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Olivier Tallec
France
Olivier Tallec graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d'Arts Graphiques in Paris and worked in advertising as a graphic designer before devoting himself to illustration. He's created many illustrations for newspapers and magazines and has illustrated more than eighty books for children. Olivier lives in Paris.
In this post, Olivier talks about making ‘Quiquoiqui’. This hugely engaging seek-and-find book was originally published in France by Actes Sud Junior, and has been translated into many languages. The English edition, ‘Who Done It?’, is published by Chronicle Books.
Olivier: ‘Quiquoiqui’ is the first book in a series that I started making three years ago.
The initial idea was a simple observation book where children find the solution in the pictures.
The solution/answer could be found in a specific detail, in the expression of one of the characters, etc... For example, the answer to the question, “Who is wearing a disguise?” can be clearly seen in the picture. But for a different question like, “Who played with the cat?”, the answer is found in the elapsed time within the drawing. In this case, it is not so much about depicting the action, but the moment immediately afterwards.
I decided to mix the children and animal characters together. They coexist without a problem.
Above all, I wanted it to be a funny and entertaining book.
I set out to create a world where the characters interact without speaking.
To highlight the characters, I decided to place them on a white background, avoiding scenery completely or just tracing fragments of it in pencil, to provide a basic sense of the location.
After creating the characters, my publisher and I then considered the book as a physical object: so the choice of paper, the format, which is horizontal and remained that way in all the foreign editions (this is not always the case)...
I have been working for a long time on storytelling through images, and conveying things without using any text. I consider myself to be a writer but I know my limits with narration. So this book allowed me to work on the characters' expressions and the humour in the situations... and it will possibly have several levels of readers (it is firstly for children and then for adults).
It does not worry me if a child cannot understand everything in a book. On the contrary, I think it is important that they learn some things later on.
After this first book, my publisher and I decided to make several others and develop a series. This led to ‘Quiquoioù’ and ‘Quiquoiquoi’.
We later decided to continue the series and also develop comic books for older children (with Laurent Rivelaygue) with some of the characters from ‘Quiquoiqui’. The series will soon be adapted into a cartoon for French television.
The six characters (Olive, Boulard, Pétole, Mixo, Pamela and Raoul) evolve in a white world while one of them (Olive) begins to draw... This creates the universe in which they will continue to evolve – a house, a forest, a desert...
We are always in a child's imagination, trying to create a world through drawing.
For this book, I was inspired by a television series I used to watch as a child called ‘La Linea’. It is a brilliant series which was created by Osvaldo Cavandoli in the 70s.
Illustrations © Olivier Tallec. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.
Quiquoiqui / Who What Who
Olivier Tallec
Actes Sud Junior, France, 2014
Who ate all the jam? Who didn't get enough sleep? Each page asks the reader a question about the line-up of characters. Sharp eyes are necessary. There's only one right answer, and it's not always easy!
- French: Actes Sud Junior
- English: Chronicle Books
- Italian: Lapis Edizioni
- Spanish: Birabiro Editorial
- German: Gerstenberg Verlag
- Swedish: Natur & Kultur
- Korean: Hanulimkids Publishing
- Chinese (Simplified): Beijing Poplar Culture Project
- Chinese (Traditional): Commonwealth Publishing Group
