Brian Wildsmith, who has died aged 86, was the award-winning illustrator of more than 80 children’s picture books, whose explosive use of colour made them immediately recognisable to young readers all over the world.
Together with Quentin Blake and John Burningham, he influenced a generation of illustrators and publishers in the 1960s, when opportunities for better colour reproduction were growing.
The armadillo, butterfly, cat and other creatures in his alphabetical first book, ABC (1961), were sufficiently distinctive and innovative to win him the Kate Greenaway Medal awarded by UK children’s librarians. Encouraged by Mabel George, the children’s books editor at Oxford University Press, who championed him from the start of his career, and by subsequent editors, he published at least one and usually two books a year throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Read more about him here at The Guardian
See more of his work on Instagram and here on a tribute page.
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