Shaun Tan is the New York Times bestselling author of The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia, Tales from the Inner City, Rules of Summer, and The Singing Bones. He received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2011 and won an Academy Award for the adaptation of his picture book The Lost Thing (from Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan). Shaun lives in Melbourne, Australia.
'Why isn't the finished work as good as the sketch?' Tan (The Arrival) asks in the introduction to this collection of loose illustrations and rough ideas, wondering why drawings lose their spontaneity as they undergo revision. These sketches took little time to make, he says, and some 'barely escaped the paper-recycling bin.' Fascinated with hybrids, Tan draws cyclopean monsters with claws and tentacles, light bulbs with tails, cars with antennae, and a flower whose bloom is a single human eye. A section of full-color paintings and drawings offers rich and complex layers of pigment, lush shadows, and startling highlights of scarlet and magenta. In one, an Asian man wearing glasses holds the hand of a small boy on a sidewalk; 'Dad + me, ' reads the legend. A careful set of sketches records pre-Columbian artifacts; another, just as earnest, invents a character alphabet for an undersea civilization; a cover sketch for Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels also appears. The sharing of unfinished work is a generous gesture, and the collection is a treasure trove for any young artist who wants to know more about how ideas are captured on paper. - Publishers Weekly starred review <br> Tan, the mastermind behind the incomparable The Arrival (2007) and Lost and Found (2011), opens up his sketchbooks and offers up an array of drawings, doodles, and visual experiments. Separated into works for books, theater, and film; life drawings; notebooks; and tantalizing glimpses of untold stories, the entries all share Tan's unique trademarks. Unmistakable are his flawless craftsmanship, his organically industrial yet timeless aesthetic, and his lyrically haunting style and tone. Given their own page and focus, many details that might have attracted merely a glance in larger works are turned here from a flourish into a full-fledged character or visual idea. Simultaneously, mechanics of his world-building skill come clear, like a penchant for embellishing illustrations to make them ap