Join the in-person Panel discussion for tips on how to start working as an illustrator.
This friendly panel of illustration professionals will share their insights and advice for getting your personal and professional practice up-and-running. From finding the right opportunities and people to work with, to nurturing an online presence and nailing application forms, we’ve got you covered. Bring your notebook and lots of questions! To learn more about the event and to book tickets head to their website.
Speakers:
Olivia Ahmad (Chair) is a UK-based curator and editor specialising in graphic arts and design. She is Artistic Director at House of Illustration in London, where her recent work has included exhibitions on socialist design and developing the UK’s only dedicated residency for illustrators. From 2018-2021 Olivia was editor of Varoom, the UK-based contemporary illustration magazine published by the Association of Illustrators. Her books include New York: Lucinda Rogers Drawings 1988-2018 (ed., West Street Press) and 100 Figures: The Unseen Art of Quentin Blake (Tate Publishing).
Sarah Morris is the Membership Manager at the AOI and a former Illustration Agent, with a wealth of commercial knowledge and passion for illustration, design and supporting the industry. A people person and nurturer of talent, Sarah is passionate about championing creativity, new talent and is committed to helping make the industry more accessible.
Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán is an illustrator based in London. She graduated in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art in 2021. Sharpay’s work explores social histories by combining drawing with field and archival research. She is House of Illustration’s first Engine House Graduate Resident and her work has been displayed at Tate Britain and her project Pearl’s Daughters has been shortlisted in this year’s V&A Illustration Awards. Sharpay’s editorial illustrations have appeared in The New York Times and Die Zeit.
George Morton is an artist agent and freelance illustrator. Since graduating from his illustration degree nearly ten years ago, he has accumulated a broad range of experience from an array of creative agencies working across branding, design, illustration, events and advertising. A freelance illustrator himself; he has worked with clients including Amnesty International, Condé Nast and Vans. George joined artist representation agency Grand Matter in 2018 and now works as a Senior Creative Agent at the agency; working with artists and clients across all types of commissions, whilst also heading up social media and assisting with studio campaigns and editorial projects.
Chanté Timothy is an illustrator who loves experimenting with movement, vibrant colour, character design and storytelling. Chanté is a Pathways into Children’s Publishing 2019 – 2021 Alumni and here illustrations can be found in seven children’s books including Hey You! by Dapo Adeola, Daddy Do My Hair: Beth’s Twists by Tola Okogwu, and Legacies by The Black Curriculum.
About New Designers:
Full of disruptive thinking, ambitious ideas and fresh approaches, New Designers presents the work of 3,000 hand-picked graduate design talents from around the country. Hosted at London’s Business Design Centre 29 June – 2 July & 6 July – 9 July, the show explores every discipline of modern making.
The work on display is complemented by an extensive range of design-focused talks and events, a hands-on printing workshop and prestigious Awards programme.
To learn more about the event and to book tickets head to their website.
(image: Panel Members L-R Olivia Ahmad, Sarah Morris, Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán, George Morton, Chanté Timothy)
By Jacqueline Ayer
Published by Enchanted Lion
Review by Peter Allen
Early on this year I bought a second-hand copy of Little Silk, a 1970 picture book by Jacqueline Ayer just days before reading that the House of Illustration was organising an exhibition of her picture books and textile designs. Further still, the exhibition, Jacqueline Ayer: Drawing On Thailand, would be coinciding with a re-issue, the first in 60 years, of two of her celebrated picture books : Nu Dang and His Kite and The Paper-Flower Tree by Enchanted Lion Books. For me this down pouring of interest in Jacqueline Ayer’s Thailand-inspired books, resembled less the cold spring shower, than the monsoon rains after a long, dry summer, that brings old men out to dance in the street.
This was what Ayer did for a living. She could make grey skies blue – a specialist purveyor of the ‘young and gay’ whose optimistic illustration was much in demand in the fashion and style columns of leading American press in the 1950’s. She worked alongside Andy Warhol as a fashion illustrator for Bonwit Teller department store, US Vogue and The New York Times. A childhood friend, Milton Glaser thought great things about her and wrote retrospectively “Jacqueline Ayer was endlessly admired. What is always difficult to understand is the degree to which she was able to change every culture she was embedded in, from editorial pages to clothing design, to fabrics and children’s books.”
A childhood in New York in the 1930s, her parents Jamaican emigres, her adult life spent living between Paris, Bangkok and New York, Ayer was able to see far beyond the limits of countries and continents, she had experience of the world as a global community way before her time. Not as a privileged western observer but as an energetic creative, inspired by and contributor to the cultural life of the places wherever she was living. During her years passed in post-colonial Asia, Ayer as a black American, actively sought to live and work with respect for the people around her, as a collaborator rather than an exploiter.
Her picture books, set out to give a form to her countless pen and ink drawings made travelling along the canals, in and around the markets, workshops, streets of Bangkok, capital of the recently-independent Thailand. Her young children became the impetus to tell a new story about hope for a better future. About the writing and illustrating of Nu Dang, Ayer wrote how it taught her that ‘the process had to engage my fervour and commitment, even with the reduced vocabulary of a four-to-six-year-old’. Her desire to show an as ‘accurate a picture as possible without romanticising’ gave rise to her reportage approach to representing scenes and the people within. These encounters, between Ayer and people like her, going about their daily lives, are recorded in numerous direct, intense portraits, contained in groups within the frames provided by, for example, the courtyard of a temple, a block of street food stalls, a group of boats on the river shore.
Often the picture composition is without a dominant centre of focus or hierarchy of importance, reflecting Ayer’s desire to become part of the picture herself, to be the eyes and voice of the people she met, lived and worked with each day going about her business. Her pen and ink sketches made on the way inform much of the detail used in the page designs redrawn in the studio. They display how well she understood body-form and how clothes are worn upon it, gained from her experience as fashion illustrator and increasingly as designer.
The short distance from the street provided by the studio allowed Ayer just enough space and time to enrich her reportage studies with other details, memories from tours around the city’s museums and art collections, of textiles, ceramics, devotional and popular imagery. Patterns, both woven and painted, inspired the bright, bold areas of flat colour which contrast with the areas of very finely detailed line drawing: part descriptive, part highly stylised pattern. Her designs are so successful at combining realism and decoration, because like the Thai artists and craftsmen whose work she so admired, her imagination was given free rein only when she felt her subject was sufficiently learnt by heart. The typically relaxed, joyful result is deceptively simple and the sign of the degree to which Ayer was able to distill the essence of her experience into the essential inflexions of her clear, line drawing and cut-out, collages of colour shapes.
Ayer’s enjoyment in the making of these illustrations is wholly expressed through Nu Dang who upon realising the source of his worldly happiness, abandons all other distractions that might hinder its pursuit. As a mirror to Nu Dang’s kite Ayer finds that creating a narrative from line and colour are what makes her truly happy, the happiest woman in Siam.
These reissued titles are incredibly close to the original editions in the quality of the printing that repeats the depth and brightness of the colours and finesse of Ayer’s line work. The orange cloth-covered book, embossed with a line drawing of Nu Dang and kite and wrapped in dust jacket, feels and looks like the real thing; that’s two books I won’t need to worry about tracking down on eBay.
The exhibition at the House of Illustration is deceptively modest in scale but contains an incredible variety of material relating to her lifelong career as designer of textiles, pret-a-porter fashion and books. However, the high quality of the different exhibits, posters, photographs, magazine spreads, original artwork, surpasses their relatively small number. The experience is intense, the original drawings are like miniatures, their colours almost fluorescent in brightness and the line work, given the incredible detail it contains, would be painful to look at were it not for the wonderfully relaxed, ‘young and gay’ nature in which it has been carried out.
The exhibition Jacqueline Ayer : Drawing On Thailand on at the House of Illustration until 22 Oct 2017.
You may also be interested in this book review:
The Paper-Flower Tree
On 13th December, Sotheby’s London will offer for sale over 40 original illustrations by leading artists, designers, and musicians to benefit House of Illustration.
The pieces offered for sale fall into a number of different sections including “What Are You Like?” (autobiographical drawings by leading cultural figures), Quentin Blake’s illustrations of Sophie and the BFG at St Pancras International station, and original drawings of the Famous Five commissioned to celebrate the series’ 70th anniversary.
David Shrigley
Artists include Quentin Blake, Brian Eno, Eric Clapton, Oliver Jeffers, Emma Chichester Clark, Peter Capaldi, David Shrigley, Sara Fanelli, Peter Brooks, Peter Blake, Paul Smith, and Margaret Howell.
Quentin Blake
A registered charity, House of Illustration is the UK’s only public gallery dedicated solely to illustration, with a creative programme of exhibitions, talks and events. Founded by Sir Quentin Blake and opened in July 2014 at the heart of the King’s Cross regeneration area, it is the place to see, learn about and enjoy illustration in all its forms.
Ahead of the sale, all the works will be on display at Sotheby’s 34-35 New Bond Street from 9-12 December 2016.
Peter Capaldi
A major exhibition of the work of Edward Ardizzone, one of the 20th century’s most significant illustrators, the first major exhibition of his work in 40 years.
Venue: House of Illustration, 2 Granary Square, London N1C 4BH.
Opens 23rd of September, Tuesday-Sunday 10am-6pm. Closed Mondays. Admission (includes all three current exhibitions): £8.25 inc gift aid.
Celebrated for his unmistakeable and enduring illustrations, Edward Ardizzone remains one of the most admired British artists of the 20th century. His wide-ranging output includes the Little Tim books, drawings produced as an official war artist during the Second World War, poster design, ceramics and more.
Opening at House of Illustration in September, Ardizzone: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition of his work in 40 years
From his relatively unknown early commissions to rarely seen original illustrations, the exhibition will feature over 100 pieces from public and private collections. Highlights include a Little Tim manuscript, mural artwork for a P&O ocean liner, ceramic figurines and poster designs for Lyons, as well as sketchbooks and illustrated correspondence.
‘The supreme contemporary example of the genuine illustrator’ – Maurice Sendak on Edward Ardizzone, 1967.
Ardizzone: A Retrospective is co-curated by Alan Powers, author of the forthcoming publication of Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator, and House of Illustration’s Olivia Ahmad.
Published by Lund Humphries to coincide with the opening of the exhibition on 23 September, Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator is the first full, illustrated monograph on Ardizzone. Researched from archival sources, it provides an in-depth survey of his work as well as exploring his connections and influence in mid-20th-century British illustration.
Edward Ardizzone RA CBE (1900 – 79) was one of the 20th century’s most significant illustrators. He is best-known for his illustrated children’s books, in particular the ‘Little Tim’ series which he wrote and illustrated, starting in 1936 with Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, and many of which are still in print today. In 1940 Ardizzone was appointed an official war artist – along with his contemporaries Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious – and embarked for France and Belgium with the British Expeditionary Force. He spent time in North Africa and Italy and was also present at the Normandy landings. He illustrated contemporaries such as Eleanor Farjeon and Robert Graves and classic authors from Cervantes and Bunyan to Dickens and Trollope. Ardizzone also did a range of magazine and advertising work for clients including Shell, Guinness, Radio Times, Moss Bros and Punch.
‘A Tale of Kitty in Boots’ – Quentin Blake’s original artworks exhibited at House of Illustration.
Venue: House of Illustration, 2 Granary Square, London N1C 4BH
2nd September – 5th February 2017. Adult ticket £7, student £5, children £4.
Website
On 2 September 2016 House of Illustration will open a new exhibition of Quentin Blake’s original drawings for The Tale of Kitty in Boots, the unpublished Beatrix Potter manuscript recently re-discovered over 100 years after it was originally written.
The book about ‘a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life’, features classic Potter characters including Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Mr Tod re-drawn by Blake.
The exhibition will feature Blake’s complete illustrations for the book and his sketchbooks. It will also contain the original Beatrix Potter manuscript and Potter’s only complete illustration for the book, both on loan from the V&A Museum.
It will be accompanied by learning materials and workshops for families and schools, inspired by Blake’s work and led by professional illustrators.
Colin McKenzie, director of House of Illustration said: “We are delighted to be able to exhibit Quentin Blake’s wonderful illustrations for The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots. The combination of Beatrix Potter and Quentin Blake is a magical one, and it is the perfect second exhibition for the permanent Quentin Blake Gallery at House of Illustration, which opened earlier this year.”
The exhibition will coincide with the publication of The Tale of Kitty in Boots in hardback on 1 September by Frederick Warne & Co, Beatrix Potter’s original publisher and an imprint of Penguin Random House Children’s.
