Windows into illustration: Sarah McIntyre
Sarah McIntyre first studied Russian Literature at university in the USA, and ten years later went on to do an MA in Illustration at Camberwell art college. While she started out illustrating other people’s picture book texts, she learned that she could draw whatever she wanted if she wrote the stories herself, so she did; her picture books include There’s a Shark in the Bath, The New Neighbours and Dinosaur Firefighters. In 2015 she and James Mayhew started up the Pictures Mean Business campaign, showing how everyone benefits when illustrators are credited properly for their work. Here she explains the thinking and technique behind the illustrations in her new book Grumpycorn.
I sometimes paint my illustrations on watercolour paper, and sometimes work mixing ink or pencil line drawings with digital colouring. But when I set out to illustrate my latest picture book Grumpycorn,
I’d just come off of working on The New
Neighbours, which involved a lot of digital work. I liked the effect I got in Photoshop, but I was tired of scanning and staring at a computer screen. So with Grumpycorn, I decided I wanted to do something entirely with real paint, and push my painting skills in a new direction. Here’s the book’s back endpapers, when I’d finished all the other pictures, got a grip on the technique, and could relax into making one last lavish spread.
A lot of my earlier work (such as Dinosaur Firefighters) relied very heavily on black outlines, painted in, much like a colouring book. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, but Grumpycorn features a lot
10 Books for Keeps No.237 July 2019
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