwork is going to be one specific size on the page took some adjustment — an animated film could be shown at any number of sizes on a screen, so you aren't used to thinking that way about what you are drawing. Working digitally makes this even trickier, because you can zoom in and out on your work and you forget what size it's actually going to be. Developing it in the early stages was fun. The text left a lot of room for interpretation, and you get to make up little stories of your own in the pictures between the text. Also, because the text is tight and simple, you get to wander around to different places from page to page and know that it's not going to fall apart, story-wise.

OB:

Which is your favourite spread for Cats' Night Out, and why?

JK:

I like the spread with the buildings in the morning with the sun coming up near the end. There aren't any cats in it, but I liked going back and repeating a place that had been shown at the beginning of the book and changing it a little bit. It sort of helps contain the city in the book so it doesn't feel too big or intimidating.

OB:

The city-scape in Cats' Night Out has so much character. Did you base your illustrations on any city in particular, and how did you decide which scenes to focus on?

JK:

Someone mentioned later that it doesn't look so much like a real city as much as sets from a musical or something. I hadn't thought of that at the time, but I'll go with it now. Planning a background so that the characters have little homes in it is pretty much what doing backgrounds for animation is, and that's what set design is, too, most of the time, so I guess it makes sense. My idea of those musicals is probably somewhere in New York, but I don't know the city well enough to say where. Somewhere in the city where the buildings don't get too tall, I guess. I didn't want the cats to look like they were going to fall to their death if they slipped.

OB:

You are involved with Dreamworks Animation and contributed to the animation for Coraline. How does illustrating for a book differ from working on an animation project?

JK:

I should point out that I didn't actually do any animating at either place — I was a concept illustrator and sort of a set designer. I went to school for animation, but animating turned out to not be what I was best at, even though I do enjoy doing it when it's just me. Working in animation is something I still really enjoy. It's really collaborative, and the end product is always something you didn't quite expect. That's the main difference in doing books — you are much more responsible for the end product. It can sometimes be a little paralyzing thinking that what you're doing is going down on paper just as it is, but it helps to remember books that I liked when I was little and how loose some of them were in the artwork.

OB:

What were some of your favourite picture books as a child?

JK:

My very favorite was Sam and the Firefly by P.D. Eastman. I also really liked Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books — they are still pretty amazing to read. I never had any of Leo Lionni's books when I was little, but I really admire his design work on them now. Swimmy is especially great.

OB:

On your website Burst of Beaden, you describe a technique you've developed using photographs of ink cut-outs. Have you done any illustration or animation using this technique, and do you think it would work for a children's book like Cats' Night Out?

JK:

Since I've been doing more print work, I've been trying to find different techniques that look good on paper. Digital artwork can sometimes look a little harsh, but there are processes in it that I've gotten used to. One of them is being able to layer things on top of one another. Photographing cut-outs over a light source from behind sort of replicates that effect and softens is up, too. I haven't done any animation with it yet, but it's very suited to it. A lot of animators move shapes around on a light table and photograph the frames in sequence and it looks great.

OB:

Do you have any other illustrating for children's books in the works?

JK:

I do! I have a book I wrote myself called I Want My Hat Back and one that I'm illustrating called Extra Yarn that was written by Mac Barnett. They will be out next fall and next winter, respectively.