Peter Goes

Belgium

Peter Goes studied animation at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, the city where he was born and raised. After graduating, he worked at a theatre for many years as a stage manager, lighting technician and technical director, before changing direction to become a graphic designer, animator and illustrator.

In this post, Peter talks about the remarkable ‘Tijdlijn’ (Timeline). This richly-illustrated journey through the history of our world – from the Big Bang to the present day – was originally published in Dutch by Lannoo, and is published in English by Gecko Press.

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Peter: I wanted to make a modern and up to date version of a timeline because when I was at school, timelines really helped me to understand history.

Those simple lines with dates and pictures gave me a better overview and understanding of history than text did. It’s a way to create order in a sometimes-chaotic string of events. It helps you see similarities, influences and coincidences.

I wanted to make a visualisation of time – a never-ending ribbon in space – a black unstoppable ripple flowing through time. At first, I saw it as a design exercise: a long black line on a narrow white canvas. But it soon became clear that it had to be a book instead of a single canvas because the line became longer and longer as I thought of all the things I wanted to draw.

Here are some of my first ideas:

The publisher said that the book needed colour. I agreed, but every time I tried to make a colour spread I lost the sense of the ribbon – of the line in the timeline. And the design lost its strength. As you can see in all the spreads below, it took me a while to see this, and now all this work is an example of how thickheaded I am.

So back to the black line but now on a coloured background. That way, I kept my black ribbon idea and was still able to have a sense of colour. I could also return to my comfort zone of working in black and white. I love to be able to draw in the negative spaces of the black and white drawings – to have a nice puzzle of white and black designs woven into each other.

I work digitally on a Cintiq screen, often zooming in and getting lost in the details when I’m drawing. So I was very happy when the publisher proposed the big book format. To start with, I was afraid that I would lose the ‘long’ feel of the book. But it turned out that the black line was even more visual, and I had a lot of places to put the text.

I don’t see this as a history book full of exact knowledge, but as a book that will give you a sense of discovery and a feeling for some of the significant events in world history from our perspective: the perspective of people living now. Just like our knowledge of history, the book begins with broad strokes and then zooms in at the end. History becomes more and more documented the closer you get to the present.

In fact, ‘Timeline’ is an ongoing project. The events of the past weeks could have easily (and sadly) influenced my last page. And for me personally, that last page is the start of an new era, in which my art will continue to evolve and – hopefully – get better through time.

1 December 2015

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Peter Goes

Belgium

Tijdlijn / Timeline

Peter Goes

Lannoo, Belgium, 2015