Rosie is an artist, illustrator and printmaker, who specialises in book illustrations, and aspires to continue the lithographic tradition within the craft of children’s book illustration. She started her career as a freelance producer and project manager, working mostly for media and not-for-profit organisations, before moving into illustration. She gained an MA in Children’s Book Illustration from Cambridge School of Art and has already successfully published two books with Tate Publishing. Her first book was highly commended in the World Illustration Awards 2021, shortlisted for the Little Rebels Award and named as an Observer/Guardian children’s book of 2020.
A QEST Scholarship will enable Rosie to study lithography—which was added to the HCA’s Red List of Endangered Crafts this year. She will have 12 days of one-to-one tuition with master printmaker, Catherine Ade, founder of Lemonade Press. They will cover graining and processing autolithography plates; chemical processes of plate preparation; drawing with specialist lithographic materials; mixing inks and hand inking the plate; colour separation, registration, and complex layer construction; and the use of offset lithography presses. The new skills she learns will complement her work as both an illustrator and artist-printmaker, and make her more specialist in a craft that she already loves.
Once she has completed her QEST-funded programme, Rosie plans to continue writing and illustrating books, and to extend her practise to include lithographic art prints and perhaps even fabric.
She has two new books coming out in 2022 – We Are Human Animals and A Ladybird Book: The Stone Age.
