Helen Craig | |
|---|---|
| Born | 30 August 1934 London, UK |
| Occupation | Illustrator, writer, sculptor |
| Notable works | Angelina Ballerina |
Helen Craig (born 30 August 1934) [1] is an English children's book illustrator and writer. She is best known for creating the Angelina Ballerina series of children's books with writer Katharine Holabird.
Craig was born in London, evacuated during World War II and educated in Essex, then from 1943 at King Alfred's School in Hertfordshire, then in London. [2] During the 1950s she worked as a portrait photographer in North London, then moved to Spain for 3 years, where she began making ceramic sculptures. Returning to the UK in 1967, she began illustrating children's books in 1970. The first book which she had both written and illustrated was The Mouse House ABC, published in 1977. With co-author Sarah Hayes she created "Bear", a popular children's character who appears in This Is The Bear (1986), This Is The Bear and the Picnic Lunch (1988), and This Is The Bear and the Scary Night (1992). [3] Currently Craig has returned to the medium of sculpture and is making small figurative works.
Craig is the daughter of the film designer and writer Edward Carrick. Her great-grandmother was the stage actress Ellen Terry and her grandfather was theatrical scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig. [4] One of her great-grandfathers was Gaetano Meo (1850–1925) an artist's model, painter and mosaicist, associated with the Pre-Raphelites. In 2018, with the assistance of mosaicist Tessa Hunkin, Craig restored the mosaic gravestone in Hampstead Cemetery which Meo created for his wife Agnes Morton and young son, under which he is also buried. [5]
A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images in picture books can be produced in a range of media, such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolor, and pencil. Picture books often serve as pedagogical resources, aiding with children's language development or understanding of the world.
Pamela Colman Smith, nicknamed "Pixie", was a British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the Rider–Waite tarot deck for Arthur Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the most widely used today. Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused on women writers.
Dame Alice Ellen Terry,, was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Edward Henry Gordon Craig, sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of actress Dame Ellen Terry.
Helen Sonia Cooper is a British illustrator and an author of children's literature. She grew up in Cumbria, where she practiced literature and piano playing. She currently lives in Oxford.
Charlotte Zolotow was an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of many books for children. She wrote about 70 picture book texts.
Jessie Willcox Smith was an American illustrator during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was considered "one of the greatest pure illustrators". A contributor to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Smith illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included a long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all of the Good Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
Gordon Frederick Browne was an English artist and a prolific illustrator of children's books in the late 19th century and early 20th century. He was a meticulous craftsman and went to a great deal of effort to ensure that his illustrations were accurate. He illustrated six or seven books a year in addition to a huge volume of magazine illustration.
Ursula Dubosarsky is an Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, whose work is characterised by a child's vision and comic voice of both clarity and ambiguity. She has won nine national literary prizes, including five New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, more than any other writer in the Awards' 30-year history. She was appointed the Australian Children's Laureate for 2020–2021.
Hampstead Cemetery is a historic cemetery in West Hampstead, London, located at the upper extremity of the NW6 district. Despite the name, the cemetery is three-quarters of a mile from Hampstead Village, and bears a different postcode. It is jointly managed by Islington and Camden Cemetery Service and opens seven days a week, with closing times varying throughout the year.
Helen Gillian Oxenbury is an English illustrator and writer of children's picture books. She lives in North London. She has twice won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal, the British librarians' award for illustration and been runner-up four times. For the 50th anniversary of that Medal (1955–2005) her 1999 illustrated edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was named one of the top ten winning works.
Bronwyn Bancroft is an Aboriginal Australian artist, and among the first Australian fashion designers invited to show her work in Paris. Born in Tenterfield, New South Wales, and trained in Canberra and Sydney, Bancroft worked as a fashion designer, and is an artist, illustrator, and arts administrator.
Mairi Hedderwick is a Scottish illustrator and author, known for the Katie Morag series of children's picture books set on the Isle of Struay, a fictional counterpart of the inner Hebridean island of Coll where Hedderwick has lived at various times for much of her life.
The Terry family was a British theatrical dynasty of the late 19th century and beyond. The family includes not only those members with the surname Terry, but also Neilsons, Craigs and Gielguds, to whom the Terrys were linked by marriage or blood ties.
Gaetano Giuseppe Faostino Meo was an Italian-British artist's model, landscape painter, and a noted craftsman in mosaic and stained glass. His unpublished autobiography is a useful source for art historians of the Aesthetic Movement and Edwardian Era.
Edward Carrick was an English art designer for film, an author and illustrator.
Helen Francesca Mary Binyon was a British artist and writer. She was also a watercolour painter, an illustrator and a puppeteer.
Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear is a 2015 children's book written by Canadian author Lindsay Mattick and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. The non-fiction book is framed as a story Mattick is telling to her son. Her great-grandfather, Harry Colebourn bought a bear on his way to fight in World War I, donating the bear to a zoo where it became the inspiration for the character of Winnie-the-Pooh. Finding Winnie was thoroughly researched by both Blackall and Mattick. The book's writing and illustrations were well reviewed and it won the 2016 Caldecott Medal.
Carole Marie Byard was an American visual artist, illustrator, and photographer. She was an award-winning illustrator of children's books, and the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, as well as multiple Coretta Scott King Awards.
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