Let's Talk Illustrators #309: Peter Cheong

I got a chance to talk to Peter Cheong about his newest children's book Where We Can Hear the Giants Sing, and I'm so excited to share that chat with you here today! Enjoy a dive into the depths of the ocean to follow Peter and his protagonist on their respective journeys!

About the book:

A little girl, tired of a mundane life in her seaside home, finds adventure and friendship with a mermaid who shows her the beauty of the ocean depths. But it's only after exploring the harmonious beauty of the sea, we are reminded that coming home can be the greatest adventure of all.

Peek underneath the dust jacket:

And check out the endpapers:

Let's talk Peter Cheong!

LTPB: Where did the idea for Where We Can Hear the Giants Sing come from? As you got to know our main characters, how did your illustrations evolve?

PC: Being an accomplished procrastinator, I worked on this idea while I was meant to be doing something else. I was lying in bed trying to sleep, having just finished sending off the final art for my debut PB (Every Night at Midnight). My brain was generating story ideas for a new book and I came up with the line ‘take me down into the deep’. This line evoked such strong feelings of adventure within me that I had to use it and build and build upon it. The ‘deep’ became the ocean, and the ‘taker’ became a mermaid friend. The most wonderful thing I could think of doing in the ocean was swimming with the whales, the giants of the deep, so that became the high point of the story (and the title too).

My main character is a nameless girl. Unlike my main character in my previous book, Felix, a shy boy, she knows what she wants and will do what she wants. She is driven. She is not afraid. She is who I wanted to be when I was little. She lives in my dream house with her mum, up high on a cliff overlooking the ocean, enjoying the beachy life every day. She has a friend in the mermaid, who takes her on the wild adventure, and this is reminiscent of one of my friends when I was younger, who was older and (slightly) wiser, and she pushed me to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have.

I gave the girl long dark hair, I knew this would be fun to draw and I loved the idea of just have a dark flowing shape with no texture in the images (And I knew underwater long hair would be a treat to illustrate too). With the underwater scenes, they are not realistic at all. There are giant sunfish, the whales are much larger than they are in real life, and some of the wildlife are completely made up! I wanted to show our main character really experiencing wonder and awe, and I think this showcases that (while also being very fun to illustrate too).

LTPB: What did you find most difficult in creating this book? What did you find most rewarding?

PC: The most difficult thing for me was ‘finishing’ the final illustrations. I would work at them for weeks and weeks but they never felt ‘finished’ and I was never satisfied with how they looked. It wasn’t until I drew in the white line work of fish, over the top of everything else, swimming throughout the illustrations, that they finally felt right. They were the final missing thing I needed to tie in the illustrations.

The most rewarding thing for me was being looser with my art. I’ve been really trying to loosen up in my work and I think in this book I’ve been successful. A lot of the brushstrokes and shapes in the illustration are quite abstract; I really enjoy how this looks and hope to loosen up even more in the future.

LTPB: What did you use to create the illustrations in this book? Is this your preferred medium? How does your process change from book to book?

PC: I used Adobe Photoshop to draw and color almost everything in the book. And I used scanned traditional paints and markers on canvas or paper (either made myself or found copyright free online), to create textures. I overlay these textures in the illustrations to give that nice painterly feel. These textures also provide accidental color variations throughout the illustration, which I quite like.

This collage of digital with traditional texturing is my preferred medium, though I’m still learning and experimenting as I go. In the future I’d love to do a whole book completely traditional, just to see what it would look like, but I have no desire to tackle that any time soon!

LTPB: What are you working on now? Anything you can show us?

PC: This is an illustration from a PB I have on submission at the moment; It’s my contemporary take reminiscent on those old dark fairytales. I really hope someone likes it enough to bring it to life with me. And next week I’m about to start on storyboarding a non-fiction book (illustrator only) about Whale Fall. The manuscript is lovely and it’ll be my first non-fiction book. It will be challenging because it’s not character driven, which is where I think my skillset lies, and what I’m used to.

LTPB: If you got the chance to write your own picture book autobiography, who (dead or alive!) would you want to illustrate it, and why?

PC: Oooo, if I wrote it right now I’d pick Matthew Forsythe (Pokko and the Drum, Mina). His work is INCREDIBLE. He could do it however he wished, I’d happy be a frog for Matthew. People would read my bio just to look at the pictures.

A GIANT thank you to Peter for talking to me about this book! Where We Can Hear the Giants Sing published last month from Henry Holt & Company!

Special thanks to Peter and Henry Holt for use of these images!

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