Adding to our recent website update on illustrators…
When Australian writer-illustrator Alison Lester won an Antarctic Arts Fellowship to visit Antarctica in 2005, she created the Kids Antarctic Art Project. Her trip diary was monitored world-wide by schoolchildren who read her emails and drew pictures of what they imagined from her reports. In Australian Antarctic Magazine, Alison demonstrates the process of adding her own design and color sense to the kids’ drawings, with examples. The children’s literature museum Dromkeen has exhibited a sampling of the collaboration.
Alison’s trip has inspired two books so far. Snoopy Sparks Goes South is the journal of a young detective who travels south with her aunt, who is a bryologist (a moss biologist). With Coral Tulloch, another former Arts Fellow, she is working on One Small Island, The Destruction and Regeneration of Macquarie Island. They are sharing the writing and illustration and plan to finish the book by 2009.
Purr, Moo, and Roar are Alison’s new series for very young children. Her best-selling book internationally, Imagine, has been translated into 10 languages. Thanks to the internet, this much-loved Down Under writer-illustrator is available internationally, 24/7: take a look at these charming and informative excerpts from her master classes with kids and from an interview about her creative process with an Australian teacher.
An exhibition of Alison’s original illustrations for her recent and wildly popular Are We There Yet? picture book (about traveling around Australia) is being curated by Books Illustrated. (More on Books Illustrated here.)