How did you get into illustration and why?
It’s a cliché but I’ve always been a creative person, and was always going to pursue a creative career. When I was trying to decide what to study, I kept seeing “Illustration’ pop up on uni websites but would often disregard it in favour of courses such as graphic design; it felt more stable to me, as I didn’t understand what a career in illustration meant at that point. Eventually I started to research illustration degrees and immediatelyrealised that it was exactly what I wanted to do. I was studying fine art at sixth form and managed to convince my teacher to let me experiment with lino and mono printing, collage, and ultimately a more illustrative style of working. This enabled me to build up a substantial portfolio of illustration work rather than the oil paintings and realistic sketches I was expected to be doing.
Last year your illustrations were featured in Miranda York’s book ‘The Food Almanac’. What was the process like working in this way? What do you need to consider when creating work for physical forms?
It was such a nice job. I was sent a chapter or two at a time, whenever the writers/editors had finished with them, and was told where the illustrations needed to be on the page; I could interpret the rest pretty much how I saw fit. The placement of the illustrations was definitely crucial to creating a physical thing. Things can get lost in the gutter margins for example, which of course is hard to visualise when you only see the page mockups on a flat spread.