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The Good Ship Illustration
“Do I Have to Pick One Style Forever?! (Part 1)” with Chris Haughton
00:33:57
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- [00:24]
Tanya
Okay.
- [00:25]
Katie
This week on the podcast is an interview with the one and only Chris Horton. I'm Katie, by the way. I was not there. It was Helen and Tanya interviewing him. Were you interviewing him?
- [00:37]
Tanya
Yeah, we were interviewing and it was really good.
- [00:39]
Katie
It was really.
- [00:40]
Helen
It was brilliant. Katie, you missed a treat.
- [00:42]
Katie
I wasn't there, but apparently it was brilliant. So buckle up because here it is. Okay, thank you. Have fun.
- [00:49]
Tanya
So, Chris, welcome to Good Ship as an honorary guest from the very first sailing. So you were probably the first or second person guest that we invited to talk to, so.
- [01:00]
Chris Horton
Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. I've heard so many amazing things about you guys. I mean, just from doing sort of workshops and stuff and people have said, you know, they've been involved in Good Ship and how great you are. So.
- [01:12]
Tanya
Yeah, we love that. Would you like to do your presentation first?
- [01:16]
Chris Horton
Yeah, sure. Let me just know you. I have seven picture books and I started making the picture books in. The first one came out in 2010 in English and. But yeah, the History of Information has been a sort of a side project that I've been working or thinking about since 2006, actually, long before my first picture book. So I studied graphic design in, In. In Dublin and I really enjoyed it. Actually. I kind of knew I didn't really want to be. Be a graphic designer because I just like, draw. I just wanted to draw all the time. But it was really interesting doing that course and, and learning how to use a computer was. Was really interesting and sort of the history of graphic design was really interesting to me, you know, sort of mass media and. And all that. So I love drawing and I was doing all of these sort of just little doodles and caricatures and, and this and. But I was terrible at color, which many people are surprised at because my. My work is so colorful now, but I would just basically do drawings and then I used the computer to just change the color. So rather than black and white, it was like purple and white or something like that. And all of my, you know, I would just sort of do duotone or make the color. It was basically a black and white drawing with a little bit of color added, and I would add some graphics and, and stuff to it. But this is the sort of stuff I was doing in and around college and, and leaving college. And then soon after I. I finished college, I was working with this company, People Tree, and we were doing lots of screen printing. And that really suited me really well because, you know, I. I could work in kind of black and white and just choose two colors and then make these prints. And so, yeah, I was doing these screen prints in. In like sort of two color prints, but when I sort of saw them all together, it was colorful. And what I realized that the colors didn't need to be realistic. So, you know, we have these blue trees. They read as trees perfectly. And so really I could kind of think about color as a graphic designer rather than as a illustrator and look at, you know, what the real actual colors were and just do it in. In any color. So I started doing these illustrations that were more graphics than. Than illustration, really, like, you know, that just choosing texts and different colors like that. And so the. And I was getting a lot of work to do this sort of quite abstract work in. In magazines and newspapers. And then I wanted to get into. To picture books. So I wanted to do. Take this sort of more colorful style and. And make picture books like that. So this was the sort of. I had this idea of doing a very colorful. The first book was this one is a Bit Lost. So I wanted this sort of very colorful forest and this, like, little lost owl in it. So basically just doing very colorful, unrealistic pictures and having the color there as a sort of. As a graphic designer would, basically. And then the benefit of sort of doing unrealistic colors is then you can use color to tell the story. So here's a image from another book which is kind of like the opposite of A Bit Lost, because the whole book is almost in silhouette. And the sort of. The object that they're looking at is this colorful bird. Our eye is sort of drawn towards this. This little bird on each page. And then it provides a punchline for the. For the story. And then A Bit Lost is almost like the sort of inverse of that because we have this colorful background, colorful forest, and the main character is. Is in black and white, effectively. So our eye again, is drawn to the main character, the main action of the story. Yeah, I'll just show you a little bit about how I came up with my first story because, yeah, I had been working as a freelancer, sort of doing illustrations for magazines and newspapers for. For years from. I graduated in 2001 and I was sort of working. And my first book came out in 2010. So those sort of 10 years. Nine. 10 years I was working in magazines and newspapers. And I always was thinking in the back of my mind, like, I'd love to do a picture book, but I didn't. I felt very uncomfortable about my writing. And so basically I just wanted. I wanted some idea where the Sort of pictures told the story which I think that's what all illustrators kind of want to do. So for people, tree. Again I was doing these cards so this was a sort of pop up greetings card and I really loved this image. And it's just three birds in the foreground and then there was things hidden in the background. And so I had this idea that I would have this. Ow. Well, first of all it was going to be these birds. Then I changed to an owl and there'd be something hidden in the background. And then I, I was trying all sorts of bits and pieces with, with a bit last I, I was going to do a Laparello actually that the, for the first few pages where it opens out and out and out, we sort of can that because it was going to be too costly. But I just love the idea of this owl falling out and you, you watch the owl tumbling down through the forest and it's all very visual and you see the things that they pass and then we were introduced to them later on. So it was telling the story visually. You know, there's no text at all. The funny thing is the kind of the idea that set me off to, to make this book almost nobody, nobody notices because the, the mummy owl is actually in this page here on the top left corner here. And I made her two too hidden really. So it's only very occasionally that people say, oh right, you know, I saw the, the mummy out anyway. And then this is effectively how I kind of make a lot of the artwork and, and my characters. This is a sort of collage sheet that I do for children. But yeah, it's all the different sort of bird parts and then I get the kids to, to make different birds. But that's sort of effectively how I come up with the sort of characters too. And then just some process work, cut paper everywhere. So this idea of hiding characters in the background I think is a, is a trick I've been leaning on heavily for all of my picture books. But yeah, it's, it's like the pantomime thing, it's, it's kind of, it's often a winner. But. So yeah, I'll just briefly talk about the history of information. My latest book. So I, when I was in college I studied graphics and I was very interested in the sort of theory, media theory behind that. And then in 2006, Berkeley, UC Berkeley in the States put all of their college courses, their lectures online for free so anyone could, could listen to them. They were the first college in the world to do that. And I stumbled upon this one course called the History of Information. And it was just because it had such a curious title that I clicked on it and I was just immediately hooked. And it sort of intersects a lot with the sort of history of graphics and history of the media. But it was these guys in UC Berkeley who had sort of been part of Silicon Valley, they actually both worked in Xerox PARC developing the mouse and they. The series of lectures was for the information technology course that UC Berkeley held. And it's. It was the History of information technology. So they had this very wide view of information technology that drawing is an information technology, writing is an information technology, print is an information technology. And it just all fitted so well and was so visual that I just got completely obsessed with it. And I noted down some notes, I listened a couple of times to the, to the lectures. There was about 20 hours of them. And I emailed Jeff and Paul the lectures in 2009, around the time I made this. So basically the book goes from language to drawing, writing, printing, science, news and newspapers, sort of telephone, telegraph, radio and TV and computers, the Internet, all the way to AI. Yeah, that's pretty much it really. Like there's just so many interesting things in the book that I just got really excited about because I'm an illustrator like. So it starts off really with the first man made marks. So here on the left here is like these hand and footprints from 200,000 years ago. And this is the first known deliberate mark making. And it was by children like they believe, a 7 year old and a 12 year old in a cave in Tibet. All of the sort of information technology really derives from this innovation of first mark making, then drawings. So on the left here, this pig that was in Indonesia 45000 years ago. So this is the first known representational drawing that we know of. And then how drawing evolved into. Into writing. Interestingly, we were drawing animals for tens of thousands of years before we were really interested in drawing people, which I think it's quite interesting. But yeah, they basically just go all the way through a whole load of stuff, all the way up to computers and the Internet and this sort of thing.
- [13:18]
Tanya
That was really amazing, Chris. It makes so much sense to think that you came from a graphic design course as a communicator of information and then went to illustration, as many illustrators do, from graphic design and then into editorial, which is quite an unusual jump to stay in editorial and advertising and so forth for so long and then seek into children's picture Books. Most people go straight to children's picture books. But then ending up in History of Information is like full circle again because you're almost going back to editorial, except you're the writer this time in the same way you were the writer of your own children's books as well. So you covered all the areas in the end.
- [13:58]
Chris Horton
Yeah, no, well, and actually a lot of the assignments that I was doing during that time, from sort of 2001 to 2009, 10 and beyond, was because they would only ask an illustrator if they couldn't find a photograph that does. Does the job. So the Internet was impossible to photograph. So they would always get me. They're like, oh, we've got another article about basically making money off the Internet and do you want to do this? Chris and I kind of then had this language almost of, you know, a little man going along with this and messing around with these sort of coloredy blobs. And so it was this sort of the language of what people are doing on the Internet, making it slightly surreal. But I always thought in my head and I was sort of picturing those images as I was listening to the course, thinking, oh, wow, this is. I could illustrate the whole of this lecture, but with these sort of funny men with men and women with, you know, these coloredy blobs and sort of climbing up and down ladders, you know, just like I was doing in with those illustrations.
- [15:16]
Tanya
Yeah, I bet with the new live illustrator students who might be on here who've just finished Katie's three week course or three module course in live illustration are probably thinking, wow, that's actually what we're doing too, you know, listening to a lecture or whatever while you're working. And the editorial illustrators drive to think, oh, I just have to draw what he's saying because I've got pictures flowing through my brain and I've got to put them down. It relates so well to live illustration and live scribing as well as the editorial thing.
- [15:45]
Chris Horton
Oh, wow, you've been doing a live scribing thing, is that right?
- [15:49]
Tanya
Yeah, Katie's. Because Katie does a lot of live. She's not able to be with us on the course tonight, but she. Yeah, well, that is her area of specialism and she's done it for quite a few years now. And everyone kept saying, please do a course, please do a course. She finally put her brains into a big box and then tipped it on the floor and organized it and did her first course, which only finished a week ago and to great acclaim. And I think there's a lot of people really interested into moving into that area. And it has a lot of commonalities with editorial that you skim through a science article or a political article or a finance tech article and you're, you know, you're responding quickly, the deadlines are short and you're illustrating concepts and ideas.
- [16:30]
Chris Horton
Yeah, I did that once actually.
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Tanya
Did you do live illustration once?
- [16:36]
Chris Horton
It was in Ernst and Young and they were doing this restructuring thing and honestly I didn't know like literally half the things they, they said. I didn't understand what they were, what they were talking about. I was there with a, like on this giant whiteboard drawing live, you know, you know this. And I didn't know what a KPI or something like that. I didn't know what that. I mean it was just basic stuff and I, I hadn't a clue, but it was so funny. But yeah, anyway, I bet they thought.
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Tanya
You were great and didn't realize you didn't understand any of the.
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Chris Horton
Yeah, no, they hadn't a clue because I, I, I was, I was pretty good at covering up. I just do a circle with KPI and as if I didn't, you know. And then what I, you know, and you just do a, you get used to doing that sort of stuff with editorials that do sunsets and do, you know, whatever. Just there's easy ways to get around just saying, oh, this is, you know.
- [17:40]
Tanya
Whatever it was like Katie says, people are just amazed you can draw live while they're saying something. So you can get away with quite a lot. But I just think it's the holistic kind of path of your career is really interesting how it's gone from graphic design, editorial, a huge chunk of children's books and out the other end with one of your long held obsessions which relates really well to the sort of mission in our. Find your creative voice, fly your freak flag is that you let your inner freak out with a history of information and surprised everyone when they thought you were, they had you nailed only as a children's picture book author. Illustrator.
- [18:18]
Chris Horton
Yeah, no, I mean it was just very satisfying following. That's kind of what, what I wanted to do for, for such a long time. And I like, I mean I actually, after my first book I said to Walker that Walker agreed to publish it and, and they were like, and so we were getting that ready for print and they were like, have you any ideas what you'd like to do for the second one? I said actually the history of information and, and they were like, what? And I was like, no, no, it's this. It's really good, you know, and they were like, no, we were thinking like owl too. Like, you know, and. But Deirdre, my art director and editor, it was very good advice. He said, you know, I mean, if this comes out and there's good reception, you need to follow it with something similar. And so you're sort of developing an audience and it's. There's no point in sort of jumping from one thing to the other, you know, even if that's what you want to do, you have to have some sort of consistency. And I think that was very good advice because, I mean, really I just wanted to sort of get on with. And it would have been a sort of a mishmash thing of. And they would have been waiting a very long time for me to get back to the. It would have taken me like years and 10 years maybe, like from.
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Helen
Very timely now as well, doesn't it? It seems very timely that books come out now when information is so crazy and we don't know what to believe in. AI and everything.
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Chris Horton
I know, I mean, unfortunately, it's. But honestly, the whole time, like, it seemed really timely back then. And that, that was like, this is in 2006. Facebook came out in 2005. But to me, I was like, wow, this is, you know, this is all anyone was ever talking about. And then Jeff, one of the lecturers, he wrote a book in 2012 called A Holes the First 60 Years about the word asshole. He's a linguist as well, and he was talking about how the media, you know, there's more and more unlikable characters coming out through the media, you know, in recent years and talking about this as a whole phenomenon. And Donald Trump was on the first page. So this was in 2012. Like, this was four years before he started running or he wasn't really well known at all then. And so I've been sort of been watching this play out and Jeff and Paul were just so bang on the. The zeitgeist. I mean, that they're just so good, like, so that's. And yeah, I mean, unfortunately it's. It's getting worse and worse.
- [21:39]
Tanya
The book is. It's quite a. It breaks all the rules of audience as well, doesn't it? Because in some of the nominations you've got are for junior books. But it's also an adult book too, isn't it? How did the publishers cover deal with it being such an open audience?
- [21:55]
Chris Horton
Yeah, we're actually talking now, about. Because it was classed as a children's book. And so I didn't realize this, but the ISBN determines where the book is placed in the bookshop. So it's a children's book. So it'll go in the children's nonfiction section. And so it'll be very rare for a bookseller to decide to put it in the adult section. They just don't do that. And a few people have said to me, you need to change that. And actually, Mark Haddon from the. You know, he wrote the Tale of the Dog. Yeah. That came out in 2003, and it was published at the same time with two. Two different ISBN numbers.
- [22:47]
Tanya
Oh, okay.
- [22:48]
Chris Horton
And one as an adult book and the other as a children's book. And actually, Harry Potter was done the same as well. So, like, I was like, well, we could try that. But. But yeah, that. That was something that. Because, I mean, most of the best feedback I get is from adults who have read it, but it's only shelved in. In the children's section. And then, you know, adults just don't go browsing for themselves in the children's section. So I was always a bit like, how come it's. You know, and that. Anyway, this is something I discovered since.
- [23:25]
Tanya
It came out, but I think all the. All the mums that buy the picture books and all us illustrators, so we are the. We're the adult audience. And then we'll tell all the other adults and it'll be fine. We've hit the halfway mark. So after asking everyone to send you in questions, we should do some. Shouldn't we?
- [23:45]
Chris Horton
I better answer some questions.
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Tanya
Okay.
- [23:48]
Chris Horton
Yeah, yeah.
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Tanya
Do you want to start, Helen? Have you got a good one?
- [23:50]
Helen
Do you feel you need to keep your illustration style consistent? You have a beautifully recognizable style, but are you able to try something new, use a different medium, perhaps? Or do publishers want what they know?
- [24:04]
Chris Horton
You mightn't believe this, but I sort of try something new with every book and it always ends up the same. I mean, I guess I'm just stuck doing this.
- [24:16]
Helen
I feel exactly the same way, Chris, every time I think I'm going to try this this time, and I think it's radically different, but nobody else really notices.
- [24:25]
Tanya
That's.
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Chris Horton
Yeah.
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Tanya
No, no, I was just gonna say there's a question we often get where people say, if I. I do most of my work in watercolor, but I really want to try something like collage, but it'll be so different and no one will know it's, you know, it's going to freak everyone out because it looks so different. And so this is the other end of that question, isn't it? You keep trying to be different, trying different things, but you always end up yourself. Proof that whether you change the medium or not, if your voice is really strong, you can't escape yourself.
- [24:54]
Chris Horton
Yeah, no, like with the, with the monkeys one, I was doing the tigers with, you know, drawing the, the line work for the tigers with pencil. And I thought, oh, that, that's cool, that that's adding this other element into the, into the sort of cut paper stuff. And with the crab one, I was doing loads of splashes with basically just getting ink out and doing all the waves. But like, that was the sort of idea with that one. You turn the page and there's a big splash. But yeah, the way the waves ended up was. I mean, it looks the sort of very graphic style that I do anyway. But yeah, I mean, like, I've. Because I. I think one of the reasons I, I have such a defined style is, I mean, I was doing these editorial illustrations for so long, like 10 years, and I just got in the habit, this habit of sort of, you know, I do everything by hand first, but then scan it in and then having the sort of. The ability to change things on the computer was just invaluable. And I was asked to change so much, so it just, it had to be sort of done on the computer. And so I just found this way of working that I've just never been able to break out of, really. But yeah, I'm completely satisfied with. There was another question about, you know, are you. Do you feel satisfied doing the things. I absolutely love doing what I'm doing. And I couldn't find. If I could find a more effective, more efficient way of working that would be even more direct. I would do that. But as it is, this is the best way I. I can communicate visually. Basically. That's. I found something that worked, that's worked and I've just repeated it again and again. And to me the style is just the way I'm communicating the idea. It's the most effective way I can communicate that idea. Basically.
- [27:09]
Tanya
I think you've got a kind of. Not only an economy in the voice and the way that you say you're communicating an idea, like as an ex graphic designer would, you've got the visual language to try and get the idea over quickly, as you did in complex editorial stuff before, but also the way you work, that really nice combination of lots of analog messing about, ripping up paper and splashing ink about and using the benefits of the computer to scan it in and make those quick changes I think is genius because it keeps the work quite fast. You don't get too labored and you use everything that's good about tech to give you options and turn it over quickly. You know, I was listening to Tom froze, talking about rewilding his artwork. Like basically going back to try to do more hand drawing and stop being at the mercy of technology and make it a bit more real. But it's a shock when you go back to a technology less way of working. Everything is laborious and slow and difficult and the time you yourself to work on projects, the fees you charge based on your time, all change because without. It's like being a Luddite, isn't it? To, to do without that scanning and the Photoshop changing just blows everything out the water. As a commercial artist.
- [28:18]
Chris Horton
Oh no. I had, I had this one job in Dublin for a year. It was for this fashion magazine called D side in Dublin. And it was while I was in college, it was around like 99 to 2000. And I had to do. It was a series called Ireland, My Ireland. And it was a sort of like B list celebrity who was talking, did an article about, you know, what they liked or disliked about Ireland. And I had to do a caricature of them, you know, without any. So I would get it to a point that I was sort of happy with it and that it looked vaguely like them. And then I'd. I'd have to, I'd have to leave it because I was just terrified of messing it up because I, you know, I'd add a bit and then I'm like, ah, you know, I'm Back to square one. That that year of, you know, 12 illustrations or whatever it was scarred me. I was just like. And I was never happy with any of the illustrations that really went to print because I knew I could do a bit better. But as soon as I started using the computer, I was, I was actually really happy with the work that I could supply because I had full sort of editorial control because I could just apple undo or you know. Yeah. So, you know, you can edit it endlessly and it almost becomes a bit of a problem because, you know, you're like, where do you even stop? Because it's just so flexible. But yeah, I just, I sort of took to that. Like it took to water because I was just so traumatized from, from my, my, you know, D side experience.
- [30:13]
Tanya
Just put the pure drawing. I Remember when we both worked for a Hong Kong advertising company and they were asking for lots of different drawings of things And I think I saw your drawing. You were like. I said, so how did you get it turned over so quickly? And you said, I'm just drawing in black and white and then I'm putting it through the computer and putting it through duotone or dropping a color in the back and just using the original drawing. I began with no messing around, no refining it, just let the computer turn it into something else and let Photoshop generate it. And I was like, that's just genius. That's such a quick way to work as well, that you're not laboring over highly finished, hand painted, hand rendered artwork. Only for an agency to say, now marketing don't like it, you need to take the background off and change all that. But you look nippy the way you work worked.
- [31:01]
Chris Horton
You were doing a lot of sort of computer stuff though at that time as well, Tanya, were you not?
- [31:07]
Tanya
I mean, yeah, I started to, but it was more laboured than I think. I like the fact that you began with your drawing and the drawing stayed in the picture. It didn't get refined into something else. The crazy fast speedy drawings were the raw material for Photoshop and that's how you, how you developed the work with the additions of color and maybe texture. But you still kept your integral speedy first sketch.
- [31:30]
Chris Horton
Oh yeah. Well, I tell you that the master of that. There's another friend of mine, Eamon.
- [31:36]
Tanya
Oh yes.
- [31:37]
Chris Horton
Who went. We went over to Hong Kong together. We're sort of best mates and from college and I would always sort of, I mean, relatively labor over actually for one of those illustrations, it was a calendar of food for I think a whole load of different restaurants. And one of Eamonn's illustrations was. He just got, you know, the two holes in A4 paper. You got one of them and he punched loads of holes in, in a, you know, a sheet of paper and he got all this, the circles. Circles. Put it down and he had two, two strips of paper, like small rectangles and it looked like a, a place of peas and two chopsticks. And that was it. And they loved it. And then he ended up doing a painting for them for some of the. One of the restaurants or something like that. And I was like, oh, for God's sake. I mean, you know, and I, you know, I was spending hours doing this thing and he was just like punching a thing and I think I'm gonna go with that. You know, it's like, oh, God, so brilliant.
- [32:47]
Helen
And we talk about this a lot in the freak Flag course, because there's something. There's something about the word final artwork that makes it sound like you have to produce something that takes you ages and ages, particularly if you're being paid for it. It can. You might have a lovely, loose sketchbook full of drawings that you love that were really spontaneous and easy and full of fun and full of life. And then money and the word final artwork come into action, and all of a sudden, you feel like you've got to spend hours and hours, and it's got to be painful.
- [33:17]
Chris Horton
Exactly. Yeah. And if Eamon is sitting next to you, then you realize, no, no, wait a minute. I can get away with something like this.
- [33:27]
Helen
We all need an Eamon.
- [33:28]
Chris Horton
Brilliant. It.