Like many children, Joseph Theobald got acquainted with paintbrushes as a toddler, as a way of exploring the world around him. On his publisher’s website, there is a black-and-white picture of him, no more than three years old, with a paintbrush in his hand, drawing on a piece of paper. Young Theobald also had strong passion for children’s books. Now, he still feels those beautiful hobbies, commonly regarded as “children’s stuff”, are not meant to be outgrown.
Joseph Theobald.
The Frenchman studied illustration at university because he loved painting and art. In his sophomore year, he was approached by a children’s book publisher. “She said I should try children’s books because my paintings were very colourful. It kind of clicked when I tried it,” said the author of the Marvin series.
Theobald’s most famous book was Marvin Wanted More, which is a winner of the Macmillan Prize for children’s book illustrations and gained a Welsh Books Council award for most borrowed library book in 2010. Following the success of his first endeavour, he drew Marvin Gets Mad and Marvin And Molly. Now he is working on the fourth book Marvin Says No.
The Marvin books are now available worldwide, translated into 12 languages including Thai. Theobald was recently in Thailand for school visits with Nanmee Books, publishers of the Thai language Marvin books. “I got a lot of funny questions like how I made the sheep so fluffy, or whether Marvin and Molly are going to get married,” said the author with a grin.
As a child, his all-time favourite reads included Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and a pop-up book called Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski. He said he’d always loved bright colours, quirky facial expressions and simple shapes. These elements inspire his drawing style, which is clean, colourful and humorous.
He chose Marvin the sheep as his main character as it’s friendly and funny, which makes him a good children’s book character. He also thinks that a sheep is a nice symbol of a person who doesn’t think too much.
“I quite like it because in English we say a person who’s like everyone else, who follows everyone else, is like a sheep. Marvin is like that — he doesn’t think very much. He just kind of follows,” Theobald said, referring about his character who always gets into trouble for not thinking things through.
Each of the Marvin books talks about common problems and feelings that every child goes through, such as anger, not feeling good about himself, or saying “no” to everything. Beyond teaching children about being good and happy, he also aims to remind the parents of the world we are living in.
Marvin Wanted More is a story about the sheep eating everything around him because he wanted to be big. Along the way, he ate the forest, the buildings, the continents and the world, before getting sick and shrinking back to his original size, realising that he was happier as he was.
“I was thinking about the environment at the time. It’s kind of a subject not for children but more for parents. It’s about consumption. Marvin eats everything. He doesn’t know why, but he just wants more. Sometimes I try to have different levels and make them apply to adults as well,” he explained.
Marvin And Molly has been made into an application, but Theobald still prefers traditional books to technologies. He reasoned that reading is the best thing for the imagination, far better than television and computers can ever be.
“Reading, where you have just some pictures and small amount of text, lets you create the rest of the world in your head,” he said. “I think applications have some benefits — they can be interactive and help children to read. But books are still the nicest things. They can connect with the parents or the person reading to them. With an app, the parents just give them the iPad to play and take care of themselves. With books, there’s a connection between parents and children.”
Theobald has a knack for handmade work in general — he restores old houses as a hobby in France, where he lives most of the time when he’s not working in the UK. He also prefers painting using acrylics to computer-generated graphics, even if it means that mistakes are more difficult to undo on paper than on a computer screen.
“Having a finished original painting feels nice. With a computer-drawn picture, you can have a printout, but it’s not the same.”
