Special Guest Northern Highlight - The Good Ship Illustration

NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT

Tania Willis, Helen Stephens & Katie Chappell

THE GOOD SHIP ILLUSTRATION

This week, Helen Stephens, author of the How to Hide a Lion series, and many more books for children, is talking to us about The Good Ship Illustration and their online courses for illustrators and image-makers navigating a creative career.

Can you tell us about The Good Ship Illustration and how it was founded?

Tania, Katie and I all live in the same small coastal town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. I moved here about 10 years ago in search of more space after 17 years in London. Katie was born here, and after travelling the world, nannying on the way, she came back to do her MA in Edinburgh and stayed. And Tania, who was my tutor at Glasgow School of Art, moved here after living and working in Hong Kong for twenty years. She saw a picture I posted of some washing hanging in one of the back lanes and wanted to know where this picture of northern domestic idyll could be!

We would meet regularly for coffee and a chat, and found we were asking each other all the juicy questions about what it is like to work in each other’s areas of illustration: Tania works in advertising, environmental graphics, editorial, design, surface design, licensing, publishing, branding, event, editorial and corporate illustration - but her biggest passion is illustrated maps. Katie is a live illustrator working all over the UK and Europe. Her clients include Google, Dove, Lululemon, Royal Society of Biology, Nespresso and lots of the UK’s top universities. And of course I write and illustrate children’s books.

Anyway, at the coffee-chats, we would pick each other’s brains, and ask all the stuff we’d been afraid to ask anyone else. What do you get paid, what does your contract look like? How do you survive the ups and downs of being freelance?

We realised we had over sixty years of experience between us, each from a different era of the industry. Tania calls us the Three Bears of the illustration world. Ha! We wondered if there was a way of sharing these conversations with a wider audience - we thought it would be really valuable for anyone wanting to, or already working in illustration. And so the idea for The Good Ship Illustration was born.

Drawing by Katie at TGS's 'Art Club'

Drawing by Helen at Art Club

What are the advantages of being based in Northumberland?

We all love living here at the sea, and it’s slightly off the tourist map so we have these huge windy beaches to ourselves. It is a great place to walk, and we all agree that a long walk each day helps solve those knotty illustration problems - it blows away the cobwebs and wards off cabin fever.

It is also much cheaper to live here than in London, so good for creatives just getting started. When I left art school in 1994 there was no internet, so I had no choice but to head to London if I wanted to get into publishing. By contrast, Katie left art school a couple of years ago and by building a brilliant website and being active on social media, she has been able to stay in her hometown. So there isn’t the overwhelming pressure to head to London any more.

Drawing by Helen at Art Club

Drawing by Emily MacKenzie at Art Club

What are your future plans for The Good Ship Illustration?

Well, so far we have launched our first course, it’s called FIND YOUR CREATIVE VOICE - FLY YOUR FREAK FLAG. It’s all about basking in your weirdness, finding your own unique creative voice to help you stand out from the crowd and having an enjoyable career with longevity. We thought this course was a good starting point because we all work in different areas of illustration, but this is something we’d all tackled and we all felt passionate about.

The first group of people ‘graduated’ last week, and the feedback has been incredible, we are still trying to take it all in. People have told us they learned more in our six week course than they did at art school, some people have found it life-changing, others have had huge creative breakthroughs… We had people from across the board join the course: one man hadn’t drawn since he was eleven, there were lots of recent graduates and there were people who had taken a break from illustration and were hoping to kickstart their creative career again. There were also illustrators at the top of their game, whose work we admire and would have asked to contribute an interview to the course if they weren’t on it!

As for future plans, we will be writing more courses, perhaps a picture book course next...

What for you is the 'spirit of the North’?

I am from Darlington originally, so I think I am qualified to talk about ‘the spirit of the North’. I love that independent streak we all have, that stubbornness not to conform, some healthy scepticism of the people in charge… And also, we have the benefit of not living where the trends start. We have enough distance to be able to invent our own creative voices without following trends.

Who for you are the great Northern illustrators?

Alfred Wainwright, the author and illustrator of the fell-walking guides, Mairi Hedderwick who wrote and illustrated her ‘Katie Morag’ books set in the Hebrides. We at The Good Ship are all massive Jonny Hannah fans, he made us a brilliant film for the course.

Can I name a couple of writers? I love Vivian French, who is based in Edinburgh, especially ‘Caterpillar Butterfly’, illustrated by Charlotte Voake. I love Robert Westall, he is one of my favourite writers of all time. He was born in North Shields and grew up there on Tyneside during the Second World War. ‘The Machine Gunners’, ‘The Scarecrows’ and ‘The Watch House’ are amongst my favourites, and I read The Christmas Ghost (illustrated by John Lawrence) every Christmas.

Why is it so important that we continue to promote children's books in the North?

Publishing, and the media generally, is very London-centric. It’s a breath of fresh air to see books with a sense of place that hasn’t been explored in a picture book before. Like ‘Town is by the Sea’ by Sydney Smith, not set in the UK, but a book with a brilliant in this way. I hope we see the northern equivalents.

What would you like to see from children's publishing in the North?

I worry that publishers will see moving north as an opportunity to reduce advances. Most picture book illustrators, unless they have a few successful books under their belt, struggle to survive on their advances. So I am hoping that Children’s Book North will be able to follow this closely, and support illustrators to be paid properly.

On a brighter note, I think publishing moving north is a brilliant opportunity to improve diversity in children’s books. This is a great time to bring in some new talent with different life experiences and perspectives. It is a very exciting move, here’s to more publishers moving north!

What is next for The Good Ship Illustration?

The FIND YOUR CREATIVE VOICE - FLY YOUR FREAK FLAG course launches again at the end of July. If you are interested you can sign up to our newsletter for a heads-up.

We also have a free audio drawing prompt on our website called ‘The Sketchbooker’s Friend’. It is a brilliant tool to loosen up your drawing, get you back into the creative habit of observational drawing and feel good about what you create.

Or join us for our Instagram Art Club. We go live each Friday at 8pm UK time to do quick, timed drawings of whatever is in front of us. Everyone is welcome! Sharpen your pencils, grab some paper and we’ll see you there!

www.thegoodshipillustration.com

Insta: thegoodshipillustration

Facebook: The Sketchbooker’s Friend