I'm Alex Fitch and I'm at the illustration cupboard with Sean Tan, illustrator, writer, artist and now award-winning animator. We have here a couple of pieces from the Lost Thing, the children's book that was turned into Oscar-winning short. And it shows very much how your work is mixed media. We have a piece at the top which is oil paint over the top of technical drawings and excerpts from various artists. It looks like books of physics and maths and at the bottom a much simpler sketch. Could you speak a little about how you use mixed media in your work and how often you go straight into paint or if it's more often that the case that you start off with a sketch and work from there? I always start off with sketches, often like this. Then I did a lot of media experiments in those days and with this particular book because it's set in a world that's so kind of dry and mechanical, I wanted to incorporate this collage of physics and maths textbooks. I also wanted to be incredibly dense so there wasn't any white space in it. Everything is covered with stuff like layers and layers of a past culture of something very mathematical. And then just allowing these little windows into which these images, very organic looking images might contrast with all that technical detail and the introduction of these strange creatures. And immediately when looking at it I found a sort of poultry in between the dry, hard-edged technical diagrams and these soft tentacled shapes which has become the core of the aesthetic for the whole book. And painted it in oil paint using watercolour brushes. Yeah, just in order to get the fineness of detail and ruined many expensive watercolour brushes that way. On this wall we put a variety of different sketches in pencil and charcoal in ballpoint pen which I guess is a mixture between the kind of work we might find in your sketch book and then finished pieces that ended up in books like the arrival. Yeah, that's right. These particular sketches are taken, basically, to the straight out of the sketch books for the arrival and there's many of them because it was such a huge project. And I went through hundreds and hundreds of drafts of each page, you know, often very quickly, trying out different ideas. It's a little bit like a manuscript. Instead of words you have these tiny little diagrams and very crude drawings because I'm not even worried about what they look like. I'm purely sketching concepts. And it's just enough for me to understand almost like a doctor's prescription, like person running, people hugging buildings, you know, and this sort of thing. And even when the drawings are really scruffy I'll have written notes just to explain to myself. But it's showing the core thinking process. It's often I'm reluctant to show this stuff because it looks so ugly to me. But at the same time it's an honest revelation in the process that goes into what most people see in the printed book which is a highly rendered polished work. That's not where I spend most of my time. Most of my time I spend doing all this, um, I'm mucking about with, you know, I always start by drawing a square and filling it with something and then you see I've drawn arrows as I think about changing the ordering. This scene in the in a story is not written about at all. But there's actually quite a lot of text that goes with this story. But in the middle of the text is a six page silent section which shows a couple having a journey through the desert. And, you know, none of that is narrated because it was more powerful just to show all this weird things happening and leave it to the reader to try and figure out what's going on. And then the text picks up at the end. The words generally do stuff that the pictures can't do. So often explain abstract concepts which would be why impossible to draw pictures of I think. And the pictures show other things showing really weird ideas that have been possible to describe. You wouldn't be able to adequately describe that image in words. So, um, a lot of it is to do with compression. Like I'm trying to make sure stories are short as possible. And in doing so, I'm trying to think what's the most economical way of conveying an idea instantly but still have it being very mysterious. Yeah.