For Tim Hopgood, winning the Best Emerging Illustrator category of the Booktrust Early Years Awards was a vindication of the risky decision he took to change career in midlife.

A graphic designer for twenty years, he became frustrated with the ephemeral nature of the work he was producing for the fashion retail industry and decided to channel his efforts into making art that was a bit more permanent.

‘It had always been an ambition of mine to do books,’ he explains. ‘It became one of those things that you just talk about all the time, and you finally think, “What am I going to do about it? Time’s marching on.”

'So I took some time off work and locked myself in a room for a couple of weeks and put some ideas together, and that’s how it started.’

Hopgood’s interest in exploring the different ways that children and adults see the world has become a central theme of his first three books.

‘I love what John Burningham does, where you have different things going on, so in Our Big Blue Sofa the parents are seeing it as an old sofa and the kids are seeing it as something completely different, and in A Dog Called Rod it’s about having an imaginary friend.’

He deliberately roots the children’s imaginative adventures in social realism: characters live with extended families or lone parents, in urban terraces or tower blocks.

‘With Rod I made a conscious decision that I’d put it in the block of flats. I remember as a child that Mary, Mungo and Midge was set in a block of flats, and that stuck with me. There are so many books set on farms! I was also thinking about what makes a family. I’m always looking at portraying different set-ups.’

Hopgood developed his fluid style of line drawing while at college. That hasn’t changed much over the years, but the use of computers has, and the programs he employed in his graphic design work now enable him to produce distinctive multilayered and textured illustrations.

"The way I put the illustrations together is a mix of everything: I draw and paint, and then I scan everything in to the computer"

‘The way I put the illustrations together is a mix of everything: I draw and paint, and then I scan everything in to the computer. It allows me to layer things up and play around with the colours.’

‘Over the three books I’ve built up a library of paint textures,’ he explains. I’ve painted big brush strokes, so I have a bank of background paint streaks that I can bring in.

'If you look at all three books you’ll start to see that there are the same paint effects starting to appear. I’m always adding to it. I start off working in black and white. I’ve got paint that I use for the base of a face and the highlights as well, and skin tones.

'I like the idea that you build up a file of different textures for a project, then you start to put it together like a collage on the computer. I love seeing through the different layers. But I don’t want it to look too computery. I like the fact that it finishes up looking like it was done by hand.’

Each of Hopgood’s books incorporates a different textured effect: in Our Big Blue Sofa it’s leaf-patterned blue velour; in A Dog Called Rod the eponymous canine is covered in white glitter and surrounded by sparkly star.

Hopgood's latest award-winning book, Here Comes Frankie!, features shapes and fruits coated in a gloss varnish called spot UV.

Achieving the effect required Hopgood to produce a separate layer of artwork. ‘After I’d done all the colour work I had to go back and pick out everything that I wanted to be varnished and do a black layer of spot UV. That got a bit mind-blowing. It was a big job.’

In addition to the varnish effect, many of what Hopgood refers to as the ‘sound bursts’ have a pattern on them, which he created by using various fabrics, including kitchen towel. ‘I scanned them in and swished them around so that it was all blurred. Kitchen roll has a good texture.’

Here Comes Frankie! is about a boy whose quiet household is turned upside down when he decides to learn to play the trumpet. Frankie and his parents don’t just hear the music: they see and smell it too.

The back endpaper gives an explanation of the sensory condition synaesthesia, in which at least two senses are combined, but the book can also be read metaphorically.

"I read about Kandinsky and how he heard his paint box hissing when he mixed colours"

‘One of the things I wanted to explore in Frankie was just getting across how music can change the whole mood of a room or how you’re feeling. The book grew from wondering how you show the excitement of music as a picture and that change of mood that it can bring. I originally had Frankie sitting on the stairs playing the trumpet and suddenly an orange shape appeared. I don’t really know why or how. Then I read about Kandinsky and how he heard his paint box hissing when he mixed colours, which I thought was fantastic and hilarious - almost like the colours could be quite threatening. It kind of all grew around that, really.’

Hopgood’s use of colour in Here Comes Frankie! lends it a retro feel in keeping with its 1950s jazz influence.

‘I love that period, when things were quite experimental in music and in art. That is summed up on jazz record labels like Verve and Blue Note, so I looked at album covers.

'I wanted a feel of that period to come through in Frankie. The page where Frankie comes home from school with the trumpet in his hand has a background pattern from the 1950s. I stretched it and changed the scale of it. I did the leaves on the trees on that page when I was looking at the 1950s jazz labels.'

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his fondness for jazz, Hopgood always listens to music when illustrating a book. ‘When I’m working I can put on a CD and just have it on replay. It helps me loosen up.

'For Frankie I had on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, but I had Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall as well because I’d got into Quincy Jones. Music’s really important to me, more so than books. I don’t think of myself as a bookish person.’

The clever names on the colour chart that decorates the back endpaper provide a clue to the musical influences underlying the book. ‘I love doing the endpapers,’ he says. ‘You can have so much fun with them. Not everyone’s going to get it, but maybe it will springboard to something else; maybe they’ll go and find out about something. I love the colours on the back endpaper. It’s one of my favourite spreads, in a funny way.’

Here Comes Frankie! has autobiographical origins. Like Frankie, Hopgood was brought up in a quiet home; unlike Frankie, he didn’t turn his parents into music-lovers. ‘My mum wouldn’t even have the radio on. When I was about 16 or 17, through a teacher I got a commission to do some illustrations. I got paid £300 and I went out and bought a stereo, and my parents just freaked out.

'Then I used to buy records all the time. They used to think it was a total waste of money. When I was at junior school I opted to play the violin: nightmare. I think I did a 12-week starter course and it was horrendous. That’s a difficult one if you can’t play.’

He never did learn to play an instrument, and it’s a source of regret. ‘My son plays the drums and, yup, there’s a pain barrier that the whole family has to go through, but in the end it’s worth it.

'I encourage my kids to play musical instruments because I look back and I wish someone would have said to me that I should choose another instrument, to find the one that was right for me. My son started on the keyboard and went to drums and my daughter plays piano and flute. I just play the keyboard – the computer keyboard!’