Benji Davies | 'Most of my stronger ideas start fairly small, but they stick in my mind'

The latest title, Tad, from picture book creator Benji Davies, out in paperback in January, is the tender tale of the smallest tadpole in the pond. Rather fittingly for a tale of growing up, it’s a story that has been in incubation for a long time. Speaking from his London home, Davies reveals how the idea took shape. "Tad started out as a single image of a frog, sitting on a leaf, looking at the Moon." Following his author-illustrator début, The Storm Whale, it was actually the first idea he explored for his second book. "I tried to write a story for this frog, but it was fairly fruitless," he laughs. The image stayed with him, eventually re-emerging in a sketchbook. "I kept thinking about this frog..." He sketched a tadpole, head poking above the water, and spontaneously came up with the caption which would become the book’s opening line: "Tad was a frog/Well that’s not quite true—/she was almost a frog."

This route to inspiration is a familiar one to Davies. "Most of my stronger ideas start fairly small, but they stick in my mind and I keep coming back to them, generally over several years." The story of the little frog evolved into a coming-of-age picture book. Tad watches on as her tad-siblings grow legs and disappear, all the time fearing giant fish Big Blub. Davies had a strong vision of how the artwork would enhance the plot. "There’s storytelling in the colour and the light," he explains, contrasting the saturated
green of Tad’s world with the murky depths inhabited by Big Blub. The final spread is a joyful explosion of light, as Tad quite literally finds her feet and leaps into the vibrant world above.

Davies is never afraid to confront darkness and big ideas, from Noi’s loneliness in The Storm Whale to bereavement in Grandad’s Island. His ability to make such themes
accessible to young children is one of the most compelling elements of his work. How hard is it to strike the right balance? "It’s quite tricky. Those slightly meatier things are appealing to me, things that have more depth." While feedback from readers about how his books have helped in particular situations feels "amazing", he’s keen to stress that he doesn’t set out to write books with a message. "I look for stories, for characters and the situations they are in and naturally get led towards these bigger subjects." Children in particular, he thinks, "can see through things very quickly".

Talking ’shop

Art for a new book begins in pencil or grey ink thumbnail sketches, which are scanned in and made into PDFs. Davies then works with Photoshop, building up layers of flat colour, texture and detail. Tad presented a particular challenge: unlike most of his other books, there are no people or their accoutrements to add substance. "When you get down to the scale of a tadpole, you need something to get your teeth into. I used spray paint, making splatters onto the paper, to create the feel of being under the water and add texture." The scope of software is, he says, almost limitless, but he prefers to set parameters. "By only using certain brushes—by not using gradients, for example—it can be more authentic."

Davies was drawing and illustrating from a very young age and has never stopped. Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a "real favourite" with a lasting influence and the iconic 1980s animation of "Watership Down" also made a big impact. "The emotion of it really spoke to me. It felt alive, so real to me, very powerful imagery." By the time he was a teenager, he wanted to do both animation and children’s book illustration. "The two have been running concurrently and I’ve never really wavered!" He chose to study animation and in his first week at university met future Oi Frog! illustrator Jim Field. Following their degrees, the two friends set up an animation company, creating commercials, short films and music promos.

His passion for illustration continued in the background: his first commission was On the Moon, an Usborne board book, and he illustrated for other writers. These projects, however, were "quite brief driven", and what Davies really yearned for was to create his own stories. "I was trying to find my own voice." A day trip to Whitstable proved pivotal. Inspired by the coastal setting, he worked up some sketches and photographs of beach huts into an image of a house by the sea. Nia Roberts, then Simon & Schuster’s art director, loved it, and asked if he could develop it into a story. But in fact, he already had. "My graduation film was a short animation called ‘A Bowl of Soup’ and that became the basis for The Storm Whale." Three years later, the book was published and quickly became a bestseller. Several more books followed before he moved to HarperCollins in a three-book deal.

Since his young daughter was born Davies has started to work from a studio, "more of a 9-5 situation", rather than home. Can we expect to see her influence in his future books? "Yes", he laughs, "lots of repeated readings" of picture books have made him think harder about rhythm and speech. "Dialogue, short sentences, these little phrases and the voices of characters... There’s something real about the kinds of things small children say that might help connect with the work."