Melissa Castrillón is an English and Colombian illustrator who studied illustration at the Cambridge School of Art and currently lives in Cambridge with her husband. She spends most of her days illustrating and writing children’s picture books, as well as illustrating and designing book covers for all ages. She has already illustrated more than ten picture books and written three, which have been translated to more than 20 languages worldwide.
Her motivations are striking color combinations, imaginative compositions and unusual patterns. She has won numerous awards and in 2019 was awarded a gold medal by the Society of Illustrators in New York for her wordless book entitled The Balcony. Plants and nature play an important role in her works. In Hungarian, we can see her illustrations in The House with Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson, The Marvellous Land of Snergs by Veronica Cossanteli and the first two volumes of The Pinch of Magic series by Michelle Harrison, but she also illustrated English-language classics such as His Dark Materials trilogy and Tuck Everlasting.
Among the book projects, she designs her own patterns and prints and holds a picture book illustration course on the Domestika website.
