“The text shouldn’t duplicate what the pictures have already told – they should work symbiotically.”

Jane Johnson

Children's Illustrator

Jane Johnson observes as she reflects on the keystones of a career as a children’s illustrator which spanned over 20 years.

“There’s nothing to take the place of dogged practice. Like practising scales, you’ve got to keep doing it. Your style will develop and evolve over time.” 

Her success came not through formal training in the shape of a foundation course, but arrived after seven years of refining her skills and working on her children’s illustrations...

The influences

Johnson's aesthetic is based on the Edwardian era owing to her idiosyncratically old-fashioned childhood in the 1950s. Modestly claiming to have been slow to read as child, Johnson says she delighted in her mother’s book of Arthur Rackham’s Shakespeare illustrations. She identifies two chief strands of the British illustrative tradition: the weird and gothic imaginative works of Lewis Carroll and Mervyn Peake, and the more comforting side of AA Milne and The Wind in the Willows. She belongs to the latter camp...

The style

Throughout her many works Johnson’s values remain constant: elegant illustrations and a desire to 'convey a sense of comfort and reassurance to lonely and unhappy children'. Her work exudes sensitive symbiosis between text and the pictures.

Few of her works

• Sybil and the Blue Rabbit 
• 1984’s A Book of Nursery Riddles 
• Today I Thought I’d Run Away 
• Tiger
• The Princess and the Painter
• My Dear Noel

Prizes

• The runner up for the 1980 Mother Goose Prize for best new illustrator
• The Owl Prize in Japan