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French-born illustrator Thibaud Herem draws insects, birds and buildings, and has just completed a book on rodents. Clare Dowdy meets up with a multi-talented creative who initiates his own projects and prefers to stay independent
Who would have thought it would be so easy to warm to the naked mole rat? According to a new children's book, they're about 7cm long, 'are hairless, with tiny eyes that are almost blind and massive incisors that protrude out of the mouth with lips that close behind them'.
Even the book's illustrator, Thibaud Herem, finds them 'really disgusting', and yet his depiction of said rat makes it almost endearing. This rodent sits alongside 19 other of the species, in Ziggy Hanaor's book Know Your Rodent, which was published last month.
It's a sweet little hardback that combines rat facts with pen-and-ink and watercolour pictures, and is one of Herem's most recent projects. But then the French-born illustrator has inky fingers in many pies. He's an insatiable self-initiator and pours his energy into getting himself on the illustrative map, so to speak. (In fact, one such project is to do with creating a map...