Moo

March 30, 2007 at 11:35 pm (GMT) by Denise | 7 Comments Latest by Carol Epstein

I first noticed children’s book illustrator, Susan Mitchell in several people’s MOO trading sets. Her work is lively and cute, and her cards are popular. On her third box already, she’s traded with people in Singapore, Australia, USA, Canada, England and Scotland. I contacted her for a quick chat about her work, MOO and her collection of luggage tags, and this is what I found out…

With a degree in Drawing and Painting from the Edinburgh College of Art, Susan came to be a children’s book illustrator after building up a portfolio of commercial greeting card designs. Originally from Scotland, now based in Canada, she would illustrate a set of Christmas cards once a year for a Canadian card company. A friend sent a link to her growing portfolio to an editor at Simon and Schuster and her first children’s book contract came from there.

She cites her main influences as Arthur Rackham, Beatrix Potter, Lisbeth Zwerger, Mary-Louise Gay, and Holly Hobbie among others, describing her own style as ‘whimsical, sweet, and sometimes funny’.

Working entirely by hand, Susan uses a mixture of watercolour or acrylic, ink and collage. She loves working with traditional materials, and sometimes for fun, in unusual formats.

A member of a few different online communities, Susan started taking part in Illustration Friday, a weekly illustration challenge. Its one part of a community site sharing ideas and critiques of each other’s illustration work. A list of potential challenge topics are emailed in by community members and a weekly topic is chosen for Friday’s challenge. Wanting to try something a little different, Susan decided to paint her entries on luggage tags.

‘I have always loved cardboard luggage tags—they are so simple and unassuming but somehow exotic at the same time. They always make me think of packages and travel. So I dug a few out and started painting on them. I really like the small format of the tags. I was hoping that their size would encourage me to simplify my style, and I love the challenge of trying to fit little stories into such a small space.’

Working at this scale can be fiddly, she says, especially with pen and ink. But a beautiful body of work is being created, which she hopes eventually to exhibit. Until that time, she’s been making MiniCards with her artwork.

‘When I tried uploading images of the artwork I’ve done on luggage tags, they seemed to fit the cards well, because the images were already quite small and narrow - they looked like little tags themselves…’

So, what does she do with her MiniCards?

‘I display some in my studio, and use some as business cards. I also add them to packages if I am sending out samples of my illustrations, and included them with Christmas cards I sent out to clients. And of course, I give lots of them out to friends.’

Having cards this cute does present one small problem… ‘At first I was telling people to take as many as they liked, and they would usually help themselves to quite a few. I quickly had to make another order so now I only let them choose a couple!’

Susan has quite an active online life, a member of Flickr for over a year, she also reads a lot of blogs. Her favourites?

‘Oh, there’s too many! When I first discovered blogs like Molly Chicken , Wisecraft and Angry Chicken it opened up a whole new world to me. Creating art is a part of their everyday lives, like eating and sleeping, and I felt such an affinity with that and found them very inspiring.

‘I’m also a member of a group of illustrators that I met over the ‘net. We have a forum where we chat about work, do promotion together, talk over ideas and critique each other’s work. It is really nice to be part of this group: we all feel like friends even though we live in different parts of the world. It is a great place to stay encouraged even when work is slow. We also started up a blog recently.

As well as Susan’s group blog, you can see more of her work at www.susan-mitchell.com, and on her personal blog.

Finally I asked Susan if she had any advice for other illustrators out there?

‘Don’t give up and stay true to what you love. Try to surround yourself with things that inspire you and keep working.’