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and told me to find my niche and just focus on one thing. “So I tailored my portfolio to food because I can relate to that. Raw ingredients are really beautiful. Amazingly, one publisher – not Penguin – asked me to illustrate their next series of books. This series of books kept on going and going, and I illustrated over a hundred books for them, within the space of three years. “It wasn’t because I was
particularly any good, I promise you I wasn’t. It was simply because I produced everything on time and stuck entirely to the brief, not flexing and insisting on a different colour or angle. I suspect this alone probably came as a relief to publishers! And to be honest, I was just really, really glad to have a constant flow of work.” Anna began by illustrating
cookery and lifestyle books before diversifying into natural history and wildlife illustration. After taking a back seat for a few
years following the birth of her three children, she returned to the fray only to discover her former contacts in the publishing industry had all left to have their own children.
She set about forging new
connections on social media, using Twitter and Instagram to hook up with prominent authors and chefs and promote her work. “Social media took off properly and suddenly I had access to this whole new network of authors,” she said. “I didn’t have to communicate via their publishers or their PAs because the authors themselves were here, using the platforms and delighted to chat with anyone. “It’s a fabulous medium and somehow I’ve recreated a network. I’m not sure how it happened, I suppose I used Twitter and Instagram as an opportunity to talk with these people about things that we both had a mutual interest in. “And so if I saw, for instance,
[Michelin chef] Nathan Outlaw chatting on about fish, I would
naturally interact with him. We both love fish. Now he’s got a whole wall covered in my work. He’s been a brilliant advocate of my art, which is very, very kind of him. “The interest grew and to my
amazement I was back illustrating full time once more.”
And then I’ll put it in the freezer, hopefully remembering to label it first so I can bring it out for reference when needed. I approach all my illustrations the same way, whether food, natural history or wildlife.” Anna’s illustrations naturally go hand-in-hand with her own writing. She has penned two books describing an artist’s year in paint and pen. The first ‘From Field & Forest’ took inspiration from the flora and fauna in the fields and forests surrounding her former home in East Sussex. After moving with her family to
Anna says she is a “detail freak,” adding: “Anything which has been freshly caught or harvested is immediately intriguing to me. I want to try and capture everything about it - the shape and form, the
a Grade II listed farmhouse near Dittisham in 2020, Anna now finds inspiration in the ebb and flow of the tide throughout the year. A love letter to the natural world ‘From Coast & Cove’ combines her exquisite illustrations of the plants
vividness of colour. With food, the first signal to your stomach is visual. It’s falling in love with food simply for the look of it, before you’ve even touched a knife. It’s that visual impact that I really want to recreate on paper or canvas. So where fish are concerned, I’ll take many, many photographs to make sure I’ve been able to capture the colour, and then I’ll draw many sketches of it so I get the form and can comprehend the details of how it all falls into place – it’s structure, bones, fins, how it lies, everything.
and wildlife found in the water and along the coastline, with emotive and evocative tales of life beside the sea. “When I moved here my publisher said, “You mentioned the possibility of doing the same kind of book for the coast because your parents live in Cornwall and you’re from Cornwall. Well, now you’ve moved to Devon, we’d love it if you could go ahead and start writing.” “In Sussex we’d lived in the same
house for 20 years and I’d seen the miraculous change of this field and
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