Shaun Tan,
The Bird King and Other Sketches
Templar Publishing (UK), 2011; first published by Windy Hollow Books (Australia), 2010.
Ages 9 +
Shaun Tan’s beautifully produced sketchbook, The Bird King, generously lays bare the creative process of illustration. While not specifically designed for children, Tan’s familiar images are of instant, near-universal appeal, and his explanatory text will be a revelation to young fans, especially aspiring artists.
Tan’s introduction references Klee’s famous description of drawing as “taking a line for a walk.” The colored and black-and-white drawings are divided into sections. Images in which “one little drawing is enough” to suggest a whole story comprise the untold stories section. In book, theatre and film, Tan describes his preliminary sketches as “a constant reminder of what I was ‘getting at’ in the first place” during longer creative processes. In drawings from life, we see “ongoing studies in the relationship of line, form, colour and light” that are crucial to an artist’s lifelong process of learning to see. A final section, notebooks, is culled from small ball point pen sketches, doodles and scribbles, some “an equivalent to daydreaming” that Tan poetically compares to fishing: “casting loose lines into a random sea… catching ideas that might otherwise be hidden beneath the waves.”
The drawings themselves also include little notes, ideas for development, and titles that further decipher the artist’s visual language. One double-page drawing entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” features a dozen of Tan’s creatures marching behind a small boy, bird on his head, palette in hand. The only color on the page is a splash of orange dropping from his brush, repeated on the body of a goldfish, held aloft in a bowl, by a large creature with a diving bell head in which a bird in a beret stands at the wheel. In Tan’s quixotic imagination, the robotic and the humanizing hover in edgy balance.
The production quality of this small hardcover book is excellent. Partially bound in red cloth, with embossed lettering on the front cover, it’s held closed with a red elastic band; a blue ribbon bookmark is sewn into the binding. The back matter includes a list of the drawings in the book (noting materials used and the original purpose of each sketch) and a bibliography of Tan’s published works.
Young artists will learn more from studying the lines Tan takes for a walk than from any number of art classes. Children who already know and love books by the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner will recognize preliminary sketches of work from favorite books. For newcomers, The Bird King is a great introduction to this evocative Australian writer-illustrator.
Charlotte Richardson
February 2012