BY WAY OF ILLUSTRATION
Stuff cartoonist and illustrator Shaun Yeo is adapting, yet again, to a constantly changing industry, writes Michael Fallow.
Atuatara is more pleasant to the touch than its spiky, edgy appearance might suggest. But when Shaun Yeo was asked to hold Invercargill’s famously aged reptilian Henry for a photo shoot, he flatly declined.
‘‘I think they thought I was afraid. I was. Afraid I’d strangle the little ...’’
His next word is one you won’t find in either of the two jaunty children’s books featuring the adventures of Henry, illustrated by Yeo.
Henry has been as much a torment as an inspiration for him, reliably showing up as a subject under tight deadline pressures at exquisitely awkward times.
First book, as he laboured over images for Lynley Dear’s text in The Terribly Tired Try-Anything Tuatara,
Yeo was himself battling the exhaustions of new parenthood.
Second Henry book, second child, it all coincided again. By then he could just about draw that critter in his sleep. In fact, he may have.
And, throughout Yeo’s career as a
Stuff cartoonist, Henry has proven relentlessly newsworthy.
But, in his more generous moments, Yeo must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Henry.
‘‘Do you know how hard it is to get a tuatara off clip art?’’ The Southland
Times art department head Steve Fotheringham sighed during Yeo’s 2001 job interview. ‘‘It’s impossible.’’
Clip art was an industry resource. Of sorts. A massive, scrapbooked collection of images that would be physically cut and pasted – we’re talking actual paper images and gum paste here – by art department personnel. The generic drawings were neither distinctive nor distinguished.
Inexplicably, you could turn page after page of clip art only to discover that no-one had ever been tasked with drawing a tuatara.
Which helps explain why the Times job ad that had drawn Yeo’s attention had talked not only of computer-savvy graphic design qualifications that he didn’t have, but the one skill he knew he did. Illustrator. Seriously, a tuatara? ‘‘I can do this,’’ he said.
The certainty with which he’d been able to say so stemmed from an epiphany when he was 11.
His eye fell on a book capable of transforming a young man’s life. A book of near-spiritual inspiration: Footrot
Flats 6. Funny as, and it looked so great. As he turned the pages he felt the call.
Within a week the Times’ Newspapers in Education department ran a cartooning competition and he won his section. Even loftier benediction followed when Murray Ball wrote him back and, thrillingly, said he thought the samples Yeo had sent him were pretty good.
He would need to have lots of ideas, but should go for it, Ball concluded.
By seventh form at Southland Boys’ High School, Yeo and his mate Angus Low had come up with a cartoon strip superhero called Phatman. They shyly showed NIE secretary Carol Boniface an example at a careers evening and she arranged an interview with her boss, Gordon Bain. They showed up soaking wet, having biked in from school. Bain looked down at their work, looked up at the bedraggled pair, and asked: how much do you want for these?
‘‘We just about fell off our chairs.’’ Phatman became a feature of the youth-oriented pages of The Southland
Times .
Then came the day in 2001 when, the owner of a brand new computer, he stopped to ask a salesman: how far away are we from being able to put lined artwork into a computer and colouring it? ‘‘Mate, it’s right there,’’ said the salesman, taking him to a flatbed scanner that was to become his first hire purchase and take years to pay off. He was finding his way around the digital world when the Times’ need for a tuataracapable artist kicked in, and the ad for the illustrator appeared.
His pen, and flatbed, were to increasingly replace clip art. Which was a good thing, right? ‘‘To be honest, it became a bit of a hindrance.’’
The ad jobs kept landing in his in-basket, and they had to be done. People had paid good money and they wanted a professional job. Clip art was a temptingly quick fallback, compared with the added time it was taking to draw things himself.
‘‘I came to realise I was avoiding cartoon work because it was making the job harder.’’
Happily, one busy day he heard a sub-editor, Cate Hogan, in Fotheringham’s office, seeking a favour: a photoshopped image of Josh Kronfeld in surfer-dude mode. The ad team had too much work on, sorry – but Yeo followed her, caught her on the stairwell, and convinced her he’d have a cartoon to show her the next morning. Labouring into the night, he did. It ran on the feature page, really big.
‘‘All that Saturday, I sat in the sunroom, staring at that page. I was so proud of it.’’
The editorial work came more frequently and by 2010 he was a dedicated journalistic cartoonist. In hindsight his work was sometimes . . . what’s the word Shaun?
‘‘Dodgy. Some of it’s distasteful now. Shows how quickly we’ve moved, on certain things.’’
He came to realise how far he’d gone down the rabbit hole when, for a 2011 Rugby World Cup story about incoming Brits, he’d drawn among the horde, a topless woman waving her shirt.
‘‘I’d been reading a lot of old British cartoons. Some of the tabloids’ political cartoonists, they loved their boobies. I was in that headspace.’’
‘‘Lose the nipples,’’ his editor, Fred Tulett, told him when he deposited his work in front of him.
Yeo returned having painted on a bra but, defiantly, hints of areola remained. ‘‘Lose the nipples!’’ Tulett repeated, in more stentorian tones.
Yeo was enraged.
He went storming to his place of sanctuary at such times, the sports department.
‘‘He’s lost the plot,’’ he complained bitterly to sports scribe Logan Savory. ‘‘I know who’s lost the plot,’’ Savory told him, having studied the contentious masterpiece. ‘‘It’s not Fred.’’
In the cold, hard light of the next morning, Yeo regarded the published third draft he’d made under such protest and burned up at how wrong he’d been. Mortified, he turned to wife Gina. ‘‘What was I on yesterday?’’ Other times, strong emotions are justified. Not all his work has been cartoonish. Anzac illustrations cut deep for him. Then came the time he was photoshopping an image of a fishing boat, placing it in more violent seas. A real boat, the Easy Rider, in a different but tragically real context, to illustrate a story on the inquest into the sinking that claimed eight lives in Foveaux Strait.
He was using Photoshop techniques, but not to deceive. Far from it. The task was to recreate an image of what had happened, but not to mislead. The photo taken, as they say, in happier times, had to be accurately placed in its new darker context, without being deceptive. ‘‘You have to make people realise this is now an image. They have to see, straight away, that it’s an artwork, you’re not [presenting] it as a photo.
‘‘It’s really sensitive work because you’re dealing with a tragedy still really raw for so many Southlanders.’’
Halfway through the task, he was telling himself this would never run. Did though, and suitably sorrowful it looked.
By 2011, he’d joined Fairfax Editorial Services, still working out of the Invercargill office but supplying illustrations, cartoons and caricatures to the entire stable of newspapers and magazines.
More technological changes came along – not the least of which was the end of what illustrators called their morgue. Before the internet, every cartoonist had a morgue – photos they might one day need to replicate.
‘‘We all draw from our head but it’s a lot easier when drawing from reference. You can do an aeroplane, a car, from memory but what happens a lot is that all our cars and planes look the same after a while.’’
The need evaporated, pretty much overnight, with the revelation of Google Images.
By this stage, Yeo was mightily adept at colouring with his computer and mouse. It allowed for increased speed and subtlety in his work. His Apple pen would sketch, colour in layers, brush, add – and remove – layers effortlessly, all resulting in far, far more detailed images, in his caricatures especially. His political subject certainly noticed. ‘‘Wow,’’ Jacinda Ardern messaged him, ‘‘you really went to town on the detail.’’ Wellington Mayor Justin Lester observed, perhaps more by way of critique than complaint, that he didn’t look as good as Yeo’s depiction.
But here’s the thing. These technical capabilities were taking Yeo, and many around him, back towards realism; work edging as near as dammit to a photo.
So, quite deliberately, he’ll add roughness back into the impression, inserting imperfections. It makes the result more vibrant.
Working at pace, under pressure, really has its upsides: ‘‘It’s not how good you are after two or three weeks’ work on something. It’s after three hours. Or 30 minutes. But I love the energy that lends your work.’’
And, sometimes, he just takes his pen, opens his imagination, and does it all without a net. Old-school cartoonistry still sings to him and he can happily waft back to classic cartoon landscape when it feels right.
One Friday, Yeo was just about done but still had his Sunday News cartoon to come up with. In haste, he seized upon the just-broken story that veteran English comedian Ronnie Corbett, one of the Two Ronnies, had just died. He tossed off an oh-so-basic cartoon of him showing up at the Pearly Gates, where his partner and predecessor, Ronnie Barker, was waiting for him. Both had their arms outstretched and were welcoming each other with the same cry: ‘‘Ronnie’’.
‘‘I slapped some colour on it, really fast, and it was done. Boom. I kind of liked it. Put it through, signed off, and went to the pub.’’
About 10.30pm, still there, he decided to post it on his Facebook page, too. It wasn’t until the end of the weekend that he thought to check the interest level. The number of hits – 4 million.
It was timing, he says. The Brits had woken up to the news and his cartoon had been picked up by a radio station. Overnight his Facebook followers had increased from 250 to 1700.
This year, for the third time, he’s a finalist in the prestigious media awards previously sponsored by Qantas, then Canon, now Voyager, first as illustrator of the year, next as cartoonist, and this year he’s a finalist in both categories.
His is in many ways a perilous way to make a living and, ironically, the latest awards announcement comes just as he’s facing redundancy from his fulltime job. Not that he’ll be laying down his pen. ‘‘I have to keep drawing. It’s not a job or a hobby, it’s part of who I am.’’
So it’s a freelance future for him within his ever-changing industry.But first he had one more big job. He reacted with good grace when The Southland
Times asked him for what would be his last big, front-page illustration. Something to illustrate a story about the future of the city’s tuatarium.