Featured Illustrator: Sarah Palmer

2015 promises to be an inspiring year, and Words and Pictures is proud to welcome a fresh new artist as our first Featured Illustrator of the year. Sarah Palmer is a graduate of the MA course in Children's Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art, and one of the illustration winners of last year's Undiscovered Voices. See more of her work on the Featured Illustrator Gallery.

Background

Growing up, I loved to draw.  My mum and dad always encouraged me, and I spent many happy hours drawing flowers in our garden. 

Drawing in the garden

My Grandad was a brilliant amateur wildlife artist.  One of my treasured possessions is a picture of ostriches that Grandad drew and I painted. 

Painting done with Grandad

I enjoyed lots of different subjects at school, but I knew that I wanted to do something creative.  However, I was surprised and disappointed to find myself struggling with my Art A-level course.  It really knocked my confidence and ruined any chance that I would look at a degree in illustration, so I chose to study for a Graphic Design degree at university.

Although I loved my time at university, and quite enjoyed the course, it just wasn't quite the right 'fit' for me. I most enjoyed designing for print, but multimedia was the 'big thing' when I left university in 2000, so I looked for a job outside the area of graphic design.

Towards Children's Illustration

After several years, I was aware of a desire to express myself creatively, but also a need for some structure, as I was a bit lost and directionless under my own steam. I looked around for some distance-learning opportunities, as I worked full-time, and found a Diploma in Children's Book Illustration.  It was just what I needed and taught me two big lessons.  Firstly, that I really enjoyed creating imaginary creatures, like this little fella who lives under the sink... 

Sebastian's Sink City

 Secondly, it taught me that I needed to connect emotionally with the topic in order to really engage with a project.  We were just given a title for our final piece of work: "Singer of Starlight".  It made me think of all the times that my nan used to sing me to sleep when I was little (and not very good at sleeping!).  

Singer of Starlight

 The diploma was the 'push' I needed and I looked for ways to develop my illustration further.  I stumbled upon information about the MA in Children's Book Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art and knew I needed to do the course!  It took a couple of years, but I managed to drop a day at work, and start the part-time course in 2011.  It was brilliant and I learnt so much over the two-and-a-half years.

It was during the MA that my friend encouraged me to enter the Undiscovered Voices competition and I was delighted that my illustration for Amy Warburton's Most Unusual Pet was chosen as one of the winning entries.  

Entry for Undiscovered Voices 2014

By the time I had completed the MA, I had written and illustrated two picturebook stories and had developed an idea for a boardbook, which I had never imagined would be possible for me! 

Spread from “The Problem Pet”, a story about a worry monster

Tips

I feel (and hope!) that I am at the beginning of the 'journey' and therefore don't feel in the best position to offer tips... 

But, for what it's worth, I would say that I think it's really important to experiment.  Don't dismiss anything until you've tried it. 

Character ideas for the worry monster

Also, don't ignore the dummy book stage - enjoy it!  I loved creating the dummy book for the Monster Meals board book.   

Dummy book for “Monster Meals”

 Finally, (and I'm shouting this at myself) believe people when they compliment your work and accept any help / advice / critiques that you're offered!  

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See more of Sarah's work on her Featured Illustrator Gallery!
Sarah's blog is here
To contact Sarah email sarahloupalmer@gmail.com

Featured Illustrator: James Brown

James Brown is this month’s Featured Illustrator. One of the winning artists in last year’s Undiscovered Voices, James studied English Literature at Sheffield and Stockholm Universities before taking an MLitt (Master of Letters) in Creative Writing at St Andrews. Illustration has always featured in James’ work, he came third in the 2014 Illustrate It competition and is now represented by United Agents. Find more of James’ artwork in the Featured Illustrator Gallery.



To some people, Twitter is a dangerous place full of trolls blurting out horrid things, following you around and popping up when you least expect them to. But in the children's writing and illustration community this is not so. People are friendly, supportive, enthusiastic and reassuring, particularly to someone like me who two years ago knew nothing about Twitter and had just set off in search of The World of Publishing, hoping one day to find himself on bookshelves across the land.

It’s through Twitter I learnt about the SCBWI and its Undiscovered Voices competition. Having joined, I was spoiled for choice in picking which story starter extract to illustrate, but for me the one that leapt off the page was Maureen Lynas’ Sophie in Gargantua. Immediately I could picture the arch of the scene and Sophie’s trailing curls. An hour later I’d drawn the main characters, along with other bits and bobs, and went on to glue them together digitally.

My winning image for SCBWI Undiscovered Voices 2014 based on
Maureen Lynas’ story Sophie in Gargantua.

I remember Jan Carr being incredibly helpful when I was submitting my entry. And then it was a waiting game.

December arrived and so did an email that told me I’d won a place in the 2014 Undiscovered Voices anthology. The winning illustrators were all invited for a ‘portfolio intensive’ with Anne-Marie Perks, John Shelley, Bridget Strevens-Marzo and Loretta Schauer who were all incredibly supportive and generous with their advice. It was a rigorous and thought-provoking day and helped us prepare for the February launch to meet agents and publishers. Being in the anthology was wonderful; as a result I was offered representation by several agencies and I’m thrilled to be represented by Jodie Hodges at United Agents who fell in love with my Santa Claus:

The image that got me ‘spotted’ on Twitter.

Meeting Chris Riddell at the launch party was pretty awe-inspiring. He took the time to chat to each of us about his work and his speech was riddell-ed with humour, much like his artwork. And the evening just got better. If I hadn’t entered the competition, and if Ali Ardington at Stripes hadn’t seen Sophie in the anthology, then perhaps I wouldn’t be looking forward to two Elspeth Hart books (written by Sarah Forbes and illustrated by me) coming out in May and September next year. Before long I was doing character sketches and spending the summer drafting roughs and then the final artwork for Book 1:

A rough and final image of the main character in Sarah Forbes’
Elspeth Hart and the School for Show-offs, published May 2015.

For black and white illustration I use pencil, fine nib pens and Faber-Castell crayons (usually blacks, greys, browns). I then enhance using Photoshop.

At the launch party I also met Fliss Johnston from Orion who liked my colour illustrations for younger readers. From meeting Fliss, I’m now writing and illustrating two books for the Early Readers series, published in 2016. For the artwork, I sketch in pencil then use crayon and a lightbox before colouring with watercolour and gouache (ramped up with Photoshop). This project is very dear to me and I can’t wait for the books to hit the shelves. I’m a great fan of Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry and Kaye Umansky’s Algy’s Amazing Adventures. I can’t believe I’ll be part of the same series, especially with illustrators like Tony Ross and Richard Watson.

The style of illustration for my books published by Orion in 2016.

One or two of my rhyming picture book texts are in the pipeline with publishers too… I love picture books. My texts are usually a bit bonkers with a twist at the end.
I’ve always found books compelling. It’s their smell and texture, the pause between the pages, the way the illustrations add even more to each narrative. I get lost in details. I’d pore over Errol Le Cain’s The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Arthur Rackham’s Peter Pan. I remember reading Dahl’s The Magic Finger over and over and listening to James and the Giant Peach and George’s Marvellous Medicine on my tape player so much that I’d have to wind the tangled tape back into the cassettes with a pencil. And then I’d spend hours drawing and painting at the dining room table, something my daughter Eliza loves doing now too. I’ve no idea where she gets it from… Rather than spreading out on the dining room table, I’ve now got a work station (which is strictly out of bounds to the cat and sticky-fingered children):

Here is my bubble.

It’s surrounded by my favourite authors and illustrators (such as Sally Gardner, Caryl Hart, John Boyne, Peter Bently, Tracey Corderoy, Oliver Jeffers, David Roberts, Alex T Smith, Nikki Dyson, Steven Lenton, Jim Field, Rebecca Cobb, Benji Davies, Leigh Hodgkinson, Steve Antony, Sara Ogilvie, Ed Vere, Kate Hindley, Becka Moor, Ella Bailey and Mei Matsuoka). I have lots of Moleskine sketch books to hand and I tend to draft and write initial story ideas on my phone.

Tips 

Having a Twitter account and joining the SCBWI have made me realize how important it is to share your ideas and passion with other like-minded people. If you have a question about something, always ask. If there’s a conference or talk with your favourite authors and illustrators, go to it. Research. Contact people. Meet people. Act on advice. Read as much as you can – not only your favourite texts but also literature about publishing. Sketch then trace over using a lightbox. Overall, be flexible: people in the field know what they’re talking about.

Venturing into the world of children’s books has brought me one step closer to sitting on bookshelves for others to reach out and, hopefully, pore over. The help I’m enjoying along the way is due in no small part to the leg-up the SCBWI has given me.

Elspeth Hart and the School for Show-offs, written by Sarah Forbes and illustrated by James Brown, is released in May 2015. It is available for pre-order now.

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See more of James' work in the Featured Illustrator Gallery.
Follow James on Twitter at: @jb_illustrates
He is represented by Jodie Hodges at United Agents
jhodges@unitedagents.co.uk

Featured Illustrator: John Shelley

This month's Featured Illustrator is our Friday editor, John Shelley. Having formerly lived in Tokyo for many years, John has developed a uniquely international career, working directly with publishers in Japan and the USA as well as the UK on over 50 books. But how did his journey start? 
Check the Featured Illustrator Gallery to see a broad selection of illustration from John's recent titles. 

The Banner

from Crinkle, Crackle, Crack! (Holiday House USA, 2015)

The banner illustration is from my next picture book, Crinkle, Crackle, Crack!, written by Marion Dane Bauer, released in January. A child wakes at night and is guided by a bear through the cold, dark winter towards a nameless destination. Joined by other animals, they eventually find a giant egg that bursts to reveal the warmth and colour of Spring. Crinkle, Crackle, Crack! is a book very close to my heart. Though written by Marion, it's also my story, I've often felt like a child stumbling along an unexplored path towards an intangible goal in the dark. 

Where it Started

The truth is I've only reached this far down the path through luck.

The shipwreck from Peer Gynt, on the left from my music study book aged
around 12 or 13, on the right the same scene from the picture book Peer Gynt 
 (Hyoronsha, Tokyo, 1990), drawn when I was 30. Some things don't change!

I was the quiet mouse of the school classroom with an obsession for doodling and collecting Airfix plastic models. I covered the margins of school books (and sometimes desktops) with renderings of old battles and dogfights, painting model aeroplanes and Napoleonic soldiers were my first lessons in how to handle a detail brush. When Sutton Coldfield was incorporated into Birmingham City Council all our school books were replaced by new ones, which meant I had loads of old and unused exercise books to scribble away in, my first stroke of luck! I spent a lot of time filling these up with my versions of Commando war comics in the style of Josè Maria Jorge, my first big art hero. Through his work I learned a lot about light and shadow. At the same time through my local library children's illustrators like Edward Ardizzone and Alfred Bestall instilled a love of fantasy.

When I was fourteen, my dad bought me for Christmas a set of the Adrian Hill "teach yourself" guides to drawing and painting, and I turned to sketching things directly from life, still entirely in ballpoint pen on old exercise books. 2nd bit of luck... one day the class bully threw my school bag across the art room, scattering the contents everywhere.... Out came all my sketchbooks and drawings, to the surprise of the art teachers, who barely seemed to have noticed me until then. I was "discovered", suddenly the class mouse became the class master artist. For some reason I never got around to thanking the bully. 

School exercise books turned into Biro sketch pads

Here's the third stroke of luck - at the seaside in Cornwall one year I picked up a couple of whimsical bookmarks as souvenirs. My holiday reading was pretty dull, but something about the illustrations on these bookmarks sucked me in like no other art ever had before. They were organic, they were mysterious, like windows into another world. I found out they were by Arthur Rackham - soon I was engrossed in the world of Edwardian "Golden Age" illustrators: Rackham, Heath-Robinson, Dulac, and later Beardsley, I was enraptured, entranced - THIS was what I wanted to do with my life. Now I spent my time in the deepest, dark woods of Sutton Park looking for mythical creatures. If before I had my head in the clouds flying Spitfires, now I was definitely away with the fairies - there really was no hope.

I was impatient, I wanted to be an illustrator, now. So I spent sixth form years writing a sprawling fantasy novel. It seemed a logical way to begin - write the book so I could illustrate it! After being sensibly rejected by two publishers, the manuscript was consigned to my dad's loft. I swore I'd never write a children's story again, packed my bags and set off for art school.

How NOT to submit a novel - one sole copy, close typed on a 1930's Corona
typewriter from notebooks (school exercise books again), no editing whatsoever...
and if you wonder if I'm going to show you the quaintly derivative illustrations,
think again! Argh!

Manchester and London

My fourth bit of luck was being accepted onto the Illustration course at Manchester Polytechnic, run by Tony Ross. This was 1978, Manchester was a factory of iconic music that brought me screaming into the contemporary world. Tony and the other tutors did their best to shake up my illustrations too - out with goblins and fairies, in with urban streets, primary colours and strong character. They were right, I had to move on, develop, constantly refresh! On the last day of the degree course in an act of post-punk pantomime I threw most of my student work out of the college window.

Whilst dabbling with music journalism for a year I worked on a new portfolio, and so came another lucky break, my first ever commission from Jill Coleman at A & C Black, to illustrate Fatbag, a children's novel by then-unknown Jeremy Strong, a book which still remains in print in paperback with my black & white drawings today, 32 years later. Other book commissions for text illustration followed - Get Lavinia Goodbody! (Andersen Press) and A Canoe in the Mist (Jonathan Cape). By 1984 I was in a communal art studio in London sharing a room with Jane Ray, being fed a steady diet of pen & ink editorial jobs and colour book jackets.

London opened my eyes to art from other eras and countries. I began researching styles that had influenced my illustration heroes, particularly Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints... a new world was sucking me in. Pam Royds at André Deutsch then gave me my first trade picture book commission, Val Willis's The Secret in the Matchbox. 

from The Secret in the Matchbox (Andre Deutsch/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 1988

However this proved to be the last thing I did in the UK. A chance attendance at a Japanese festival in Battersea had pulled me into the Anglo-Japanese community in London, the lure of the East had it's grip on me. The Secret in the Matchbox was a big success, especially in the US, and led on to two more follow-ups. In the UK I was runner-up for the Mother Goose Award but my publisher had to receive the award on my behalf, for by then I was in Tokyo.

Japan

A year off in Japan seemed like a great idea - zip out, study the culture and language, zip back and carry on in old London town. Clients would hardly know I was gone. Oh little did I know! After months of soaking up the atmosphere in Tokyo's downtown Yanesen area and watching my funds evaporate, in another stroke of luck I was introduced to fashionable Parco Department Store. Parco commissioned me to do a series of posters, which led on to other big advertising jobs. Suddenly I was the latest "thing" from London. A simpler stripped down graphic version of my children's book style seemed to hit a nerve with the Japanese zeitgeist, one year turned into two, then five - in the end I spent twenty-one years as the resident overseas illustrator in Japan (also fashion model/actor and sometime DJ, though that's another story!).

At the peak of things in the early 90's you couldn't get on a train without seeing my drawings somewhere.

I also continued to illustrate children's books, including some self written and translated into Japanese. On the whole, Japanese publishers approached me with very clear ideas of what they wanted. I was an authentic European illustrator so was often asked to work in a traditional English style on folk tales like Cinderella, The Month Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen or Jack and the Beanstalk. Editors felt I could give a more faithful rendering to these stories than Japanese artists.

Various picture books for Japanese publishers

The Ball, from Cinderella (Hikari no Kuni, 1996)

I particularly loved illustrating Japanese translations of Western novels that had no illustration in their original UK/US editions, like Jenny Nimmo's Charlie Bone books, or works that required a style more acceptable to Japanese tastes than their original Western editions, like Robin Jarvis's The Deptford Mice.

Text illustration to the Japanese edition of Charlie Bone 
and the Castle of Mirrors (Tokuma Shoten, 2006)

 

Cover and interior cut from the Japanese editions of The Deptford Mice 
(Hayakawa Shobo, 2004)

As times moved on, I shifted more and more away from advertising back towards children's publishing. The internet opened new avenues, I joined SCBWI in 2001 and soon after was persuaded to co-found the Tokyo chapter. I re-connected with Stephen Roxburgh, the US editor who had bought the rights to Secret in the Matchbox, who commissioned me for new titles. I found an agent in the States. Through SCBWI I had the chance to travel to many countries, doors opened and connections were made that have led to several book commissions. 

from The Boat in the Tree by Tim Wynne-Jones (Front Street Inc, 2007)
editor Stephen Roxburgh

My first commission from Charlesbridge in the US was Julie Danneberg's
historical novel Family Reminders (2009), a connection with the publisher
first made through SCBWI at Bologna.

Then lady luck came knocking again, only this time it wasn't good fortune she brought.

Return to the UK

At the end of 2007 my wife died very suddenly and unexpectedly. Soon after, in the consequent fall out, I found myself with my 4-year old daughter on a plane back to the UK. Everything changed once again. I'd been away for 21 years, it felt like starting over again from scratch. Fortunately I had friends in children's publishing. I especially thank all my dear colleagues in SCBWI British Isles for the support I received since our return here, I'm indebted to you all.

Returning to the UK has had a very beneficial effect on my work. Largely freed from editors with stylistic agendas, my books in recent years are closer to my core as an illustrator than they've ever been. 

From Marion Dane Bauer's Halloween Forest (Holiday House, 2012)

I'm creeping down that uncharted path of creativity with ever greater curiosity. Almost like the theme of my last book Stone Giant, I feel as if my art is going through a personal renaissance.

from Stone Giant - Michelangelo's David and How He Came to Be
written by Jane Sutcliffe (Charlesbridge, USA, 2014)

So, like the child in Crinkle, Crackle, Crack!, whatever bumps and potholes are on the way, as long as I keep drawing, exploring and following the path, all will be well. I feel luckier than ever now. And I've my own three warm, fluffy companions - my daughter, my cat ...and SCBWI!

from Crinkle, Crackle, Crack! (Holiday House USA, 2015)

Publishing Tips

It's tough to maintain a career as a children's illustrator today. The key is to diversify, explore widely and think laterally. Identify where your work fits in and exploit opportunities.

Always maintain the integrity of your imaginative world. Developing your style to the requirements of the marketplace is important, but never lose sight of the essence of what it is that makes you draw or paint. Your personality should flow through your work. Like chameleons we match our styles to the market, but our DNA remains the same. 

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John Shelley is the Illustration Feature Editor of Words & Pictures and current Central East Network coordinator. See more of his recent work in our Featured Illustrator Gallery

John's website is  www.jshelley.com.
His English language blog is Shelley Scraps. 
Twitter: @Godfox
art@jshelley.com

Featured Illustrator - Julia Walther

Julia Walther is this month's Featured Illustrator. One of the winning artists in last year's Undiscovered Voices, Julia has devoted much of her life to literature, both through studying literature and translation in her native Germany and Ireland, and through working as a translator within German publishing. But her heart was set on writing and illustration, where she's now also beginning to make her mark. Find more of Julia's artwork in the Featured Illustrator Gallery



One fine October day I was wandering through the huge halls of the Frankfurt Bookfair. I’d been there many times before because of my job as a literary translator, but on that particular day I happened to be free to listen to some talks by the German illustration association, to stroll through the exhibition showcasing the most beautiful books and to spend hours among the stalls of children’s book publishers.

That was the day I decided to pursue my dream to become an illustrator.

As soon as I got home I went online and started searching for illustration workshops – anything that would help me along and wasn’t another full-time college course. There wasn’t really much on offer. With one exception: a weekend event near Munich only a couple of weeks later by an organisation I’d never heard of. Ah well, I thought, I might as well give it a go and email them to see if there are still places available. There were.

Bridget, Kirsten and Donna made me feel incredibly welcome, and there was a whole bunch of lovely people there, as there always are at SCBWI events.

That was three years ago and a lot has happened since. Apart from the many inspiring regional SCBWI events, there was the amazing Europolitan conference in Paris in 2013, and I also got to travel to Winchester to experience the great buzz at one of the annual British Isles conferences with all the wonderful people there (including some of the fabulous team behind Words and Pictures – thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this and for making it all possible!)

One of the highlights was, of course, the day I heard that my illustration was among those to be included in the Undiscovered Voices 2013 publication!

I had chosen that particular story starter partly because I was intrigued by the theatre atmosphere described so vividly in the text. I also liked the challenge to create an illustration that would appeal to a YA audience. It was actually my first black-and-white ink illustration in that style. Here are a couple pictures from the process:

Creating the illustration for UV 2013.

Because I was quite happy with the result and had spent a lot of time thinking about the scene between Ruby and her Dad, I decided to create another two pieces illustrating what I imagined might happen after this first encounter.

My studio space is very flexible: when I’m working full-time on something it tends to spread out from its contained corner to an extra desk and eventually on to the dining table.

Drawing of me working away at my art desk.

The corner desk is great because it has lots of shelves and spaces to store things. Everything has its place because I hate searching for stuff, yet sometimes I feel somebody messed around with my brushes and pens while I was asleep or in the other room working on a translation … 

Mice often find their way into most of my work!

If I had to choose a single desert-island art material it would be my favourite 2B pencil. I’ve always loved drawing and I got my first set of watercolours when I was nine, so I feel pretty comfortable with that medium. Thus, pencil and watercolour is what I choose for most of my illustrations, except the ink drawings. When I’m working on a watercolour piece there usually comes a point when my inner draftswoman starts elbowing her way to the front calling for clearer lines, i.e. some sepia ink, or more contrast between light and dark. That’s why I often add final touches with coloured pencils, but a while ago I discovered the amazing qualities of pastel pencils, which are much easier to blend with the watercolour – especially on coldpress paper.

I can’t see myself ever switching over to digital illustration because I simply love the feel of pencil on paper too much, as well as being surrounded by ink bottles and watercolour tubes. However, I’ve begun to appreciate the advantages of Photoshop, in particular at the sketching stage where you can try out new compositions by moving objects around etc. without having to redraw everything.

Studio space.

Illustration of the corner of my desk.

Over the past three years I've learned A LOT about children’s book illustration, yet there is still SO much more to learn, and sometimes I feel I’m only at the beginning of this exciting journey.
However, so far one of the most important lessons for me was this:
it’s incredibly inspiring, encouraging and invigorating to go to workshops and conferences, to talk to other artists, to read books about art and illustration, to look at art. But what makes me an illustrator is to sit down at my desk, silence the inner critics, pick up a pencil or brush and create new work.

Personal work to illustrate a friend’s story.

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See more of Julia's work in her Featured Illustrator Gallery
Her personal website is here.
To email Julia click here
Julia Walther is represented by Maria Bogade at Wundergarden Agency

Featured Illustrator: Anna Violet

For Featured Illustrator this month we spotlight Manchester based artist Anna Violet. A familiar presence in SCBWI and contributor to Words & Pictures, Anna's tactile and vibrant illustrations are rendered in a wide variety of materials including watercolour, ink and collage, all tied together with her own idiosyncratic style. See the Featured Illustrator Gallery for more examples of her work.

Personal path

Anna Violet - self portrait as a child

I was a child in the 1960s. I grew up with illustrations by Jean Primrose (Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, author Rumer Godden, 1961), Maurice Wilson (Fables from Aesop retold by James Reeves, 1961), Shirley Hughes (My Naughty Little Sister, author Dorothy Edwards, 1969) Alice and Martin Provensen (Iliad and the Odyssey, retold by Jane Werner Watson, 1965) and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, 1964).

Maurice Wilson's illustrations captivated me,
especially his foxes

This book even had instructions on how to make a
Japanese house!

Clumsy, messy and shy, I pondered on whether pigs could really fly and if fairies and harvest mice roamed wild in our garden. When I wasn't arguing with my brothers, looking after my mice or searching for dragons with my fairy wand, I had my nose in a book and my fingers in the pencils, mud and modelling clay. I was really chuffed to win a runner-up consolation prize in a Kellogg's Cornflakes competition for my drawing of a tram. I was also very proud of a Japanese doll's house I made from firelighters.

My drawing of a bus.

I didn't want to grow up, but accepted the inevitable when I hit my my teens. I trained and worked as a landscape architect for over 15 years, for three different councils. Armed with a parallel motion drawing board, a set square and stencils, I drew onto large sheets of tracing paper with technical drawing pens, scratched out mistakes with scalpel blades, and coloured-in dyeline prints with pantone pen markers. Computer-aided design was a mere speck on the horizon. Sometimes, I also had fun making models for meetings. At weekends, I made mess with clay and slip-trailers.

Paints, wobbly lines and happy accidents

When I became a mother in my thirties, I revisited childhood. My first born developed type 1 diabetes as a toddler and I became very focussed on home. It was a joy to rediscover picture books and children's fiction and share them with my children. I was impressed by Gerald Rose (Ahh Said Stork, 1977), John Burningham (Oi Get Off Our Train, 1989), Nick Butterworth (After The Storm, 1992), Margaret Bloy Graham (Harry the Dirty Dog, author Gene Zion, 1956), Cressida Cowell (How to Train Your Dragon series), Dave McKean (Varjak Paw series, author SF Said, 2003), Antony Browne (Voices in the Park, 1998), Patrick Benson (Owl Babies, author Martin Waddell, 1992), Satoshi Kitamura (Angry Arthur, author Hiawyn Oram, 1997) and Sam Lloyd (Mr Pusskins, 2006).

I love all the different marks Sam Lloyd uses in her illustrations.

One of my paintings from 1990s.

I loved messing around with paints, wobbly lines and happy accidents, without the constraints of technical drawing. I exhibited in galleries and did craft sessions with children. In 2006, I was lucky to get the chance to do a degree in illustration and get up to speed with computer technology and contemporary illustration at Stockport College, a bus-ride away. I graduated in 2009. I was introduced to the work of graphic designers and illustrators, including Paul Rand, Saul Steinberg, Christopher Corr and Beatrice Alemagna. I experimented with new toolkits (especially ink and string) and developed collage skills. I learnt the value of playfulness and I learnt the mantra, 'Less is More'. I started to sell limited edition prints of Manchester scenes and do decorative maps and commissions.

Decorative map for National Trust leaflet 2010 (Anna Violet)

Castlefield area in Manchester  (Anna Violet)

 Technique

I begin my images by sketching and playing around with marks. Then I cut, scan, copy and collage. I do lots of observational drawings in my sketchbooks, and sometimes these lead to ideas.

My sketchbook pages with start of hedgehog character

My sketchbook images from Cheshire Show 2014.
Start of new goat character.

My sketchbook images from Cheshire Show 2014

In 2009, I joined SCBWI and shared stories with other illustrators and writers in crit groups, both online and in the Manchester group. In 2010, I won the Undiscovered Voices Tribute Illustration competition.

My winning entry for scbwi Undiscovered Voices
Tribute Illustration competition

I went to SCBWI masterclasses and the SCBWI conference 2011. I started to appreciate author-illustrators  Catherine Rayner (Augustus and His Smile, 2006), Alexis Deacon (Beegu, 2003), Helen Stephens (How to Hide a Lion, 2014), Lizzy Finlay (Dandylion, 2009), Sarah McIntyre (Sharks in the Bath, 2014) and Jon Klassen. In 2013, I won the SCBWI Promo Mailer competition and my prickly hedgehog image was selected for the 2013/2014 touring SCBWI Illustration Showcase.  My illustrations have been published in Oxford Reading Tree Books in 2011 (How Anansi Got His Stories, level 8) and 2014 (Big Ears and Sticky Fingers, Infact level 9) and Spider magazine (Carus Publishing) 2013.

How Anansi Got His Stories (OUP 2011)

I've been developing my writing with several picture book stories - stories with harvest mice, fledgling umbrella birds, frogs, wrens, shrews, foxes and dragons. Oh, and I've been pondering again on whether pigs can really fly...

Pig flying over Beech Road, Manchester (Anna Violet)

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Check Anna's Featured Illustrator Gallery page to see many more examples of her work. Her personal website is at  www.annaviolet.co.uk
Follow Anna on her blog here