Illustrators – Sarah Warburton

Illustrators – Sarah Warburton

Dominique Valente: Starfell – Willow Moss and the Forgotten Tale (HarperCollins Publishers 2020)

Sarah Warburton is a children’s book illustrator. In Hungary, we can see her drawings in the first volume of Dominique Valente’s Starfell series, but she has already worked with lot of well-known authors and publishers. You can read more about Dominique Valente and her books here and here.

Sarah Warburton spent her childhood in North Wales and currently lives in Bristol. According to her own admission, her style changed a lot: as a college student and in the years that followed, she turned to darker tones. She then began to illustrate various textbooks where she could try out a large variety of techniques. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, her drawings began to become softer and her colors got more vivid. She is perhaps best known abroad for her illustrations in Caryl Hart Princess series, and the covers of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Stories are also very beautiful.

Catherine Holabird’s Twinkle was the first fairy she drew. She loved fairies as a young child, but when she finally had the opportunity to draw them, she wasn’t sure she would succeed. But because her studio is in the garden, she soon jumped back into the fairytale world: she was inspired by the flowers and the wings of insects.

In 2018, she created illustrations for the new retelling of Peter Pan by Caryl Hart, in which dark tones can be discovered, but in richer colors that tend to be filled with magic rather than gloom.

By her own admission, her favorite parts of a book are endpapers, because here in the illustrations, we can discover things that don’t necessarily collide with the story.

If you would like to see other beautiful illustrations by Sarah Warburton, you can visit her at Swarb_ish on Instagram, Sarah Warburton Books on Facebook or @sarahwarbie on Twitter.