Katharine Nicholls

Here are some of my animation backgrounds from various productions in the 1990's. I and others painted hundreds over the years, often working into the small hours to make sure we delivered on time. Always there was a balance to be struck between speed and quality. Getting the style of the production right would take a couple of weeks at first and then I'd be away, gathering speed in my little workroom, tuned into Radio 4. It's not a job for the gregarious person perhaps but I enjoyed being cocooned in my own little world. One of things it taught me was to think of style as superficial thing, a veneer that matters less than the substance, i.e. the idea or the drawing. But style is important too, it's just that it's sometimes used to mask weak substance. Here's a tiny sample of my animation backgrounds, some of the few that made it to the photocopy shop on the mad dash down the Tottenham Court Road to deliver work. These two backgrounds we

I'm working on some hotel pictures again and I thought I'd put some up even though they are a bit unfinished.  I don't want to overwork them but the flowers need more fullness so I'll add some more of the white gouache blobs with my sponge at the studio next week. I'm quite pleased with the freshness of these.

I just found more some more images from The Gardener, the book I did a few years ago with the jeweller, Alex Monroe.  Alex's story was about a little girl who discovered the delights of an allotment in the city and he made a beautiful collection of jewellery around the idea.   I thought about the story recently when I heard that councils are selling off allotment sites for development, in some cases land that has been used for this purpose for hundreds of years.   The illustrations were deliberately loose and dreamy in their style. Here are a few of the development pages from my sketchbooks