Artist Statement
Empathy
As a children’s picture book illustrator, I enjoy playing with concepts that don’t necessarily exist in the real world. I find it amusing to imagine details that we cannot experience in our day to day lives. I’ve always been fascinated with fairy tales and magic, and love experimenting with these narratives while illustrating my stories. Creating magical tales, tied to a sense of the real world and its issues, is something I passionately love to draw. I believe this approach can also teach children the importance of certain topics in a fun and fundamental way.
The old architecture and landscapes found in northern England were the initial inspiration for both my series “Can You Find Them All?” and for my new picture book Tilly & the Woods. Each piece in the series portrays a different dilemma and secret within the bakery and touches on the theme of “mutual aid”. I’ve done this to pique curiosity in the child viewer through a search-and-find experience. To find all the hidden mice and deeper messages, the viewer may need to look closely at the images and miniature kitchen.
For my process, I digitally sketched my ideas to come up with compositions through experimentation with a variety of expressive brushes such as crayon-like textures and different colour combinations. I wanted my compositions to have dramatic lighting so that the secondary details would be seen after the main action. In each individual piece I wanted to capture the essence of a regular day by showing the little mishaps that can occur and how to deal with them. I wanted to touch on the themes of greed, mutual aid, friendship, and finally empathy as these things are all part of a child’s learning and upbringing.