About
An experienced illustrator and designer based in Herts.
After working for SPCK, Oxfam, Lion and Random House Children’s, I left in 2003 to concentrate my efforts on illustration. Preferring to be adaptable to whatever the book requires, I’ve worked with a variety of visual languages. I also freelanced in-house at Hodder Children's for 12 years, working on fiction covers (young and YA), picture books, special sales materials and other projects such as the heavily paper-engineered Story of Everything by Neal Layton. As a designer I also have significant experience of integrated fiction insides and have designed many of the books I've illustrated (which now amounts to around 70 titles).
In 2019 I completed a two-year Masters in illustration and Authorial Practice at Falmouth University, graduating with Distinction. This has been a wonderful experience as I look to deepen my understanding of the illustrator as an author with their own voice. Graphic novels and sequential narrative are rapidly expanding areas I am pursuing alongside my current freelance work.
I'm always available for commissions or last-minute illustration and design jobs. I work in Adobe CC, with which I am fully conversant.
I am also available for schools workshops and talks having experience in running workshops on comics creation and the basics of telling a story.
In 2019 I spoke at the Worcester Illustration Symposium on the role of Graphic Medicine (using sequential narrative in relation to illness storytelling and patient/medical discourse). I also self published a 176pp Graphic narrative, Afloat (available in my shop).
SKIP TO HERE FOR THE MORE INTERESTING BIT
In 1969 before we had an inside loo I started watching my home town football team. In 1977 we got our first inside loo and shortly afterwards Grantham won the league. I used to perform stand up and on one occasion performed to absolute silence. I love travel and have been abducted in Bolivia, had a wondrously bizarre haircut in Tiblisi and was canoed to hospital in the Amazon (I blamed the outside loo). I love words, ideas, international politics, using image and word together to convey the Sisyphean strangeness of the human condition...oh and cricket and cups of tea. I still watch my football team who now play in a new ground slightly lacking in the old atmosphere but with really nice posh toilets.
PUBLISHING AWARDS
Spud Goes Green (2005 Blue Peter Best Book of Facts)
Yuck's Rotten Joke (chosen as a 2009 World Book Day book)
Do Igloos Have Loos? (2010 Blue Peter Best Book of Facts)
The Covers of My Book are too far Apart (Shortlisted 2017 Independent Book Award)
(Nominated for 2017 Kate Greenaway)