Michael Foreman (author/illustrator) - Approach To Illustration

Approach To Illustration

Foreman learned to respond instantly to text as an art student. Having drawn for the newspapers and for the police, drawing female suspects when Identikit only catered for men, he gained valuable drawing experience. A travel scholarship took him all around the world, drawing landscapes, architecture and wildlife. Although many of his books feature luminous watercolours, it is the drawing that he sees as vital: "It's all in the drawing. It's a question of creating another world, believable in its own right. I think I was very lucky to have started art school so young when they actually taught Art. It was a rigorous training - not just painting and drawing from life - but hours of anatomy and perspective. ... it really taught you to understand what you were looking at." His aim in illustration is to make the worlds created believable, real: "I keep trying to make things more real, not in a literal photographic sense, but in an emotional sense, telling a story by capturing the essence of the situation, giving it some meaning."