Yasmeen Ismail at the Seven Stories archive

Just before Christmas author and illustrator Yasmeen Ismail paid a visit to the Seven Stories archive. If you’ve yet to have the joy of seeing Yasmeen’s work for yourself, you can see some pictures and find out more about her from her website: http://www.yasmeenismail.co.uk. Yasmeen’s first book was Time for Bed, Fred, published by Bloomsbury last year, and her next book If I had a Cat is due out in June this year. Yasmeen has very kindly donated artwork from both of these titles to the Seven Stories collection!






This is Yasmeen at the archive with some of her artwork

 

During her visit, Yasmeen had a look at some of our collections including illustrations by Edward Ardizzone for his book Tim and Charlotte and illustrations by Helen Craig for Angelina Ballerina. She also talked to us about her own process and technique. Yasmeen specialises in watercolours and collage and her colourful, energetic style (inspired by her background in animation) is very distinct. She uses a computer to bring her drawings together, taking elements of various scanned drawings and sketches and compiling them into a final image – making her process quite a bit different from a lot of other illustrators in our collection. Amongst Yasmeen’s material are whole pages of drawings of books, clothes and ‘Freds’, only one or two of which have made it into a final image.

Yasmeen’s artwork will be catalogued and available to view soon and will no doubt be featuring in Seven Stories events in the near future.