Featured Artist June 2009: Christiane Engel
Christiane Engel is a freelance illustrator based in London. She was trained in Animation and Graphic Arts in her home country, Germany and in the UK. Over the past 4 years in business she has worked for a wide variety of international clients, ranging from small businesses to high profile advertising agencies.
She has illustrated picture books, school books, a childrens’ bible (My Read and Rhyme Bible Storybook) for Tyndale US - featuring just under 200 of her illustrations, an award-winning advertising campaign run by the COI to promote affordable childcare (commissioned by CMW London) and she also regularly works on editorial illustrations for newspapers and magazines.
Christiane says that quite often art directors commission her because they are intrigued by the eye-catching way she portrays children - naughty but cute. In fact, she draws inspiration from real life situations, her own childhood and funny everyday stories that happen to people around her. Her bold and colourful cut-out collage style is achieved by using lots of different elements such as hand painted papers, textures and wood, and sometimes line drawing, which are then put together digitally, giving her maximum flexibility in developing a first idea into the final artwork. Christiane often combines her own handlettering with her illustrations, and has created type for ads (Fairy/Make-A-Wish, Twix) and children’s books including her own, ‘Louis+Bobo’ (Chrysalis Children’s Books), which she both wrote and illustrated.
She recently finished working on two children’s books, an environmentally themed pop-up book series for Macmillan, and a quirky interactive picture book for TenSpeed Press US. At the moment Christiane is working on two educational projects whilst also preparing a new book of her own. She is represented by Thorogood Illustration.
Clients include: Macmillan, Barefoot Books, COI, TenSpeed Press (Random House), Guardian, Junior, Tyndale House Publishers, Froebel Korea, Twix, Fairy/Make-A-Wish, Hamlyn Books, Harcourt, Oxford University Press, Chrysalis Children’s Books, Surrey County Council, Unicef.
See more of Christiane’s work at www.desertfriends.com.
