Artists & Illustrators — June 2017

30 Artists & Illustrators

MASTERCLASS

KATE GREENAWAY MEDAL

Making amazing

children’s books

The annual award is the gold standard in illustration for youngsters.

Natalie Milner talks to two of this year’s shortlisted artists to get to the root of their success

Emily Gravett

The double winner is shortlisted again

this year for her new book Tidy

Your Instagram feed shows lots of doodles,

do you find these help your process?

I doodle all the time. Usually people, words or

even numbers, but also the characters I’m

considering using or animals that interest

me. Characters must have started as doodles.

How do you get personality into characters?

Part of doodling characters is learning their

personalities. I know how they would react in

situations. My website has had a rebuild, and

one of the features is Q&As for the

characters. I realised how well I know them.

I heard your pets have been ‘hands-on’ in

your illustration process...

The rats (now long deceased) were brilliant

nibblers and useful during the making of

Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. I coated

plain paper with yoghurt and left it in their

cage for ‘distressing’. I had a dog called Tip,

who I tried to get to chew the corner of an

illustration for my Wolves book, but he was

too well behaved so I had to chew it myself.

In Tidy, Pete (the badger) ends up destroying

the forest in his efforts to keep everything

just so. Where did this idea spring from?

Tidy started as a different idea about a

badger, mole and hamster going on a

treasure hunt, but I couldn’t make it work.

I started to think about what badgers eat

(worms) and what would happen if he

couldn’t get any worms, which made me ask

why he couldn’t get any worms. I was driving

home from the Hay Festival when I saw a

woman hoovering a car park. It seemed

excessively tidy, so I worked it into the book.

Your book is set in a forest. Do you have any

top tips for drawing trees?

I didn’t have a clue how to tackle all those

trees. I spent a lot of time staring at them,

thinking about the seasons, and looking at

how other people depict trees. I settled on

a mish-mash of approaches. I painted the

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