Inspiring Children through Illustrated Books | Interview with Sheena Dempsey

Sheena Dempsey is an illustrator originally from Cork. She now lives in London with her partner Mick and their adopted ex-racing greyhound, Sandy. She has been illustrating professionally for about five or six years, and in that time, Sheena says she has had the pleasure of working with several lovely publishers in Ireland and in the UK. Here she talks to me about life as an illustrator and an author of children’s books.

How did you get started in illustration and children’s books? 

In 2009 I was living in Dublin and at a kind of impasse in my life having studied Fine Art but being fairly certain that it wasn’t for me. I’d become increasingly interested in illustration and children’s illustration and I eventually decided to study for a Masters at Kingston University. I was very lucky that my first book, which I started working on during my masters, was picked up and published by Walker Books.

What is the best thing about being an illustrator?

It’s hard to pinpoint, maybe the satisfaction of having drawn a really good picture. The process itself is usually difficult and frustrating. It’s like childbirth: torture during, but then you have something lovely at the end so you forget about the agony and you want to do it all over again. I find it very rewarding to meet enthusiastic children who are excited by drawing and writing too.

You’ve written some of your own books. What’s the difference between illustrating another authors books and illustrating your own?

When you are illustrating for others you have a lot less to worry about. It can be very liberating not to agonise over whether text and illustration are working together or whether the story is sounding flat and all of those concerns, and just focus on making the best illustrations you can. But there is something very satisfying too about inventing and developing a character of your own from scratch and immersing yourself in that dual process of drawing and writing. I enjoy both.

Part of the problem for me with writing my own stories though is that I’m not so crazy about all of the working on spec: you develop a kernel of an idea, you feel very excited, you work really hard honing and polishing, redrafting and rewriting and finally when they are ready, you send your beloved characters toddling off like babies finding their legs into the fairly harsh world of publishers’ inboxes…and the unsavoury truth is that more often than not they are rejected. I thought for ages that I was the only one whose ideas were being rejected but I’ve since learned that even manuscripts of very established children’s authors are frequently rejected by publishers. It’s a fiercely competitive game and getting your ideas published is the exception to the rule, even if you’ve already been published lots of times.

I really love to illustrate chapter books for other authors: it’s fun, straightforward and quick and the publishing turnaround is quite fast. With picturebooks you have to wait a whole year and a half after you deliver the work to see it in print, by which time you have gone off it because your work has moved on so much in the meantime.

What do you want children to take from your stories?

That’s such a good question – I want them to feel comforted, entertained and inspired. The way children and adults consume visual imagery is so different. As jaded adults I don’t think we don’t take as much in, but as a child you are seeing everything for the first time so it’s a much more intense and fascinating experience. I think that’s why the books we read as children seem to stay with us and we remember tiny details about them years later. I was recently speaking to a friend of mine and she was telling me how as a child she had a favourite book that she used to pore over and she always remembered a particular character: a monkey. In her mind this monkey was extremely important, but as an adult she went back to read the book and she couldn’t find the monkey anywhere. After searching thoroughly, she eventually found him but he was just a tiny little character on one spread, so small that if you blinked you’d have missed him. Yet for her that monkey had made that book really special. I thought that was very interesting. You don’t really know as an illustrator what children are going to respond to or which little detail will make an impression on them, but knowing that children love detail is part of the reason my illustrations can have a lot of it.

What were your favourite books growing up?

I don’t really remember many picturebooks in my childhood but I read all the Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton I could get my hands on. I read a lot of chapter books by Dick King Smith and Anne Fine, Michelle Magorian’s brilliant Goodnight Mister Tom, I loved Kaye Umansky’s Pongwiffy, as well as some of the Irish favourites like Daisy Chain War and Under the Hawthorne Tree. I really loved Alice in Wonderland – the original C S Lewis version with Tenniel’s absorbing and grotesque illustrations, but I also could not get enough of the Disney animation. Say what you like about Disney but Mary Blair’s touch in that animation makes it totally enthralling – I still think it’s their best one to date.

Do you think that children aren’t reading as many books as they used to, with video games and ipads being used more and more as entertainment?

I don’t know if this is strictly true. If reports of sales that I see in the Bookseller are anything to go by, children’s books are an ever growing sector and they make up a large percentage of overall book sales. (That’s not to say that my books are selling like hot cakes though! Just that publishers are making a hell of a lot of them). I think there is room for both iPads and books, although I do think that the internet can poison our concentration. Most children I know still make time for books though, there is a comfort and simplicity to the ritual of turning the pages of a book that children really respond to.

Who is your alter ego, Mrs. Pinkerley? 

Mrs Pinkerley is an ancient woman who owns a pet shop where one of my characters, Titch the guinea pig, is adopoted from. Occasionally she comes along to events and festivals. Who knows when she will finally retire or pop her clogs.

What are you working on at the moment?

Right now I’m finishing twenty colour illustrations for an Edwardian era chapter book by Sally Nicholls. It’s about a telegram boy called Billy who lives in a small village and I think it’s exactly the kind of book I would have felt very comforted by as a child. It’s publishing with Barrington Stoke in the summertime. I’ll soon be going to Ireland for the Mountains to Sea Festival where I’ll be doing some children’s events with Swapna Haddow, the author of “Dave Pigeon”, a book I illustrated in January, which is publishing with Faber and Faber in April.