Chris Haughton Interview

There is an interview on Chris Haughton's blog. I have distilled it down to the questions and answers that I think help my practice and how I think about my work.

When you were creating your new works every time, Where did you getthe greatest inspirations from? For instance, from family life,daydreams, love story or walking in a forest etc.
for visual inspiration what makes me excited is looking at unusual ways of representation and image making. things like old maps and folk art and embroideries, anything that ignores perspective and other rules in favour of narrative or simplicity is interesting to me.
for writing i am often inspired by funny sentences or words or mis-translations. that sort of thing. i used to write down odd things i found funny for no reason here and there in my sketchbooks, just odd sentences if i found them amusing. i had no real way of using them until i started writing picture books. now since i have discovered that i can make use of these in my books  i have begun doing it more, and with more purpose.

Is there a certain working pattern/routine to follow when you are making your illustrations? (it could be both spiritually or physically)Which part in your working process would be the most exciting one?
If i am given a brief i would think about it and maybe sleep on it and wait for something to inspire me. sometimes i would come up with something in the first 20 mins or so or sometimes it would take a day or so.. sometimes i start out with one idea and it evolves into another. it all depends really. you need to be flexible in order to try and harness any better ideas you might stumble upon while executing it.
come up with the ideas are usually the most exciting but i also like finishing off and tweaking an illustration if its one i really like. its nice to really polish something if you are proud of it.

Do you have a believe/spirit in art /design /illustration field?  Where does it guide you to go? 
i think design has a potential for great things. it can make our world and communication clearer and more beautiful. it can help communicate things that are unable to be communicated by language. sadly, perhaps because of its power in communication, it really has been totally hi-jacked by advertising and corporate communication. the word ‘design’ has kind of become synonymous with branding. i would love to counter that.

What is the biggest difficulty in your work? How did you / will you pass over it?

i had a big problem with using colour. I actually was particularly bad at using colour when i started off… the images i produced were almost entirely black and white or ‘duotone‘. although i loved colour i couldnt incorporate it into my own illustrations somehow.. Every time i tried to colour my images they tended to look cheap and cartoony, i was doing this using the magic wand tool in photoshop and it just looked like a drawing that had been coloured in on the computer and looked pretty cheap. It was only when i started making artwork for people tree which is all screen-printed that i began experimenting with with unrealistic colours. i just layed a few sreenprints on top of each other and realised i could build up whole scenes and landscapes using this process that there was a breakthrough. in fact it was a really huge breakthrough for me… one minute i was using almost entirely duotone images and the next i was doing entirely full colour. to explain this image was made in this way. each element was made in ‘duotone’ but using different base colours. when they are placed together on one page they together make a colourful image then i later evolved that kind of image making into this..

When he talks about colour I can relate entirely and he points out the importance of experimenting with processes as that is where he found a breakthrough. I try to create block shape illustrations and in illustrator the colours often look cartoony and cheap as he says. I often digitally add textures to my work that seems to help give them life and form. I think a lot of colours look terrible on screen and need to be printed to a high quality to really see their value. Unfortunately this can become a time consuming and costly process. I might make a sheet of test colours and print it off as a poster that I could use as a guide.