Top Children Illustrators to Follow in 2022

There is a great chance that you still remember one or two of your favorite books as a kid. As a child, you best understand things through visuals since you don’t know how to read. This explains why kids’ books wouldn’t make sense if they did not have illustrations. Illustrations will help develop the mind and imagination of a child before they can read.

Most children’s book illustrators will come up with characters that children can relate to, like animals, natural vegetation, cartoon characters, and comics in a myriad of more!

This post will take you through five prominent and exceptionally great illustrators for children's books that you need to be following in 2022.

Oliver Jeffers

Oliver Jeffers was born in 1977 in Northern Irish and has been known for his work as an illustrator and writer. He currently resides in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the University of Ulster. As an illustrator and picture book maker, his work has featured in exhibitions in New York, Berlin, London, The Brooklyn Museum, Dublin, Washington D.C., and Sydney.

His work has won him plenty of accolades like The New York Times Best Seller list, The Lost and Found book was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway medal, The Blue Peter Book Award, and the Nestle Smarties Book Prize. Some of his renowned titles are How to Catch a Star, The Day the Crayons Quit, Up and Down, This Moose Belongs to Me, and Stick.

His books have received wide recognition to the point where they have been translated to French, Spanish, and German.

Lisa Brown

Lisa Brown is known as one of the New York Times bestselling illustrator, cartoonist, and writer. She has impressive picture books for children like the Airport Book, Baby Get me some Lovin, How to Be, Goldfish Ghost, and mummy cat. She is also a lecturer at California College of Art, where she teaches illustration.

She uses the pseudonym Sarah ‘Pinkie’ Bennet in illustrations. Brown has a few accolades to her names, thanks to her illustration career. She won the best children’s books for family literacy in 2007, the CCBC Choices Award in 2007, Best Books for children in 2006 presented by The Association of Booksellers for Children, and the Print Regional Design Annual for 2006 & 2007 for the book cover design.

Nina Crews

Nina Crews has had an interest in illustration and photography at an early age. She has taken pictures of her hometown since she was young. Her parents were children’s book authors, and they played a huge role in encouraging their daughter about art. Her parents are Donald Crews and Ann Jonas. As she started, she did commercial animation and photo collage illustrations as a freelancer. These jobs played a huge role in leading her into being one of the most spectacular children illustrators.

Some of her work include Snowball, The Neighborhood Mother Goose, and One Hot Summer Day.

Patricia Polacco

Patricia Polacco is an illustrator who has done more than 115 books for kids. These books are Thunder Cake, Rechenka’s Eggs, The Blessing Cup, and The Keeping Quilt. Through Polacco’s challenges as a kid, she developed interests in drawing, sculpture, and painting as she struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia to the age of 14years. This did not stop her from getting a degree in fine arts and a Ph.D. in art history.

This will be a surprise to many; Polacco started writing children's books at 40 years. These books have drawn great inspiration from her childhood memories. Most of these have been influenced by her cultural background for her inclination to storytelling. You will notice that figures like her grandmother feature in many of her famous titles.

When it comes to Polacco’s work, you will notice that she uses soft graphite and pen and ink drawings. There are instances where she has also made use of collage. When it comes to the facial features, you will see that some have been rendered with Sketchy lines and greyscale. For important objects, joyful circumstances, and characters, she makes use of flat colors.

Conclusion

When looking for the best books for your kid or a gift for a friend’s child, you should consider following the illustrators we discussed above. They will have books or illustrations that you can buy for display in a child’s room or nursery.