Angie Rozelaar Scary Monsters and Super Kids

Originally from Kent, Angie Rozelaar has lived in London, Brighton, Devon, and Sweden before moving to Normandy in France where she presently resides with her family in an old farmhouse. Having a converted hayloft for a studio, seven cats and a collection of hens running around, it’s no wonder that she draws such smiley characters !

Her sketches also have a fresh charm of their own.

Angie loves using all sorts of materials to create her illustrations, including conté crayons, inks, watercolour, graphite sticks, a wide variety of pens and a computer. 

You can even see the brush strokes in some of these illustrations.

A few friendly wild cats and a sheep who knits, well why not !

I really like these little snapshots where child and animal are off on their travels.

The natural next step on, is small children and scary monsters, or small monsters and scary, bossy children lol

Earlier this year Angie’s latest book Don’t Call Me Sweet was published by Bloomsbury. Everyone thinks that little monsters are cute and cuddly, but this monster’s grumpy and grouchy. Honest ! He does REAL monster stuff, like stomping around and eating squishy, squelchy food like bug eye stew. He’s brave, too – he’s not scared of ANYTHING. Not even big, hairy ogres …Wait, is that a big, hairy ogre ? HELP !

Angie has worked with great names like with Hodder Children’s Books, Bloomsbury Children’s Books and HarperCollins US. 

After a childhood spent mostly drawing and painting pictures, she went on to study at Chelsea Art School, and later graduated in Humanities from Exeter University.

Since then, her path to becoming a full time illustrator has been a meandering one. Although she continued to enjoy drawing in her spare time throughout a variety of jobs, from West End theatre technician to gallery assistant, it was not until she began working with a local primary school on a project to support literacy that she discovered an aptitude for children’s book illustration in particular. She started posting her work on her blog and launched her career as a freelance illustrator in 2009, securing early commissions for greetings cards and from educational publishers.

I’m loving this slightly retro look here too.

Not only is Angie a fellow illustrator on my agent’s site Yellow House Art Licensing but best of all, she told me she is also a firm fan of my Fishink Blog too ! What great taste she has lol

I caught up with her, in her French abode, to give us a flavour of how she works. She told me  ” A typical day would see me in my studio by about 9.30 (after packing the kids off to school and feeding my 7 cats!) I generally work until about 6pm. My studio is a converted hayloft right next to our house, so I don’t have far to go.

Keep up the superb work Angie, look forward to seeing many more illustrations from you in the years to come and do keep us posted as to any future developments with your Etsy shop.