Back in 1999, Sébastien Roux worked in a communications agency specialising in web animation, games and video clips. But he spent much of his free time experimenting with the opportunities offered by a new, exciting vector animation tool named Flash. It was then that he built himself a personal website to showcase his work, superdeux.com.

Initially, the site had no commercial aspirations, but Roux’s images rapidly circulated across the web and, by chance, caught the eye of Peter Thaler, whose own website featured the most interesting graphic artists on the web. Thaler’s site became increasingly popular, and, as a result, was transformed into Pictoplasma, the design bible for advertising executives that is now respected the world over.

Appearances in Pictoplasma and other such titles drew the attention of millions of people across the globe to Roux’s inimitable style. And so, three years later, Roux left the communications agency to concentrate his efforts on Superdeux, which was already attracting work from clients. Roux teamed up with Stéphane Huleux who soon took charge of the studio’s technical side together with web programming and sound design and the rest, as they say, is history.

Artistic concepts
Whether for print, web, animation or toy creation, Superdeux’s work is now characterised by a style that is simple and streamlined. “Our characters have very simple shapes, our images are very colourful, and everything is heavily tinged with fun and irony,” says Roux. “We enjoy combining a cute design with a violent idea, perhaps even an aggressive one, and this mix produces something slightly off-centre that people seem to like.”

Roux cites Japanese animé, street style, eighties culture and music as his main influences: “Music is very much present in the work we do. I often pick up and reuse phrases taken from hip hop tunes.”

For the last two years, the company has spent time formulating creative plans to conquer the world. How? Superdeux develops individual artistic concepts and then attempts to apply them to everything it produces. This process usually starts with the creation of a small character, which is then liberally stylised.

Along with the character, a strong idea or a sentence is created, which forms a sort of signature or a slogan. “Once a concept has been developed, we work hard to come up with all the possible and imaginable ways it can be used,” explains Roux.

“From there, we contact the manufacturers directly and, if we can work out a deal, they execute the project.”

And that’s really as complicated as it gets. For his toys and T-shirts Roux has taken the chance to send his concepts to perfect strangers: “I only knew the people I contacted [about his work] through their websites. I had used their site but had absolutely no personal contact with them.”

Sending your own designs away to a toy manufacturer on the other side of the world may seem a little risky but, as Roux says, “The only thing I had to lose was my designs, and I thought it was worth it.” And indeed it was. After several months of email communication, Roux finally signed a contract. “I guess it’s not very professional,” he admits. “We had already agreed on the terms, but I didn’t sign the contract until the toys were in production.”

Superdeux’s sales technique is thus remarkably simple. With a simple email contact, Roux can subcontract all his projects, from toy manufacturers or textile specialists, even if they are located halfway around the world. It’s clear that much of the company’s success comes down to the optimal use of internet resources.

From his office in Lille, a city in the North of France that few non-French advertising executives could locate, Roux attracts business from Asia, deals with his customers in the United States, and uses the internet to communicate with graphic artists worldwide.

“The Superdeux touch”
Superdeux can now boast an impressive client list including huge names such as MTV, Universal Pictures, KidRobot, ITRangers, EA Sports and Sony. Another, Sony Ericsson, asked Roux to design a range of tiny pixel-art characters to be used as animation on phone screens.

“Working with Sony Ericsson was actually not too different from working with smaller clients,” says Roux. “They wanted “the Superdeux touch”, so we were completely free to create, perhaps even more so than with smaller clients.”

The characters, originally designed as low resolution Flash files, were then exported as animated GIFs before conversion to an image format compatible with mobile phones.

Technical matters proved a little more complicated during work for television network Comedy Central. “To make the short clips the client asked for, I had to work with animators who used After Effects, an application I have yet to master,” says Roux. “At fi rst, I was only asked to draw the characters and they said their animators would do the rest. But then I mentioned that I could do the animation myself in Flash.”

There were several technical issues – resolution, managing the frame rate and the colour space, for example. The animations were produced in Flash in RGB, and then transferred to Illustrator for conversion to EPS format in CMYK, where colours had to be tweaked. Everything was then exported to After Effects.

“The French have no guts”
In addition to the publicity gained from Pictoplasma, Superdeux has an agent responsible for drumming up international business, particularly in the United States and Japan. Roux also keeps busy as creative director of Thunder Dog Studios, a New-York-based design company, so he regularly travels to the States to work on location for a few months at a time. Being there gives him the opportunity to make new business contacts for Superdeux.

While this international experience has increased the studio’s prestige, Superdeux, paradoxically enough, has virtually no French clients. “I guess our style just doesn’t suit them,” Roux concludes. “They have no guts,” adds Huleux, smiling.

When asked what has been his most surprising experience, Roux immediately states that it’s disembodied communication via the web that he finds the strangest. “There have been times when I have worked for months with a person before meeting them face-to-face. I find this manner of working increasingly annoying. I miss the human contact.”

The future
Superdeux aims to substantially reduce its “made-to-order” jobs by developing its personal concept work. “Ideally,” says Roux, “we’d like large corporations to contact us and say “we would like you to do some work for us, but we don’t really know what”. From there, we could freely develop an entire range of products.”

To achieve this honourable goal, the team works by relatively modest means. Roux won’t be parted from his portable Sony VAIO and Huleux works on a PC he put together himself. Of course, their favourite software is Flash, but, at times, they also use Illustrator and Photoshop.

Right now Roux and Huleux are launching a parallel label to Superdeux, Unchi (the Japanese word for poo). “[Unchi] is intended to host all of our artistic creations as well as the ones from the people we love,” Roux reveals. “That way we can do exactly what we like and become masters of the universe which is, of course, our secret objective.”

While J.K. Rowling may be the current darling of the children’s book world, every generation has its favourite author – be it Roald Dahl or C.S. Lewis. Chances are, though, your fond memories of that Dahl book are inextricably entwined with Quentin Blake’s distinctive illustrations.

A good children’s book illustrator can put their mark onto a story forever, bringing it to life in a way that the text alone might not achieve. For educational and non-fiction books, images can play an even greater role in hammering the message home.

One of the attractions of book illustration is that it gives you much more scope for creativity than, say, a magazine article. Deciding which parts of the story to depict, in what style, is obviously a crucial element of any commission, and one of the most fun.

For younger children’s books, which may consist almost entirely of images with a few words on each page, the publisher and author usually decide on the general layout and tone. But for books with a substantial amount of text, most illustrators agree it’s simply a case of using your own discretion.

Readers will spontaneously form their own images of particular characters or situations in a well-written book, and the same approach is used by the artist. The publisher and art team may also provide suggested style ideas and page layouts, depending on the book’s format and subject matter.

Keeping it fresh
Jackie Snider is a US-based illustrator who has worked both with watercolours and digital media. “This is a visual business, so when I read a manuscript, hopefully I have lots of images dancing in my head before I put pencil to paper,” she says. “Lately I’ve been looking at photo reference of objects or subjects to give myself a fresh outlook on a story, rather than relying on the same old things that pop out of my head. After almost 20 years of illustrating, one has to keep ideas flowing, so looking at photos helps to refresh my perspective on the world. There is limited room in my head for endless new versions of dogs, cats and kids!”

Asa Andersson, who mainly illustrates children’s educational books, also relies on inspiration. “I would always have a picture in my head before I start the actual illustration,” she says. “I’ll read the text and different pictures will spring to my mind as a certain part of the story inspires me.”

Perhaps most surprising to someone not in the field is the amount of contact between author and illustrator – or rather the lack of it. Except in a few exceptional cases, where an author may have worked extensively with the illustrator in the past, there’s generally very little collaboration between the two.

Following a brief
Effectively, the book or story itself serves as the commission, and the specifics of character design and setting are a natural part of the creative process. However, an illustrator will often collaborate with the publisher’s own art editor or team, particularly if they’re new to the field.

“I rarely communicate with authors,” says Jackie. “Never in educational or magazine work, and seldom in trade [commercial] books. Mostly I am left to my own devices, since I have a large portfolio showing a consistent style and my clients are familiar with my work. Sometimes I’m provided with rough layout sketches or written outlines of illustration content, but primarily I’m given manuscripts and page layouts and allowed to interpret the content myself.”

Of course, processes vary from publisher to publisher. Nicola Slater illustrated the covers of the British editions of The Princess Diaries, and her distinctive style appears in many other children’s books.

“More often than not, the brief for a project contains items which have specifically been picked out by the author or art editor from the book, which will be important to help support the story,” she says. “Discussions about the book will typically involve how to make it work and flow visually, how the text will fit around the illustrations or visa versa, the kind of palette to suit, and so on.”

Digital techniques
Many book illustrators have turned to digital production for the obvious convenience and freedom it provides, but some feel more comfortable beginning with traditional techniques. “I still do my rough sketches in pencil on tracing paper,” says Jackie Snider. “I think better that way. I scan the pencils and send JPEGs for approval. Then I use these as templates for the finals. If the client produces PDFs with my sketches placed in position with the text, I’ll use these as templates to make sure my spacing is accurate.”

Jackie switched from watercolours to using Illustrator on a G4 three years ago, and says she still has a lot to learn. “I’m starting to enjoy using transparent layers and have done some work with gradients, but since my painting style was fairly flat colour I have tended to stay true to that look for now as I make the transition to the new medium.

“I use a Wacom tablet because it enables me to have a line that mimics the pen-and-ink style of my watercolour illustrations,” continues Jackie. “When I made the transition to digital art, the hardest thing was choosing a palette. After playing around with too many colours at first I managed to narrow my swatches down to about 20 colours.”

Nicola Slater also sketches roughs, either on paper or in Painter: “I then place the sketch in Adobe Illustrator and make it into a template. From that I can work up the entire illustration. I mostly use Painter, Illustrator and Photoshop, though the latter is mainly used for scanning and cleaning up a sketch.”

Asa Andersson takes a different approach, drawing directly in Photoshop. She says this is mainly because she creates animations as well as print illos: “In animation it would take forever to do pencil sketches first. Even for print I think it’s a lot faster and easier to touch up a digital image.

Asa continues: “I work directly in Flash, Illustrator or Photoshop depending on the look and feel I want. If I want a sketchy style, I would draw it in Flash or Photoshop; but if I’m after a more ‘worked at’ effect then I would draw it in Illustrator.”

Children’s book illustrations, with their bright colour and often spontaneous, flowing style, may seem more suited to natural media. Indeed, many illustrators still work with traditional materials, such as Axel Scheffler (of The Gruffalo fame).

But a switch to digital tools usually means a change to working practices rather than style. “Both methods produce pretty much the same effect,” explains Nicola. “But I certainly have to be much more disciplined and methodical when it comes to digital artwork. Working in Illustrator, you have to plan the picture carefully beforehand, leaving little or no room for experimentation once you start the artwork.”

“There is a softness to watercolour that I cannot recreate in Illustrator,” admits Jackie. “Possibly, if I worked in Photoshop I might be able to come closer to that look, but I have adapted to the differences and started to use the cut-and-paste feel of Illustrator to enhance my work.”

Digital media has become as much a part of book illustration as in any other field. What hasn’t changed is the creativity and mindset required to be an effective illustrator. Kids don’t care if you used a pencil or Photoshop – but if you can capture their imagination, the chances are you’ll have a fan for life.

INFO: Nicola Slater and Philip Nicolson can be contacted via Thorogood Illustration, www.thorogood.net. Asa Andersson is available through NB Illustration, www.nbillustration.co.uk. See more of Jackie Snider’s work at www.jackiesnider.com.

When creating a character design, you may rely on dialogue to bring your creation’s personality to life. Yet Pixar’s latest animated film WALL•E has two non-human lead characters who don’t talk. Indeed, there’s almost no dialogue at all for the first third of the movie. Even by Pixar’s standards, it’s a project of considerable daring.

Such is Pixar’s stature that it’s easy to forget just how brave the studio has been time and again. From creating the first full-length CG animated feature, Toy Story, at a time when audiences were tiring of cartoon movies, through to the way each film is crafted with genuine cross-generational appeal and real emotional depth rather than simply pandering to a lowest common denominator audience, Pixar is a studio unlike any other.

A sci-fi tale that’s part-love story, part-comedy, with an eco-theme to boot, the central idea for WALL•E was first mooted in 1994. At a now-famous Pixar lunch, the ideas for A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo were also first discussed. Years later, director Andrew Stanton returned to the idea of a robot left behind on Earth, and began fleshing out the extraordinary story of the cute little ‘Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth- Class’ droid known as WALL•E. In part fascinated by the idea of tackling the science fiction genre, in part attracted by the Robinson Crusoe concept, and also intrigued by the challenge of largely abandoning speech, Stanton wanted audiences to connect to a highly mechanised main character purely through his actions – inferring emotion and following the action as if watching a silent movie from the early age of cinema. A tall order, but then Pixar did make its debut with Luxo Jr, a short featuring an animated desk lamp.

The pre-production process began at Pixar’s California HQ in August of 2005, although Stanton and a core team had been working on the story and carrying out proof of concept tests prior to this. Overseeing production design work was Ralph Eggleston, a Pixar movie veteran and director of Oscar-winning short film For The Birds. Working with a team including character art director Jason Deamer, Eggleston set about working on a style that would give the film a unique appearance. Old artwork from Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and NASA proved highly inspirational.

“It wasn’t about the specifics; rather, the notion of ‘Where’s my jet pack?’” says Eggleston. He explains that the aim wasn’t to depict what the future is likely to be like, but what it could be like. “In designing the look of the characters and the world, we want people to believe what they’re seeing. We want the characters and world to be real – not realistic-looking, but real in terms of believability.”

Colour and lighting were also key concerns. Romantic and emotional lighting was chosen for the movie’s first act, set on a deserted, rubbish-infested Earth. Act two, set in outer space, emphasises sterility and cleanliness. As the story progresses, the more idealised palette is gradually re-introduced.

“A big part of my job is wrangling all of these disparate ideas from the art department all the way through the production pipeline,” notes Eggleston.

For director Stanton, inspiration for the look and feel of the movie and its characters also came from movies like Star Wars (particularly R2-D2), Alien, Blade Runner, Silent Running, and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

The works of silent movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd also provided some valuable pointers, reveals directing animator and storyboard artist Angus MacLane: “We looked at how they were presented, how they communicated ideas – getting a feel for the language of that type of film-making. Of course the acting is often very presentational and stylised, but there are definitely some common cues and notions.”

In time-honoured fashion, the Pixar crew made a number of field trips, taking in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, robotic conferences, recycling stations, and even a manufacturer of a ‘tank wheelchair’ device fitted with caterpillar tracks for all-terrain capability. NASA expert Jim Hicks was also consulted to provide information about the effects zero gravity might have on the movie’s cast of human characters, while Apple design supremo Jonathan Ive met with the art team to discuss futuristic design.

While much of the design for lead character WALL•E sprung from a desire to make him look highly functional, with an appearance suggesting he could actually operate as a roving trash-compacting machine, one crucial brainstorm came at an unexpected moment.

“The design for WALL•E’s eyes came about after Andrew Stanton saw the acting potential for a pair of binoculars while at a baseball game,” says MacLane. Stanton ended up missing an entire inning as he toyed with the binoculars, quickly realising how versatile a performance they could provide. And so it was that a pair of swivelling, zoomable lenses became the ‘face’ of the character.

While WALL•E needed to look workman-like yet endearing, EVE needed to appear graceful, feminine, and hightech. A fluid, seamless form was chosen to suggest femininity. Whereas WALL•E is visibly powered using cogs, gears and motors, the idea with EVE was to have a transformable robot whose seamless moves are achieved using magnets.

“With EVE we had a constant visual struggle to sell the elegance of her form,” admits MacLane. “A lot of it involved very careful control of the relationship between her head, body and arms, and of course the stylisation of her eyes.”

As with any CG-animated feature, character development continued as the designs were taken from paper to sculpts, and then into 3D. The mechanical nature of the robotic characters made the impact of this phase more pronounced. “The thing about doing robots and complex mechanical things is that you can get the broad strokes in character sheets, but at a certain point it’s almost impossible to track all the complexities that will be inherent in the 3D model,” explains character modelling lead Jason Bickerstaff.

Bickerstaff points out that the design wasn’t limited to the exterior appearance of the characters. In the case of WALL•E, a plausible suspension system was required, his arms needed to move in a suitably mechanical manner and needed to be able to tuck into his body, and he needed to look correctly weighted – all while possessing a range of motion that would satisfy the animation team.

In the original designs, for example, WALL•E possessed elbows. These were later replaced with a track system around his sides, giving his arms a good range of motion. EVE, on the other hand, required a 3D model and rig that would enable her to seamlessly change form, allowing her to fly as well as seal herself together like a robotic egg. Much finessing was required to create parts with a bevel small enough to give the impression of an unbroken surface.

“When you turn an orthogonal drawing into 3D there are always features you can’t reconcile, and that becomes much more complicated when you need interlocking parts working in a plausible way,” stresses Bickerstaff. “So the process was a little different to usual, in that we had to do a lot of design in 3D after the art had been delivered, to make sure characters could work mechanically and perform in the way the animators wanted.”

What the animators did want, somewhat unusually, was a set of robot designs that, while endearing, looked convincingly practical. Where other computer-animated robot-themed movies have made liberal use of squash and stretch and other classic cartoon techniques – or had elements arranged to create highly humanoid shapes and facial structures – the stars of WALL•E were designed to remain true to their metallic materials and to utilise motions in keeping with their functionality.

“A machine only does what is necessary to complete each task, so we tried to stay true to that,” says MacLane. “So WALL•E generally only moves his arms if he’s reaching out or using them as a tool.”

With the might of Disney now behind it, a string of box office hits, and a strong sales business thanks to its Renderman software, Pixar could be forgiven for sitting back and taking it easy. That the studio dared to craft such ambitious characters and build such an uncompromising, design-led movie around them is impressive. That the movie has proven so successful – taking close to $68 million in its opening weekend in the US, and grossing over $280 million worldwide to date – is a true testament to the studio’s artistry.