THINKING OUTS IDE THE HUTCH
Illustrating John Marsden’s The Rabbits was a turning point in Shaun’s career…
“To be honest,” says Shaun, “I don’t know how the book came about. John had read something about the experience of indigenous Americans and this inspired him to write a short poem. He’d given it to a publisher and they probably thought this could be a really good picture book, we’ve got this young wet behind the ears illustrator here who might be interested, he likes science fiction and fantasy…
“He didn’t collaborate closely with me on The Rabbits, but we still had a really good discussion right at the beginning. But I didn’t actually meet him until long after the book was published.
“I didn’t know what to do with the text for a long time. It kind of felt so alien to me, and also I felt a little bit rudderless. Previously, I’d worked closely with a senior author, which is somebody John Marsden was, and they’d helped me a lot by explaining what I needed to consider. And the fact that he was pretty much sort of saying you’re free to do whatever you want, I felt a little bit lost. So the dilemma of that forced me to really think hard about illustration and what it is and what I can do.
“I became very resourceful and I think that probably accounts for the originality of The Rabbits, as well as the fact that I was pretty naive. I didn’t know that much about picture books so I wasn’t constrained by any expectation of tradition or things like that. I just thought about what would I like to see, and that’s how I went about developing the images.”