Up Down Inside Out

"I love JooHee Yoon’s artwork. This book is made in just two colours: red and blue. And yet, she has done that clever thing that you can with print making, when you get a myriad of extra colours by combining the overlays of colours. For example, you get a very dark, almost black, colour when the blue and red are in their full strength overlaid together. Plus, she’s used textures in each colour to get different shades. You have textured red, which almost makes a pink, and textured blue that makes light blue. It’s very creative use of two colours. You could say that the artwork is quite stylised for a children’s book, but I find it very appealing, and I think I would have loved it as a child. The way she has done the flaps is really clever, “clever simple”, as my old boss used to say. Having worked in novelty books for 20 years, often I’ll look at a novelty book and feel fussy and I’ll want to change something about it, but with this book I don’t. I think it’s brilliant. “It’s really rare for me to feel a book is perfect” My favourite page is an image of a cheeky thief. You can see his eyes peeking above his coat, which he is holding closed with his arm. It is also a flap, and when you open it you reveal all of the watches underneath that he’s trying to sell you. Because the artist has made lots of patterns for the watches, it feels more than two colours. She is so clever with her use of the colours along with the white space. You have to have quite clever spatial awareness in your head. As an artist who works in layers of paint colours, I know that managing the design of the layers is quite a challenge in itself, and then you have to make the artwork readable as well. JooHee Yoon does it really well so I’m very admiring of her. She has taken idioms like “people in glass houses should not throw stones” and turned them into single page illustrations. As an illustrator, you’re not only using materials and artwork to make images, you’re telling stories. This book is sophisticated for a child, but I can imagine children really enjoying looking at it. It probably is a book for adults and children."