Meet The Phaidon Kids illustrator - Sara Gillingham
As a child, our Alpha Bravo Charlie illustrator created ‘paper worlds’ for the cats in her neighbourhood. As an adult she always looks for the essential in each illustration and believes books are a critical break from a fast-paced childhood.
Sara Gillingham’s thoughtful approach to illustration is rooted in her belief that children are the toughest of customers when it comes to noticing what is right and what is most definitely wrong. The US and UK educated, Vancouver-based illustrator believes design for children should be clear, purposeful, and empowering and that the books she creates should be a critical break from an increasingly fast-paced childhood.
As a kid herself she would create entire worlds out of paper – subliminal preparation perhaps for some of her most successful Phaidon books, Animals in the Sky, Seeing Stars: A Complete Guide to the 88 Constellations, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie: The Complete Book of Nautical Codes, Full of Life: Exploring Earth's Biodiversity, and Exploring the Elements: A Complete Guide to the Periodic Table.
She begins each project by considering the developmental stage of her audience—what they can see, feel, and understand—and builds her illustrations accordingly. Her goal is to create books that are not only visually appealing but also foster a sense of comfort, curiosity, and connection, and her work spans board books, picture books, and early learning materials, many of which have become mainstays in nurseries and classrooms worldwide.
In her distinctive approach to illustration, design and storytelling are seamlessly integrated. She often works as both author and illustrator, allowing her to create a cohesive relationship between text and image.
Sara has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and a Masters in Illustration/Design from the Glasgow School of Art and has taught children's book illustration at California College of the Arts and UC Berkeley Extension in San Francisco.
In a 20 plus year career, she has received countless accolades, including the Society of Illustrators Original Art Award, Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Award, Parents' Choice Award, and recognition in the AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers competition. Several of her books have been named to the Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year and have appeared on “Best of the Year” lists from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.
She is also the founder of Sara Gillingham Studio, where she offers design and consulting services to clients in the publishing and lifestyle industries. To celebrate 20 years of Phaidon Kids, we’re talking to a number of the illustrators and authors behind our brilliant children’s books. Once you've read our interview with Sara take a look in the Phaidon Kids store and check out her website https://www.saragillingham.com.
Can you draw us a self portrait? Of course!
What did you draw as a kid? My dog. I drew my dog a lot. We actually had to give my dog away, because we moved when I was about eight years old, and so I feel that drawing my dog was like art therapy for me. I drew self-portraits, I drew monsters. I also really liked drawing decorative things. I would get in trouble in my schoolwork for over-decorating things that did not require it at all. If I needed to turn in something very dry, I would put a very elaborate border around it. I was always interested in making an object out of everything in my drawings.
What do you always have in mind when illustrating for kids? Continuity. You've got a tough customer when you're making illustrations for kids, so you've always got to be thinking about that. Kids will notice if there are three buttons or two. If that continuity is broken, they will notice those things. Children are much more detail-oriented than adults when looking at illustrations and tend to spend more time taking them in. I have really noticed children's ability to home in on finer details and on continuity. They're great at picking up inconsistencies. I think we, as people, start out with that and sort of lose it over time. I feel like younger readers are still really tuned into it.
For some of your books, you were both illustrator and author. Where do you think this desire to create entire worlds came from? When I was little, I was always very much into making, as well as drawing. I wanted to make objects out of paper, and I sort of had this way that I made trees. I really wanted to make this whole world out of paper with trees, [so] I built this thing called “Paper World.” There were some baby kittens where I was living at the time, and I wanted them to occupy this “Paper World.” Of course, they never went inside or interacted with it in the way I wanted them to. But I wanted to make a whole little world for them.
Did you go to art school? I started off doing my bachelor’s degree in English at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. But I switched to fine art halfway through. So, I ended up with a fine art degree, making work for gallery walls. But I really had a drive to make something more applied to a particular design use. I did their master’s Design Programme, and my thesis project was on children's books. That was where I shifted into that lane.
I came back to Vancouver and there's not a ton of publishing in Vancouver, especially not children's publishing, so I ended up working in advertising for about a year before joining a publishing company. I wasn't doing my own illustrations, but I was learning a lot about how to make a book and how to art direct a book and production. How it is printed is still a big part of my work.
When I had my first kid, it really changed the way I thought about children's books. I thought about them in a much more aesthetic, superficial way before I had kids. When I had kids, and I was reading books with them, I really started to realise what’s a ‘designer's book’ and what's actually a book that kids will find exciting. That was inspiring to me. I started my own design studio and then started pitching my own books.
What's the best piece of advice you’ve received? One of my fine art professors in undergrad used to say, “Look for the essential in every image.” And that really has stuck with me. When I am struggling with something or I am looking for clarity with something, I try to zoom out and think about what is essential, what must be in this image and what doesn't have to be in this image, and what can be omitted for the sake of simplicity.
Your Alpha, Bravo, Charlie book is one of our favourites. It’s such a treasure trove of information conveyed via visual imagery. Was that fun to work on? Yeah, that was so much fun. I really loved that book. I grew up around the ocean and I love boats, and I really was excited by the content and learning semaphore and the Morse code and learning all these codes. I really enjoyed learning about the hidden world of boats, because it is not something you bump into. I'm so happy with all my books with Phaidon, honestly. I feel so fortunate to have worked with the team that I've worked with there. Meagan Bennett's design of the books has been a huge part of their aesthetic look and feel, along with the risk-taking in the editorial and conceptual approaches.
What’s the one thing you always like to get into an illustration? I would say a human element. For example, with Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, it's a bunch of images of boats, so I wanted to have people in those boats. It's hard for me to make an illustration without people in it. I like to try to get a human element in wherever I can.
How do you use colour in your work for kids? There are a lot of things vying for kids' attention in the world and so I like to do something unusual, unexpected, or bold with colour. That’s my approach. Colour is a very important part of my work and I've been lucky enough with Phaidon to have the most amazing production values and be able to use spot colour, and interesting formats, and die-cuts. That's been wonderful. There's a lot of research around high contrast imagery being very effective for really young readers – board book age readers.
I think all illustrators feel that there's a certain extent to which you can control it, but also, it's just what comes out of you. It is what it is, but I do like – with Seeing Stars, for example - having some aesthetic rules, as well as being able to being able to print it in that in that limited palette. It’s somewhat of a risk to do a limited palette in children's books, but I do think it helps set things apart when it's appropriate for the subject.
What are the tricky bits when you're navigating high-information books, such as Exploring the Elements and Full of Life? I think one of the main challenges is creating something that has an accuracy and an informative quality to it that is rendered in my very minimal simplified style. The top challenge in these books is trying to create something that satisfies both of those things, and not to lose the informational and the factual in the stylization, because at the end of the day, this is a book that's meant to convey information.
Those books written by Isabel Thomas are incredible for the level of information in them and the craftsmanship of her words, as well. I want to do justice to that. A lot of books that are written in that vein are illustrated photographically, so my challenge is trying to find what can these images deliver to a reader that satisfies some of the more factual pieces that need to be conveyed, as well as giving them a different aesthetic world than they might be used to in this type of book.
What does a work day look like for you? It really can be very different day-to-day. Last week, I was out at an art school in Vancouver doing a talk for students about book design and illustration. The week before that, I was visiting some elementary schools. Every day there are lots of emails because I also run a design studio where I'm doing art direction and design for books. It’s balancing that with finding bigger chunks of uninterrupted time to work on my illustration. I find I need to trick myself into feeling like I have all the time in the world and of course none of us ever do. But I need to feel that way in order to get in a flow state with illustration.
Why books? What do they offer that other media doesn't? That is a great question. I first started working in books like in the late nineties. So, it's been 25 years now and I feel like the world has changed a lot in that timeframe for kids, and what they're doing with their time. I think that the role of books in that time frame has changed. I feel now, more than ever, books are a critical break from the fast-paced, and from advertising being insidiously woven into everything you consume. I really see books as very special in that way. I also love that you bring something of yourself to a book in a way that maybe is done for you in other media. For me, it's a tactile object in the world and that's what I've always loved to make. I love the physicality of books. I love that they can move at their own speed for the reader. I’m happy to be able to still make them in this world. I feel like children's books in particular are a protected book medium, because I think parents really want them to exist for their kids, especially when they're little.