Drawing out your inner child

By Lydia Roberts

ILLUSTRATOR Sandy Flett wants to draw out our inner child.  ​

So she has designed a “kit bag” of drawing warm-ups, tips and advice to help potential illustrators and writers achieve their goal of drawing and writing for children.

Sandy will share her kit bag, as well as her experience as a children’s illustrator, at a workshop organised by the New England Writers’ Centre. 

“I would love the participants in this workshop to have their dreams of becoming an illustrator made more possible,” Sandy says.

“It would be awesome for people to come away feeling more confident in their ability to create and to learn to relax into illustration work.”

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"Illustrating children’s books is a way of reconnecting with our own childhood."

​Think of Blinky Bill and Dorothy Wall’s cute drawings of a koala in patched knickerbockers.  Or May Gibbs’ cute gumnut babies in Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.

A picture can catapult us back to our childhoods and be an escape from our present.
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It is this which Sandy hopes to unlock in participants of her illustration workshop, to be held in Armidale on Saturday, July 2.

Sandy says it was the “bright colours, expressive characters, comedy and a bit of magic” of her childhood reading that stuck with her and made her mull a career as a children’s book illustrator.

It would be awesome for people to come away [from the workshop] feeling more confident in their ability to create and to learn to relax into illustration work.

Sandy has been a children’s author and illustrator for about six years.

“I started after a bout of pretty significant illness and I like to think that time gave me a bit of a reset in life,” Sandy says. “I started to really think about what my life was all about, what had I let lie dormant in me, in all the craziness of life. 

“So, as part of my recovery, I started drawing again, after probably 20 plus years of little or no drawing.

“During that ‘re-drawing’ period, I remembered that for most of my childhood and teen years I had been fascinated by cartoons and illustrations in the books I loved the most - and that in fact, I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator.

“I had forgotten that, until I reconnected with that part of myself.”

​Most recently, Sandy has illustrated the highly successful Juno Jones series of books by author Kate Gordon.

Sandy also wrote a short story, The Terrible Thing in the Spooktacular Stories anthology and has illustrated two middle-grade book series, Edie’s Experiments, by Charlotte Barkla.

“I’m very excited to meet local artists who are keen to illustrate, and to hopefully help give them a bit of a kick start into the world of children's book illustration,” Sandy says.

It doesn’t take a studio or workshop to begin your journey as a children’s illustrator, as Sandy can attest.
Many of her illustrations were completed on the dining room table (“the ‘posh’ one that we never used”, Sandy says).

“Currently, I am in one of our living rooms, which looks over our backyard where our new puppy, Teddy Arthur, the border collie, resides and gets into mischief. I’m basically minding him while I paint - doubly pleasurable.”

Sandy’s parting advice is to keep reading children’s books and to keep drawing, even if it’s only for a few moments a day.
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Any other advice and you will have to book into her workshop!