As Clive Hicks-Jenkins picks up his paintbrush, he’s ready to draw on a surprisingly eclectic range of experience. With a background in acting, choreography, directing, painting and puppetry, the illustrator’s path to the world of art on page is rich and varied. So, when Folio began work on a new edition of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, the team knew they had to have him on board.

‘There are many resources when it comes to ancient Greece, but you have to be cautious or everything begins to look like a statue or an image on a vase. I went to the British Museum to make drawings to get in the spirit – I needed to understand the historical accuracy first, to be able to later account for why I was offering a different view. But then as an illustrator I have to pull back and create something unique. It’s a conundrum!’

Once the scenes were decided, he laid down gouache – an opaque, water-based paint – in the six colours he mixed specially for the poems, then drew on top with coloured pencils. ‘I also built models out of cardboard, such as the Greek wall with the gate that Hector knocks through, and lit them with torches. It’s more interesting to create a model and light it than to imagine it.’ With his knowledge of puppetry, he also makes rough, articulated maquettes of his characters, ‘so I can arrange them in different ways, draw and rearrange them.’

Clive says Folio had suggested black and white for Homer, but he had another idea. ‘I presented the Folio team with a painting I’d done called Startled Peacocks – of mythical beasts fighting, with a colour palette of yellows, blues and greens – and suggested a similar approach for Homer. And they went for it.

Emily Wilson’s translation is illuminating, says Clive. ‘She brings a distaff point of view, rather than the endless sabre-rattling of men. In this way, she manages to tip the balance slightly.’ The project made for some difficult logistical choices. ‘With space for ten double-page drawings for each poem, I had to make a wishlist and then edit that down. I would have liked to focus on Achilles’ wife, Briseis, for example, but she didn’t make the final cut. I’ve worked with horses all my life, so I spent far too long on the chariots!

‘I couldn’t let Achilles have all the drawings, either. I tried to get three or four characters into each spread. There’s gilded Apollo, the Sun God, shooting poisoned arrows at the Greeks, who is also cruel and vain. My favourite character is Athena – she is such a piece of work! She has her spear, chariot and shield, and she wears a kind of poncho that is edged with snakes. She wears a man’s war helmet and her hair streams out from under it. She is so envious and angry, it really gives me a kick to draw her.’

Working from his studio in the Welsh countryside – ‘I go out there early, in my head torch while the owls give way to the blackbirds’ – the project has been an 18-month labour of love. ‘Having read and absorbed both poems twice before starting, making drawings along the way, I feel as though I’m really under the skin. The ancient world is a fallacy – much of how we think something looked isn’t how it actually looked – so I wanted the whole thing to be recognisable but also fresh,’ he says. ‘Ancient but itself, and doing justice to these incredible poems.’