Wake Up!

Katie Cleminson gained her foundation diploma in Art and Design at Falmouth College. She went on to study Illustration for Children's Publishing at the North Wales School of Art, where she graduated with a First in the summer of 2007.

Katie works with inks, charcoal and Photoshop and loves the work of Lane Smith and Jackson Pollock. She's drawn to nostalgic items like gramophones, typewriters, pipes and bowler hats, which sometimes turn up in her work.

In 2009 Katie won the Best Emerging Illustrator in the Booktrust Early Years Awards for Box of Tricks (Red Fox).

She was chosen for a Booktrust Best New Illustrators Award in 2011.

Illustration technique

Katie sites Jackson Pollock as an inspiration and uses pipettes with ink to create her trademark splashes of colour across her illustrations. She created this technique when thinking about the best way to illustrate magic.

Katie furst draws her characters using charcoal, colour pencil or ink and creates her backgrounds in pastels and ink in contrasting colours. She also draws using pipettes which requires a lot of practice.

She prefers to draw in layers so she can be more experimental and move things around and it’s not such a problem if you make mistakes.