Artist Interview: Paul Tobin

Paul Tobin is a conceptual designer, illustrator and graphic designer who has been working at Weta Workshop since graduating from Wellington’s Massey school of Art and Design in 2003. He has worked on films such as Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, Peter Jackson’s King Kong and James Cameron’s Avatar and most recently The Hobbit.

He also teaches illustration at Wellington’s Massey University, and regularly runs the Concept Design Workshop together with Warren Mahy. Recently, Paul has put together a book, in conjunction with an exhibition, entitled White Cloud Worlds showcasing fantasy and sci-fi art by New Zealand artists.

White cloud worlds

“I have been wanting to do my own book for quite a while. I have been in the industry for a while now, so I have built up quite a good network of people. New Zealand is quite a small place – everyone knows everyone. All of the artists were saying the same thing – ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a book we could all get our stuff into’. The problem is everyone wants to do their own book, but they’re working full time and they are struggling to produce enough work to create a book of just their own work. So a good solution is to be able to club together with everyone and go ‘Well, let’s just come up with a book that has lots of artists’ work in it’. So that’s where White Clouds Worlds was born.

It was me first going to 5 other friends saying ‘Do you want to lend me some of your work, I will see if I can create a book around it’. I started working on a book pitch to see if I could get it off the ground. I laid up about 20 pages and I thought that was all looking ok. It was pretty straight forward so I thought I should maybe do more. So I went to more artists that I knew, and before I knew it I had 90 pages of a book. No text, just images with fake text. But it was 90 pages. And we had come up with a working title to it and we decided it was going to be a New Zealand anthology profiling NZ artists or artists residing in NZ.

We pitched it to Harper Collins, they loved the idea (that was about two years ago). The book goes on sale in November. And it is exactly as I said – a NZ anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy art. 27 artists who have written their own text in their own words, and profile some of their artwork. Some of it’s professional artwork, but most of it is work that they have done in their own time.

The theme for the book – if you could say there is a theme – is ‘What do artists do, what worlds do they create in their free time’? It’s a mixture of concept designers, mostly illustrative (some of the illustrators are concept designers as well). I suppose just due to the associations I have, just about half the artists are Weta based artists and about the other half are a mixture of people that we’ve known through friends of friends. We’ve tried to actively look for people that we didn’t know and I’m sure there’s a bunch of people that we have missed which will be regrettable. But hopefully we will get to do another volume and we will get some people coming out of the woodwork who might be interested in doing that.

Obviously it’s a bit of a challenge, trying to put a book together essentially in the evenings when you’re not working, as well as trying to produce work for you own book. I hired the project manager that used to work at Weta, Kate Jorgensen, to get the book off the ground, and help wrangle 27 artists (quite a task as you can imagine!)

We were incredibly fortunate – we had a lot of support, from the industry from Richard (Richard wrote the introduction). We sent off an email to Guillermo asking if he could do an endorsement. A two sentence endorsement because we knew how busy he was. We sent him a sample copy of the book. He (or his assistant) emailed back and said he’d love to. And then 5 minutes later wrote back again saying, actually, do you want me to write a foreword. So we where pretty stoked with that – it was like holy cow that’s quite a coup. And Alan and John where both around as well. I have been such huge fans of both those guys work for so many years that I thought it was just too good an opportunity to pass up, to try and convince them to try and write something for my book. They both wrote the afterword which was pretty awesome. We got Wayne Barlowe and Christian Gossett to write endorsements as well. So there has been an incredible amount of support for the book. Pretty amazing. That’s kind of as far as we have got with it at this stage.

We also have an exhibition to accompany the book. It starts on the 11th of December at TheNewDowse in Lower Hutt. It’s pretty awesome. It came together remarkably easily.”
The exhibition will be on from December until March – quite a substantial amount of time. “TheDowse have been amazing. They have done a couple, like the Kong exhibition. They are a very progressive thinking museum. When you go to them with a popular culture concept like this, they treasured it with exactly the respect and excitement that we where hoping. The perceived notion of science fiction and Fantasy is, it’s low-brow or it is just pop culture. But the way that a lot of us artists perceive it is, it’s fine art – or our version of fine art. It should be seen in a similar light.

Ordinarily, the fact that a lot of the work is digital would have been a problem, but there’s been this growing tide of digital work now being done. They are going to get printed out beautifully. I suppose it’s not a lot different to just buying a really high quality print. Normally that would have been a huge impediment. But certainly not with TheDowse anyway. And because they have done the Kong, and Greg’s ray-gun stuff before, which were very successful exhibitions. Other museums probably would have balked a bit at it. But there is some traditional artwork there as well. We’ve got a number of oils and acrylics. It’s quite an interesting mixture of traditional and digital.

And hopefully it’s going to tour. I think Rotorua and Waikato have currently got the exhibition slotted in. And obviously we are hoping it will go up and down the country if we can. I’d like to get it across to Australia actually. The artwork is not for sale, as it is a public or council funded gallery, and one of their mandates is that they don’t sell. There will be some limited edition prints available in the shop.

We were trying to elevate a lot of this fantasy and science fiction art to a high end, sort of coffee table format of a book. So there is a slipcase version with a limited edition print. Harper Collins have certainly spared no expense in terms of producing a really really high quality book.”

Paul has been sitting on the idea for this book for a number of years, and had been tracking different artists around the country carefully, resulting in the book coming together rather easily.

“That was one of the problems actually – the book quickly filled up the allocated pages that the publisher gave us. I filled up 90 of the 128 pages before it even got started. So unfortunately that made it a bit difficult to slip in newer artists that turned up along the way. But we did manage to get a few new artists in there that I didn’t know personally or that came recommended. It came together very fast in that respect.

But it is a very diverse book. Some people have some very strange worlds. But that’s the strength of the book. And the other big strength is the fact that the artists have written in their own words – something that was suggested to me very early on by one of the original guys that helped me out. He said ‘Look, I think you need to let the artists write it in their own words.’

We were terrified by that prospect, because we thought ‘My god, 27 artists, what are they going to write?’ We were a bit worried about it because that is a huge level of wrangling. It’s much easier to interview someone and just write it basically. But he was dead right – it was such the right thing to do. We just got so much more of an interesting, more informal… because they talk in their own voice, you can identify with it so much more. I want this book to be accessible. I want it to be a really high quality book but I want it to be very accessible too, to students and kids. The same kids that we were when we first picked up our favorite book.

I suppose we are trying to profile the artists a lot more so it’s a little bit more like a magazine in that respect, where you can interview the artists and find out how they work. We are very much more about trying to identify with the artist and what they are doing as well as the artwork. That was a big part of the idea of the book.

We didn’t give the artists any brief about what to write at all. But a lot of the artists will talk about how they got started and maybe what got them inspired. Some of them will talk about how they work. Others will just talk about their particular project they are working on. Some people talk about their industry and how they work in it. It really is quite eclectic. One particular artist gives quite a fictional account. He does not make a point that it’s fictional, he’s just writing it in a way thats post-humous. You kind of have to assume that it’s fictional – because you know he’s still alive. One of the more entertaining reads of the book.

The irony is that there are a lot of gifted people in NZ working at an international level, but who are totally unheard of.

We want to show the world class work that’s being done in New Zealand by artists most people would never have heard of. The irony is that there are a lot of gifted people in NZ working at an international level, but who are totally unheard of. A couple of people are starting to get their name out there – Greg Broadmore is a very good example. But I never knew there was an NZ comic book artist that was now doing Hellboy! You know, he’s doing Hellboy, he’s working out of Auckland illustrating Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. What an incredible achievement. He’s just one of a number of artists doing some pretty amazing things at such a high professional level.

But it is a New Zealand book – it very much caters to a NZ market. Of course we hope it sells well overseas but it’s book that I really want to play to a home crowd initially. Then hopefully people might find it exciting and buy it overseas as well. We are celebrating that NZ creativity – very NZ-centric. Other fantasy art books, like Spectrum, are not country specific at all. They are just picking artwork from across the globe. And there isn’t necessarily a strong theme or concept behind it.

So that’s been a huge part of my life over the last two years, getting that up and running, while working full time, teaching, running concept workshops and all the rest of it. Its been a pretty hectic couple of years. And there are other books I want to do but yeah, just getting this one out of the way. It’s just a case now of the enjoyment of getting it to the public and seeing how it goes. Nerve racking obviously. Most of the book has been self financed by myself so you have invested a huge amount of time and money into it, and hope you see some return on that. Mainly so you can hope to do another one!”

Early Years

“I think most kids draw when they are growing up. I remember consciously doing illustration work from about 3rd form onwards, when I started college. I met a group of friends who were into writing and drawing. There were those Choose Your Own Adventure books, which we really got into. The ones that were done by Ian Livingstone & Steve Jackson. We began writing our own and a couple of us started illustrating the stories.

That’s the earliest illustration work I can remember doing, rather than just drawing for the sake of doodling something. I think what got me really interested in becoming an illustrator was getting given a copy of Alan Lee’s book Merlin Dreams when I was about 16. That was an amazingly beautiful book with Arthurian style short stories”.

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All Images © 2010 Paul Tobin. All rights reserved.