Award winning author and illustrator Catherine Rayner studied Illustration at Edinburgh College of art. She fell in love with the city and still lives there with a small menagerie of creatures: Shannon the horse, Ena the grey cat, goldfish Sheila and a speckly black and tan guinea pig called Marvin.

In 2008, Catherine was selected as one of the ten best new illustrators for Booktrust’s ‘Big Picture Campaign’, which is an initiative designed to put picture books firmly in the public eye. Here she talks to Write Away about animals, art and inspiration:

You studied illustration in Edinburgh. What made you choose to study there?

It’s a wonderful city and the Art College buildings are absolutely beautiful. I liked the fact that it was a very traditional course. I did my foundation course in Leeds and somebody from Edinburgh came to talk to us about the College. I applied but I never thought I’d get in. The course was called Visual Communication - I specialised in Illustration.

 The first two years I found really hard. I just struggled to find a way that I liked working. I liked drawing animals, but the projects we were set were to illustrate things like sounds or poems, and I found that hard. Towards the end of the third year we got set free to do our own thing. I wrote a children’s book about a swan. I discovered that I loved the way text looks next to an image. I think that was when I started to become interested in the design aspect of picturebooks; the fact that story goes with picture and they can visually complement each other on the page.

Does a book stem from the art or does the idea for the story come first?

Often I decide that I’d like to explore a particular animal. It’s all such a blur at the beginning of a book. It feels like the characters then build their own stories as I am drawing them. I watch their personalities develop. If Augustus has been shortlisted for something I’ll say to someone, “We’ve been shortlisted”, and they’ll say “Who’s we?” and I’ll say “Me and the tiger.” I feel like the characters are separate to me; they go off and live their own lives. With every book I’ve done I have felt very down at the beginning. You put so much energy into the idea. I get quite flat and exhausted, and then I remember that I’m creating something and that it’s really quite hard work.

 There’s a real sense of movement in your work that must come from a lot of time spent observing animals.

Growing up, I was the youngest of three. We had a Miniature Dachshund. I spent more time with him than anyone. I was amazed at how fast his legs went when he trotted about. As he got older, he got creakier and this meant that when he ran, it looked like he was running sort of side ways. I can remember exactly how he moved. We also had a guinea pig who had babies. I remember being amazed by how big their feet were compared to their titchy bodies and how when they ran their legs stretched out so much - but their body looked as though it wasn’t moving at all. They just kind of zipped about! I have spent a lot of time around animals and I have been observing them without realising from a very early age.

Your paintings appear  more sophisticated than quite a lot of other picturebook art around at the moment. Are you trying to communicate with your readers in a particular way or is that just your artistic style?

 Children can be quite patronised by books. I think it’s important that  they really understand animals and the way that they move, and how they really are, so that they can appreciate them and the beauty of nature. The natural form is so perfect, I don’t think you have to excessively simplify it just because you’re wanting to appeal to a young audience.

Augustus is definitely a tiger. I remember publishers asking me if I could make it a bit cuter. And I thought: tigers aren’t cute. They’re beautiful, powerful beasts. And Augustus is very masculine. Making him cute would be giving readers a false idea of what tigers are like. They’re so muscular. I wanted the power in their legs and the slinkiness to come across. The fact that they have stripy bodies can help illustrate the muscle form; you can bend a stripe in the middle of the body to help you to accentuate their structure. I wanted children to properly understand Augustus’s beauty.

I like to draw from life. I also take a lot of photograps. I’ll think I’ve wasted some time because I’ve just spent the day at the zoo looking, but afterwards I realise that I’ve built up a visual bank in your brain of how the animals move and act. I will have seen things like how they blink and what they look like when they’re thinking.

 I’m very lucky; I’ve got my own horse. I often think that if you can draw horses you can draw anything. Having the horse has been very helpful for the new moose book that I am working on. They have similar weight-bearing legs and knobbly knees! In Posy I used my own kitten a lot. A lot of people say they can tell I have a cat.

For Harris the hare in Harris Finds His Feet I met someone who had a pet hare. She said I could have a look at it. It was a Belgian hare, which is actually a breed of rabbit that looks similar to a hare. I took a friend there and we spent a couple of days photographing Noodles the hare. To get a photo that I could use as reference for the page where Harris is learning to bounce up and down with Granddad, I had to ask the owner if she would mind holding Noodles up as though he was bouncing. This was so that I could see what his feet and legs would look like when they were dangling in mid-air. I usually draw animals when they’re weight-bearing, but when they are bouncing it’s more difficult. I had similar trouble when Augustus was swimming.

Are you more interested in animals than people?

 Yes. I’ve been asked a few times if I’ll do people. I got sent a text with a person in it a little while ago and thought I could have a go, but nothing came of it. You’re slightly more restricted with people than with animals. I do get asked more and more frequently.

 I was surprised that you had a dragon in your forthcoming book, Sylvia and Bird, because your animals are so naturalistic.

I was a bit worried about it. I was a bit stuck for an idea. I had a contract before I had an idea, which doesn’t often happen. I was having a meeting with my publisher and somebody suggested a dragon and I thought, why not try? I used sea horses as reference. There’s a particular type called a weedy sea dragon. I don’t even know how I found it. They’re beautiful. I watched videos of them online. I think a few people will be surprised that it’s a dragon and not a real animal, but it was lovely to have the freedom to create a completely new creature.

You always use lovely, thick matte paper. It makes the art look very painterly.

I think the matte paper makes it feel like each page is a piece of art rather than just a printed page in a book. Posy has been printed on similar paper to the sketchbook I was drawing her in at the time. I was really pleased with that stock. It’s a very gentle colour. I hope to use that paper for another book I’m doing with Orchard Books about a bear.

You  create a feeling  of space on the page

.I feel that breathing space is really important because it leaves room for your imagination to get to work – I think people often put their own backgrounds in to that space using their own imagination. I’m very selective about where things are placed. I like to give the text room to breathe because I think the text itself is a beautiful thing. I do a lot of silk screen printing - this is what I use for the flatter backgrounds, like the sand in Augustus. A lot of people think it’s cut out tissue paper, but it’s not. The ‘flatness’ of the screen printing helps the animal jump out of the page. I think the fact that the backgrounds are fairly minimal helps give the characters more presence on the page.

Can you talk a bit about how you achieve some of the varied textures and effects that you get?

I use all kinds of materials and methods: acrylic ink, watercolour pencil, watercolour, acrylic paint, silk screen printing, pens - anything I can find. Even Tippex! I think you get more confident with using stuff that isn’t supposed to be used. It’s really good fun when you start doing a book, just playing around with materials. I’m doing a bit of collage in the new book. That should be fun. Texture is so important. Different textures liven things up.

 I used mono printing for the rain in Augustus. I struggled with that spread. It’s quite difficult to illustrate rain. I looked at how other illustrators had portrayed rain – they had mainly painted the droplets or splatters but I felt this wouldn’t suit Augustus. In the end I applied oil based paint onto a sheet of Perspex. Then I sprayed on vegetable oil and then found an old brush, which was perfect. And I brushed the oil through the paint in vertical stripes to look like rain, then pressed the Perspex on to paper. I did it around 50 times before I got it right. I had lots of Augustus pictures I’d already drawn, because I had to print over the top of the illustration. I like the way the oil looks with the paint.

 In Augustus the desert, leaves and mountains are silk screen printed. The underwater spread was supposed to be done in the same way, but I did a rough in ink and liked the way the way it looked. I had spent a long time drawing Augustus and the fish on to the paper and rubbing out the pencil lines. Then I applied the ink over the top and rubber rubbings were getting mixed in with the ink. At the time I thought this would ruin the picture, but when I brushed these rubbings off after the ink was dry I got a lovely speckled look as though the light is reflecting through the water. It was a happy accident! Initially I was disappointed because I had wanted the water to look smoother, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it and now I love the speckly look!

Posy is drawn with acrylic inks on pencil crayon. I did hundreds of drawings to get the pictures just how I wanted them. It was a long book to do. All the backgrounds are screen printed. Posy is made up of all different colours of metallic ink marbled in to one another. Each illustration of her took hours and hours to dry. I’d apply the gold ink first as the base on each stripe and then put brown or green or bronze on top of it before it dried and blow it with my hairdryer to make the inks marble together.

You have some really eye-catching endpapers. Are they something you think a lot about?

Yes. I had wanted to do footprints for Harris but we’d done them in Augustus. Sometimes it’s obvious what you want to do for an endpaper, but for Harris there wasn’t an obvious thing so I just chose a strong colour to hold the book in. I love the endpapers on Posy. It is the fabric from the sofa in the book. That just worked really well and the colour goes nicely. In Augustus you’re supposed to be able to follow him in and out of the book, so you’re going on the journey with him. He walks into the book from the front endpaper - through the pages and the hops, skips and jumps out the back. When I’m doing children’s events I ask where he’s gone and they say “the jungle” or “my house”. It’s a good conversation starter. I love the endpapers for Sylvia and Bird. There was no question: I had to have spotty endpapers. That really adds to the book. Because we’ve got quite a simple cover you get away with having busy endpapers. We’ve kept the title page very simple as a result.

The Guardian compared you with Brian Wildsmith. What do you think about that?

 I still imagine it’s just my family and friends who read my books, so I nearly cried with joy when I saw that article, and found that somebody I didn’t know had written such a lovely thing! I was absolutely taken aback. I love his stuff. If I was to talk about people who inspired me – I’m trying to think of how many books of his I have. The textures in his drawings are absolutely fascinating. His work is so colourful, touchable and real.

Thank you Catherine Rayner for talking to Write Away