Lisa Stickley’s Art Is Childish, But In a Good Way

Lisa Stickley’s illustration are a sort of upgraded version of kids’ illustrations. Naive, if a bit wonky, her artwork has a playful twist to it. A sure recipe for smiles. “At the moment I love drawing animals and have a particular penchant for drawing soft toys (old and new), building up layer upon layer of texture to give the right look and feel to the character,” she relayed in an interview with Dulwich Festival. “I love making them look a little bit wonky and odd, giving them their own unique personality.”

Inspired (and influenced) by her two young girls, Stickley enjoys writing and illustrating stories for children. Trained originally as a printed textile designer, her illustrations are a mixture of shapes, patterns, and textures.

“When I was little, I was always making and doing, be it cooking, coloring, sewing, painting, drawing… I’d always be creating something or another,” recalled Stickley. “I think things really took hold at school when I had a wonderful art teacher, who encouraged me to apply for a Textile Design degree. Training and working as a printed textile designer, illustration naturally went hand in hand with designing prints. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to transfer this into illustrating for books.”

Explaining her creative process itself, she admits to using a lot of different processes to draw, using oil pastels, the mono-printed line combined with a collaged pattern, pen and ink, and paper cutting and paint. “I quite like a blank sheet of paper and often doodle on older, more worn out bits of paper I’ve collected over the years,” she says. “It adds another element to the illustration, I think.”

Check out some of her work in the gallery below.