There’s something very enchanting about creating a beautiful book. As an animator it’s a refreshing process to create still images to tell a story but it’s also a great challenge to select the exact images which will best illustrate the narrative. I really love working with beautiful stories from authors or indeed creating a story from scratch with the illustrations and characters helping to shape the words of the story.
A long running artist collaboration with Cat Rabbit has produced two books, several art installations and a couple of films. We’ve published two children’s books through Thames and Hudson in Australia and by Gibbs Smith in the USA. The books are about solving problems creatively and working co-operatively to achieve magnificent outcomes.
Cornelia Rabbit loves owls and when her town in is peril she uses her owl-know-how to design a plan to save her home. Everyone works together to build a factory. An OWL factory!
Written and Illustrated by Cat Rabbit and Isobel Knowles
Published in Australia by Thames.& Hudson and in the US by Gibbs Smith
An introverted turtle becomes overwhelmed by visitors blowing into her house seeking refuge from a storm. Turtle retreats deep into her shell until a little friend turns things around and helps her forget to be shy.
Written and Illustrated by Cat Rabbit and Isobel Knowles
Published in Australia by Thames.& Hudson
Written by the acclaimed Maxine Beneba Clarke, Wide Big World celebrates diversity from the perspective of a kindergarten playground conversation. I used hand-painted japanese washi paper to cut the shapes for the collaged illustrations and photographed them using a lightbox.
On Tuesday at kinder, under the mulberry tree,
Izzy Jones stared over at me. “You’re brown, Belle!” she said,
her eyes big-saucer-wide.
I said “Yeah, I am!” and I flashed her a smile.
Written by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Illustrated by Isobel Knowles
Published by Hachette
Chinese Straight
Written by Kerry Brown to coincide with the ANZAC Centenary year, Lest we Forget is a conversation between a young boy and his grandfather sharing ‘days you want to remember and those you want to forget. I illustrated the memories of the young boy and Benjamin Portas illustrated the grandfather’s memories.
“Lest we Forget by author Kerry Brown stands out as one of the best picture books in this category. I love the clever way two very talented new illustrators, Isobel Knowles and Benjamin Portas have worked together to produce the art work.” - Wendy Fitzgerald, ReadingTime.com.au
Storybox Library is a video service providing beautiful books read by authors, actors, musicians and tv personalities. I created a title animation, a full length video of the themesong and some special titles for their Indigenous Story Time collection animating characters by Karen Briggs.
Getting to the point of finishing and launching a book is such an incredible effort, it’s great to be able to help authors and illustrators celebrate their new creations and add another dimension to their story.
I love spending the day in the studio with Anna and her beautiful characters. Anna creates felt puppets of her characters and we spend the day together playing around with animating them. We’ve made videos for her books SNAP!, Hello Jimmy and Peggy.
Found In Melbourne is like a postcard from our favourite city. It was fun to animate all the familiar scenes!
