Windows into Illustration: Kate Winter

Kate Winter won the 2024 Klaus Flugge Prize with The Fossil Hunter (Puffin Books), which tells the story of 19^th century palaeontologist, Mary Anning. The judges admire her observational skills, the sense of place and atmosphere in her illustrations, and her use of light and colour. She describes creating the book here.

One of my favourite parts of making a book are when those early images pop into your head as you sift through the details of your idea, character or story. At least this is what happened to me for The Fossil Hunter. As I started to investigate Mary Anning’s fascinating story clear visuals started to emerge in my mind and then on the page as I sketched out my ideas.

Some of these images illustrated Mary’s place in society and how she was positioned in the lower echelons of the 19^th century class system in Britain. Layered images appeared in my early sketches, such as Mary and her family down on the beach while the smart landed gentry walked above on the promenade, or the scholars debating in the oak-panelled rooms of the Geological Society, while Mary looked up at the closed doors from the street below, refused entry because of her gender.

Another theme that stood out and appeared in early brainstorms was Mary’s extraordinary imagination. In one of the first images I drew, she was holding an ammonite in her hand. The image is up close and just a thumbnail in black and white, but it opened the door to many of the illustrations in the book. I depicted staring into the fossil, questioning it and I knew her imagination would have been whirring with ideas. This zoomed-in, black and white thumbnail opened the door to many of the illustrations in the book.

The wonderful thing about drawings and illustration is that they can be used to visualise the imagination and inner thoughts of characters on the page, so the readers can see the ideas. I drew Mary daydreaming of evolution, with a whole other world of creatures in the sea and the sky transforming over millennia. I drew her looking up at a cliff and imagining its many fossils still to be discovered, with each stratum like a layered time capsule. I produced a series of sketches where Mary holds a lamplight up to the imagined past, and an image where she imagined Lyme Regis under the sea with prehistoric marine reptiles swimming around her.

For me, this imaginative and creative thinking epitomises Mary’s unique strength and the driving force behind the advances in science that she determinedly propelled forward. Although many of these early images are different to the final illustrations in the book, they are important parts of the process for me and helped me understand what Mary might have thought and how she might have felt.

The cover image of her beneath a sky full of Pterosaurs was the one that I feel most clearly shows her unbound freedom of imagination and best expresses her passion for her work. The image is also used inside the book as a bi-fold image, where the pages open up to reveal Mary’s inner world and totally immerse you in her imagination. This feels exactly like state of mind that I like to be in when I work on my drawings – a state of unbridled abandonment and total immersion in thought.

I always begin in charcoal to sketch initial ideas. I work big, I wipe away what doesn’t work with my finger and I redraw. Charcoal is like clay, you can manipulate it and reposition it. It’s a highly underrated (and cheap!) material. You can see here how I added extra pieces of paper as the image grew.  Her posture with her arm stretched up, feels right for what I want this image to express. I hope it makes the viewer feel that airiness and freedom she might have felt in that imaginative moment. The body is very expressive and, as illustrators, we can use this as a key tool to show emotion and feeling in our imagery. Often I will pose my characters or take on a facial expression I am drawing to feel how it would feel to be them, and this helps me draw.

I needed to know a little bit about the kind of creatures that might have been in a Jurassic sky so I took time to research pterosaurs and produce a series of initial sketches. The fact they are flying around freely in the image adds to that feeling of Mary’s expansive imagination and freedom of mind. She can almost touch them, as though she can reach back into the past. That is another great gift of this story – Mary was a kind of time traveller who could journey to the past through her work, which gave me lots to play with and is something I am revisiting in my next book.

When the image was nearing completion, my designer suggested the inclusion of the pink sky. This immediately worked well, adding warmth and colour but also indicating the later years of Mary’s all too short life. When adjusting it to use for the cover I was also able to add details below the ground that indicated her story and some kind of connection between the real fossilised remains underground and her creative and imaginative mind.

The Fossil Hunter is published by Puffin, 978-0241469897, £8.99 pbk.