Harvey, text by Hervé Bouchard - Children's literature - illustration

Excellencies, dear laureates, dear guests,

I would first like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the members of the jury. I would also like to thank Frédéric Gauthier from Éditions de la Pastèque, who initiated this project.

It took me three years to create the 160 or so drawings that illustrate the magnificent, touching and inspiring words of Hervé Bouchard. This work was done in three stages: first, visual research and preliminary sketches, essential to a graphic novel in which the universe of the 1960s had to be recreated in the smallest detail. Second, I had to infuse all this research into the final illustrations and to find a style that would best serve the superb writing. For Harvey, I drew my pictures in lead and charcoal, black and white, and then shaded certain parts to suggest the evasive nature of the father’s death. Ink and stencil was also used to tell the “story within the story,” that of Scott Carré, the man who becomes invisible by shrinking, and who ends up steering Harvey’s toothpick in the gutter race. Finally, the colour stage, which required a very special technique for this book: three-colour printing. This distinctive method, as well as the “novel” format, makes Harvey a rare literary treasure, and these choices—entirely at the service of the piece, without compromise—are, for the most part, due to the editors, Frédéric Gauthier and Martin Brault.