posted on 10 Apr 2016

Christian Birmingham

Christian Birmingham is one of those illustrators whose distinctive style created using chalk pastels and pencil, you could not fail to recognise. Until I started to read about his background, I didn’t realise that he was so young, in fact I thought his rather old fashioned, traditional and occasionally rather sentimental representations indicated that he was probably old school.  His use of colour, particularly the vivid luminous blues when he is illustrating the sea, sometimes reminds me of Michael Foreman so it was interesting to read that he also spent his teenage years living in Cornwall. He has cited the American illustrator, Richard Scarry as his biggest influence as since a child, he has been impressed with his meticulous attention to detail

He graduated with a first class degree from Exeter College of Art and Design in 1991 and quickly established his reputation with his first picture book contract illustrating The Night Before Christmas narrative poem by Clement C. Moore. This was created using real people as his life models, a technique that he apparently favours for all his illustrations. I think that this explains the very solid three dimensional quality to his characters who are sometimes almost photographic in style. For instance, when illustrating A Christmas Carol he apparently used a model from an agency called ‘Ugly Models’ for Scrooge dressed him appropriately and then posed him in a Dickensian style theatre set for authenticity. He has also illustrated Oliver Twist with the same attention to period detail.

Although his work is in the realist tradition, he is renowned for how he adapts this convincingly to make fantasy worlds seem real. He has illustrated many fairy tales including The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson. He has illustrated other books by many prestigious children’s authors including Michael Morpurgo, Ian Whybrow and Mark Haddon.

As well as illustrating books, Birmingham also works as an artist producing pictures based on familiar landscapes that have inspired him like Cornwall, Brighton and Derbyshire. He especially likes to represent Venice as he loves the particular quality of light found there, an interest which explains the often impressionistic Monet like quality of his work.

Karen Argent

9th April 2016