Liévano uses various techniques and materials throughout the books that he borrows from his personal work. He’s an author and lover of graphic novels, but for this project uses sequential frames in a nonlinear way to compound the overall sense of many things going on at once in the complex narratives. And while mystical happenings occur in the stories, much is set in mundane, routine reality. Liévano scans his pencil sketches and pastel drawings, and even photos of clothing, to add real world textures to his digital works.
The Folio Society affords Liévano about four to six months to work on each book. “Which is good, because they’re bricks,” he says. Without leaving Bogotá, he spends hours in fictional Tokyo and beyond, reading Murakami’s novels multiple times, taking notes and highlighting the scenes he’d like to illustrate. Then he studies academic readings of those scenes online to better understand their meaning. He’s found himself challenged by some of the author’s more disturbing scenes— grappling with whether to include them or not—while transported by others. While he’s reading he also takes notes of physical objects (umbrellas, cats, glasses of whisky, telephones and other quintessential Murakami symbols) that become small spot illustrations at the start of every chapter. Final illustration selections are made rather practically, considering the binding of the books as they’re printed on different paper to the text.
