Wonderful colors by Michaël Cailloux

Since our last edition where I spoke to Michaël about his book 'Merveilleuses Nature', he has published “Merveilleuses Couleurs” where he challenges the reader to search for a camouflaged animal which he describes in an haïku (a form of Japanese poetry). The book is intended for all ages to playwith and expand their minds.

How do you compose your illustrations in 'Merveilleuses couleurs'? Thefirst step is with Nathalie Béreau, were we research all the elementscorresponding to each color: blue, yellow, red, green.

Although the green color was reason ably easy to research, because it is a common color present

everywhere in nature, it was much harder to find elements for blue, purple or pink. The second step for me was to draw each element without thinking about the composition, this took several months. Then I created each composition. This is very exciting and is the stage I enjoy most because I imagine myself creating my own universe.

" THIS DREAM GAVE ME THE IDEA OF THE BLUE THEME FOR THE BOOK."

Do you dream of animals? I like animals a lot and I often dream about them. I do not remember all my dreams but one in particular marked me strongly. This one was about space travel and I was swimming in space with fish as if I was in water. This dream gave me the idea of the blue theme for the book. I wanted to draw a large fish watching the Earth and so I created an analogy between the idea of weightlessness and swimming.

Are you going to make another book in this series or will you pick another theme. Yes, it was my wish, along with Nathalie Béreau, to make a proposal of a follow-up to 'Merveilleuse Nature' to our publisher. We shared the idea with him and he agreed. So this is book in the same spirit, but it is not the same work. 'Merveilleuses Couleurs' was harder to make in terms of design because it is more complicated to design a

page with only one colour and many different shades. We do not know yet if Thierry Magnier, our publisher, wishes to make an other 'Merveille' but we would like to go on with this great adventure.

How did your illustrations inspire your writing? This is Nathalie’s part in our creation. I send her the finished plates and she plays with the words.

She likes this part of the creation process because words reflect the image. We did not want to sound 'childish', so that adults can also play with the book. Therefore there are two levels of reading.

The idea of each riddle was to create a 'haïku' for children so words can related to the images, in short sentences, like a poem. There is also the idea of rhythm of the words and rhymes.

When I read the sentences about an animal that’s in the illustration but not in its natural colour, I had to think harder. My mind is telling me to look for a different colour. Was this the reaction you were looking for to your illustrations? Yes, I wanted to make the game harder. The idea was to play watching at the plate to find details. If the solution is easy, the game would be not so fun! But I'm surprised by the effect. For example, I thought that the solution of the blue plate would be easy and I realised that it’s not.

And, Nathalie enjoyed confusing our readers with the riddles.

Is there something you would like to tell our readers? I would like everybody to play with this book, regardless of the age. It is a way for children to discover colours and to play with Nathalie's riddles. And for adults, it is a way to travel and dream.