In this episode, our Tania chats with multi award-winning illustrator Jill Calder about 30+ years of illustration, and how she’s explored pretty much the entire “illustration atlas” without losing herself along the way.

Stuff we cover:

• Staying recognisably Jill across 30+ years of illustration
• Moving from editorial to corporate to heritage work
• Building a career with both illustration and hand lettering
• Big, bonkers corporate jobs (including handwriting as other people!)
• Making the leap into children’s books later in her career
• The reality of nonfiction vs fiction picture books (time, fees, and headspace)
• Colour palettes, maps and Google Earth “walks” for picture atlases
• Working with Jackie Kay on Coorie Doon and handling deeply emotional text
• Bringing wild, playful colour to I Love You Every Color
• Keeping energy and looseness in final artwork
• What Jill’s working on now – including a brand new picture book with Gecko Press

Rough Timestamps

00:00 – Tania introduces Jill and why she’s a Good Ship favourite
02:30 – Early days: art school, editorial work and the 90s newspaper scene
05:00 – “By chance, someone took a risk on me…” – moving into design & corporate jobs
07:30 – Becoming “the handwriting person”
11:30 – The wildest job ever
15:00 – Champagne, iPads and the very fancy side of ad agency work
16:30 – Exhibition days, analogue work and why looseness matters
18:00 – Stumbling into children’s nonfiction with Robert the Bruce
21:00 – Picture atlases, strict colour palettes and Google Earth walks
22:30 – Nonfiction vs fiction picture books – fees, length and workload
26:00 – Collaborating with Jackie Kay on Coorie Doon and illustrating big feelings
29:30 – I Love You Every Colour – an illustrator’s dream text
31:30 – Two very different books in one year: soft dreamland vs riot of colour
33:30 – Handling emotion, light and character across spreads
34:30 – New project: Cass and the Beast for Gecko Press
35:30 – Keeping rough energy in final artwork (and managing the stress of it!)
37:00 – Where Jill pops up inside Good Ship courses and Facebook groups

Stuff we mentioned

• Jill Calder – illustration, lettering and books
• Find Your Creative Voice – Fly Your Freak Flag (Good Ship course)
• The Picture Book Course (Good Ship course)
• Robert the Bruce – nonfiction picture book
• Coorie Doon – written by Jackie Kay, illustrated by Jill Calder
• I Love You Every Colour – written by Carolyn Rose, illustrated by Jill Calder
• Upcoming: Cass and the Beast – written by Clare Mabey, illustrated by Jill Calder (Gecko Press)

Byeeee for now!

x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania)

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Y'know when you feel like your work is neeearly there… but it's missing a lil something-something? This podcast episode is all about that. Overcoming that.

How the heck do you put more humanness into your work?

• “Accomplished” isn’t the same as “alive”
• How generic styles can creep in without us noticing
• The danger of trying to look like “a picture book illustrator”
• Why you need to make work that freaks you out a tiny bit 🤪
• The power of real memories and emotions
• Ideas that stick: why some stories stay with us
• How character, tension, and contradiction shape good storytelling
• Letting your real obsessions lead the way 🐌
• Yessss, research in bookshops is absolutely definitely part of the job
  
  

00:00 – Aaccomplished work with no heart
01:00 – “Picture book style” stereotypes and why they’re dangerous
02:00 – Generic vs personal: how to tell the difference
03:00 – Making work that stops an art director mid-scroll
04:00 – Emotion in drawings (and penguins)
05:00 – True stories - using your real life
06:00 – The Nissen Hut
07:30 – Sticky ideas
09:00 – Plots built on tiny universal moments
10:00 – A “Smile in the Mind”
11:00 – Writing craft: thesis / antithesis / synthesis
13:00 – Character dynamics and why Bernard is… Bernard 🦆
14:00 – Films to study (hello, Groundhog Day)
15:00 – How Helen learned to write
16:00 – Why sitting in a bookshop absolutely counts as work
17:00 – Picture books now vs the 90s
18:00 – Jill Calder, Libby VanderPloeg, and holding onto your voice
20:00 – Don’t perform
21:00 – Honesty wins

• A Smile in the Mind - Tania's design book recommendation by Beryl McAlhone & David Stuart
• Made to Stick (the kidney-harvesting myth book Katie mentioned!) - Chip & Dan Heath
• Groundhog Day - film
• Jill Calder: https://jillcalder.com
• Libby VanderPloeg: https://libbyvanderploeg.com
• Emily Howorth-Booth’s writing workshops that Helen loves
• Good Ship Illustration courses: https://www.thegoodshipillustration.com

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

This week on The Good Ship Illustration Podcast, we’re chatting all things experiments - we get particularly excited about FAILED experiments. In the words of that there Bob Ross, "we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents". 😆

Behind the scenes, Helen gave Tania a haircut just before we recorded this episode. Can you hear Tania's new hair?

Timestamps for our timestamp fans:
00:00 – Mmmm new ideas
01:00 – Katie’s “scaling the business” experiment that didn’t work
02:00 – Undoing things that aren’t fun anymore
03:00 – Helen’s new plan
05:00 – Tania’s in the boot of the car
06:00 – Helen’s failed online school visits experiment
08:00 – Moving from digital art back to paper
09:00 – Helen’s Substack paywall experiment (inspired by Blindboy)
12:00 – The birth of The Good Ship Illustration 🚢
13:00 – Haircuts
14:00 – Art Club’s accidental success
15:00 – Why experiments matter (and how to run one properly)
18:00 – Creative defiance and why being told what to do ruins everything 😂
20:00 – From accidental experiments to a whole career

Links & Stuff We Mentioned:

• The Good Ship Illustration on Instagram (the Art Club replays are here!)
• The Picture Book Course
  Sticker snail mail bonus ends 21st November 🎟️

Byeeee for now!
x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania)

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙