P.J. Lynch (Illustrator)
P.J.'s Website: http://www.pjlynchgallery.com/
P.J.'s Blog: http://pjlynchgallery.blogspot.com/
P.J.'s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pj.lynch.520?fref=ts
P.J.'s Website: http://www.pjlynchgallery.com/
P.J.'s Blog: http://pjlynchgallery.blogspot.com/
P.J.'s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pj.lynch.520?fref=ts
P.J. Lynch is one of Ireland’s most accomplished and celebrated illustrators, with an illustrious reputation worldwide. He won the Mother Goose Award for ‘the most exciting new-comer to British illustration’ with his first book A Bag of Moonshine (1986) and was the winner of the Christopher Medal three times. He has also been awarded the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal on two occasions, for The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (1995), and When Jessie Came Across the Sea (1997).
P.J. Lynch loved to draw as a child, and began at a young age to copy illustrations, comics and photographs. Lynch advocates this method of drawing to eager children who wish to learn and improve their artistic skills. His mother recalls that while everyone else was playing football, he was always drawing on scraps of paper, in jotters, on cardboard from new shirt packets, and on any other scraps of paper he could find. P.J. Lynch really appreciated and valued his mother’s encouragement and he continued to draw and practice in order to receive this affirmation. He also attributes his talent to his older brother, Denis, who is also a good artist, and inspired him to continue to draw. P.J. pushed himself to draw beyond his years in order for his drawings to be like his brother. He remembers having his ‘breakthrough’ once he realized how to get the ‘shiny’ effect on trains in order for them look curved and three dimensional, and this motivated him to try other drawings using this effect.
P.J. wasn’t wrapped up in picture books as a child like some other illustrators, but he distinctly remembers a set of old encyclopedia that his mum bought. He poured over these books, continuously switching from the illustrated myths and legends, to the factual material, containing photographs and diagrams. It is only in the past few years that he has made the connection between this collection, and his love and obsession for detailed research before beginnning illustrations.
P.J. was born in Belfast, in 1962, during the Troubles, and he was the youngest of five children in a Catholic family. Like many other illustrators who are from, or live in Northern Ireland (Martin Waddell, Anita Jeram, Flora McDonnell and Oliver Jeffers) As a teenager, P.J. buried himself in books and created new worlds in his drawings, to escape the horrors that were happening outside his door. He also found relief and peace at his mother’s family farm, where he and his brothers and sister worked during the summer.
Lynch’s secondary school, St. Malachy’s College, was very focused on academics and produced a large quantity of professionals. P.J. was advised by his teachers and parents to do architecture, because of his artistic talent. Although he originally began to follow this path, he realized during Upper 6th that he had no ability or interest in maths or physics and that he wanted to pursue what he loved, which was painting. Therefore, he enrolled in a foundation year in Art College in Jordanstown, Belfast, where he was introduced to many different mediums of art. However, he was disillusioned about becoming a painter, as his tutors didn’t value painting from life or life drawing, although P.J. was showing a great interest in this naturalistic style. As his dream of becoming a painter was diminishing, he then discovered the Illustration Department. This led him to apply to do Graphics and Illustration at Brighton College of Art, where one of his tutor’s was Raymond Briggs. The College is known for it’s successful alumni of illustrators and their children’s books tradition. A turning point for him in his studies was when he was asked to illustrate an extract of descriptive fantasy writing from The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White. This style of writing compelled him to produce a new and higher quality to his work. Once completed, the tutor photocopied his illustration onto the text to make it seem like P.J.’s work had been published. Seeing his work ‘in print’ gave P.J. an overwhelming sense of pride and he now knew the path he wanted to take in his career.
After graduating from College, P.J. stumbled into children’s books illustration while exhibiting some of his work at the Association of Illustrators Gallery, London. A representative from Collins Publishing Company invited him to do some sample drawings for the book A Bag of Moonshine, a selection of English fairy tales by Alan Garner. At first P.J was working with colouring pencils, however this style didn’t suit the stories. He then began to look at Arthur Rackham’s work, from the ‘Golden Age’ of British Book Illustrators, influencing him to begin experimenting with ink and a dip pen. He developed this technique over a few weeks, and the illustrations for this book were done with line drawings and tipped in colour plates. This was the beginning of P.J.’s award-winning career as an illustrator. Walker Books then approached P.J., and they were using an exciting new method of publishing. Up to this point, P.J. had to cut up, photocopy, design and paste all the text himself to shape around his illustrations. Now, using desktop publishing, Walker Books could do this on a computer, which was a great relief to P.J.! He chose to illustrate the story of Melisande, which he found in an anthology of E. Nesbit’s tales. Melisande was, according to P.J., his first mature work as he had progressed and developed his own style, and wasn't looking to others for inspiration. He created a beautiful magical world with his full-page watercolours and romantic settings. This was also his first time of working directly with photographs in his illustrative work.
P.J. Lynch has often transmogrified his family and friends into fairy-tale characters in his illustrations. Photographing them as they play out the parts is now a key part of his work in order to ensure accuracy of the folds in clothes. This also helps him to convey the feelings and emotions of his characters through body language and facial expression. His dad, for example, has modelled for him for The King of Ireland’s Son and as the North Wind in Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. His mum, too, has often played the role of old women and witches! His wife and sons are often photographed too, The Bee-Man of Orn is one of many examples. In recent years he casts upcoming actors and actresses as his characters: Jessie, in When Jessie Came Across the Sea was played by a young actess from a nearby theatre school.
P.J. Lynch is renowned for treating his works almost like a theatre or a film, by creating a set, designing costumes, and casting roles. The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey was P.J.’s first work where he really focused on creating a ‘sense of believability’ by constructing a set of the village, setting a scene and researching architecture, costumes and artifacts that would be plausible for this setting. He developed his photographic skills during this work and used these as a reference to paint from. He also travelled to Vermont where he visited the Shelburne museum and the Shaker Villages in order to study and develop a setting for the story. As he was unsure about illustrating this work at first, he began with a rooftop shot of the village, one of his favourite styles of painting. This drew him into the world of Jonathan Toomey and his moving story, written by Susan Wojciechowski. P.J. imagines miniature stories occuring in his illustrations with supplementary characters or animals, or even parts of the setting, and he often includes these minute details. He hopes both adults and children will “pour over” his paintings, as he likes to do, to find these features and imagine what else the illustrator believed was happening in the scene. For example, P.J. included a young man, who has just jumped off his horse, and is chatting up a girl at a street corner in the following painting from The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. Children are enthralled to know this and can get lost in his detailed illustrations in order to pick out and imagine the sub-storylines which may be taking place in P.J. Lynch’s paintings.
As the author and illustrator, Mervyn Peake, once said “above all things [a good illustrator must have] the power to slide into another man’s soul”. P.J. encapsulates Lynch’s belief of a good illustrator. Not only does Lynch enter into the soul of the author, but also into each character’s mind and feelings and embodies them realistically on a page. One can feel the passion, care and love he puts into his paintings. P.J. recognizes the challenge of portraying ‘what might be going on inside a character’s head – or heart’ and attributes his ability to do this to his models, who are also natural actors.
Lynch’s illustrations display quite a classical style and often a sense of nostalgia emulates from his work. His predominate medium is watercolors, although he adds highlights using gouache in order to achieve a full range of colours, which he feels he cannot get from watercolors alone. It also gives an opaque appearance to his works. His favorite illustrators are Gennady Spirin, a Russian working in the U.S. who does beautiful, intricate fairy-tale books; Lzbeth Zwerger, an Austrian illustrator whose primary medium is watercolour, and Alan Lee, who is a master of watercolors and has won an Oscar for his designs for The Lord of the Rings. P.J. Lynch hopes that ‘his work never settles into a recognizable ‘style’ [because] so long as I am learning, my work will always be changing’. This continuous development is evident in P.J.’s works, particularly in one of his newer books Lincoln and his Boys. This book is done in oil painting with glazing – a new medium for P.J.. Although P.J. begins his works with a traditional approach to drawing, he also uses a technical and modern approach in his works through the use of photoshop on his computer. This saves him time as the program allows him to scan in his drawings and divide the picture into separate elements which can be moved around like paper cut-outs. It also enables him to reduce or enlarge the size of the drawing, or to flip it in the opposite direction.
There are two genres of books that P.J. Lynch generally illustrates; realistic or historical fiction and traditional literature or fantasy. All his realistic paintings evoke tenderness, such as in The Gift of the Magi, or kindness and compassion in The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey. I also admire his perfection to detail within each illustration and the amount of prior-research he does is truly evident. For Lincoln and his Boys, P.J. flew to Springfield to meet the author Rosemary Wells and to visit the Lincoln library and his preserved home. He also read a vast array of books and eye-witness accounts, watched movies and studied photographs of Lincoln. Similarly, before beginning work on Grandad’s Prayers of the Earth, Lynch traveled to an island in Minnesota where the author, Doug Wood, walked with his grandfather in the woods.
P.J. Lynch loves to work on folklore, myths and fairy tales as they are classic stories which really suit his style. They are familiar stories and therefore he finds them comfortable to work on. He also enjoys the feeling of nostalgia that he gets from a slightly older story. His illustrations immediately draw you into a magical world by angling the illustrations from the viewpoint of the characters. Although old stories, his illustrations bring them to a new and vivid life.
Possibly, we may look forward to a story written and illustrated b P.J. Lynch in the future. Although he has written some, he doesn’t feel comfortable going forward with them just yet, so he tells us in his blog, which he updates almost on a daily basis. Below is a painting that P.J. has recently completed (taken from his blog), which is for a book to be published in 2015. Perhaps, this may even be the book written by himself? We will wait in anticipation.
P.J. Lynch loved to draw as a child, and began at a young age to copy illustrations, comics and photographs. Lynch advocates this method of drawing to eager children who wish to learn and improve their artistic skills. His mother recalls that while everyone else was playing football, he was always drawing on scraps of paper, in jotters, on cardboard from new shirt packets, and on any other scraps of paper he could find. P.J. Lynch really appreciated and valued his mother’s encouragement and he continued to draw and practice in order to receive this affirmation. He also attributes his talent to his older brother, Denis, who is also a good artist, and inspired him to continue to draw. P.J. pushed himself to draw beyond his years in order for his drawings to be like his brother. He remembers having his ‘breakthrough’ once he realized how to get the ‘shiny’ effect on trains in order for them look curved and three dimensional, and this motivated him to try other drawings using this effect.
P.J. wasn’t wrapped up in picture books as a child like some other illustrators, but he distinctly remembers a set of old encyclopedia that his mum bought. He poured over these books, continuously switching from the illustrated myths and legends, to the factual material, containing photographs and diagrams. It is only in the past few years that he has made the connection between this collection, and his love and obsession for detailed research before beginnning illustrations.
P.J. was born in Belfast, in 1962, during the Troubles, and he was the youngest of five children in a Catholic family. Like many other illustrators who are from, or live in Northern Ireland (Martin Waddell, Anita Jeram, Flora McDonnell and Oliver Jeffers) As a teenager, P.J. buried himself in books and created new worlds in his drawings, to escape the horrors that were happening outside his door. He also found relief and peace at his mother’s family farm, where he and his brothers and sister worked during the summer.
Lynch’s secondary school, St. Malachy’s College, was very focused on academics and produced a large quantity of professionals. P.J. was advised by his teachers and parents to do architecture, because of his artistic talent. Although he originally began to follow this path, he realized during Upper 6th that he had no ability or interest in maths or physics and that he wanted to pursue what he loved, which was painting. Therefore, he enrolled in a foundation year in Art College in Jordanstown, Belfast, where he was introduced to many different mediums of art. However, he was disillusioned about becoming a painter, as his tutors didn’t value painting from life or life drawing, although P.J. was showing a great interest in this naturalistic style. As his dream of becoming a painter was diminishing, he then discovered the Illustration Department. This led him to apply to do Graphics and Illustration at Brighton College of Art, where one of his tutor’s was Raymond Briggs. The College is known for it’s successful alumni of illustrators and their children’s books tradition. A turning point for him in his studies was when he was asked to illustrate an extract of descriptive fantasy writing from The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White. This style of writing compelled him to produce a new and higher quality to his work. Once completed, the tutor photocopied his illustration onto the text to make it seem like P.J.’s work had been published. Seeing his work ‘in print’ gave P.J. an overwhelming sense of pride and he now knew the path he wanted to take in his career.
After graduating from College, P.J. stumbled into children’s books illustration while exhibiting some of his work at the Association of Illustrators Gallery, London. A representative from Collins Publishing Company invited him to do some sample drawings for the book A Bag of Moonshine, a selection of English fairy tales by Alan Garner. At first P.J was working with colouring pencils, however this style didn’t suit the stories. He then began to look at Arthur Rackham’s work, from the ‘Golden Age’ of British Book Illustrators, influencing him to begin experimenting with ink and a dip pen. He developed this technique over a few weeks, and the illustrations for this book were done with line drawings and tipped in colour plates. This was the beginning of P.J.’s award-winning career as an illustrator. Walker Books then approached P.J., and they were using an exciting new method of publishing. Up to this point, P.J. had to cut up, photocopy, design and paste all the text himself to shape around his illustrations. Now, using desktop publishing, Walker Books could do this on a computer, which was a great relief to P.J.! He chose to illustrate the story of Melisande, which he found in an anthology of E. Nesbit’s tales. Melisande was, according to P.J., his first mature work as he had progressed and developed his own style, and wasn't looking to others for inspiration. He created a beautiful magical world with his full-page watercolours and romantic settings. This was also his first time of working directly with photographs in his illustrative work.
P.J. Lynch has often transmogrified his family and friends into fairy-tale characters in his illustrations. Photographing them as they play out the parts is now a key part of his work in order to ensure accuracy of the folds in clothes. This also helps him to convey the feelings and emotions of his characters through body language and facial expression. His dad, for example, has modelled for him for The King of Ireland’s Son and as the North Wind in Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. His mum, too, has often played the role of old women and witches! His wife and sons are often photographed too, The Bee-Man of Orn is one of many examples. In recent years he casts upcoming actors and actresses as his characters: Jessie, in When Jessie Came Across the Sea was played by a young actess from a nearby theatre school.
P.J. Lynch is renowned for treating his works almost like a theatre or a film, by creating a set, designing costumes, and casting roles. The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey was P.J.’s first work where he really focused on creating a ‘sense of believability’ by constructing a set of the village, setting a scene and researching architecture, costumes and artifacts that would be plausible for this setting. He developed his photographic skills during this work and used these as a reference to paint from. He also travelled to Vermont where he visited the Shelburne museum and the Shaker Villages in order to study and develop a setting for the story. As he was unsure about illustrating this work at first, he began with a rooftop shot of the village, one of his favourite styles of painting. This drew him into the world of Jonathan Toomey and his moving story, written by Susan Wojciechowski. P.J. imagines miniature stories occuring in his illustrations with supplementary characters or animals, or even parts of the setting, and he often includes these minute details. He hopes both adults and children will “pour over” his paintings, as he likes to do, to find these features and imagine what else the illustrator believed was happening in the scene. For example, P.J. included a young man, who has just jumped off his horse, and is chatting up a girl at a street corner in the following painting from The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. Children are enthralled to know this and can get lost in his detailed illustrations in order to pick out and imagine the sub-storylines which may be taking place in P.J. Lynch’s paintings.
As the author and illustrator, Mervyn Peake, once said “above all things [a good illustrator must have] the power to slide into another man’s soul”. P.J. encapsulates Lynch’s belief of a good illustrator. Not only does Lynch enter into the soul of the author, but also into each character’s mind and feelings and embodies them realistically on a page. One can feel the passion, care and love he puts into his paintings. P.J. recognizes the challenge of portraying ‘what might be going on inside a character’s head – or heart’ and attributes his ability to do this to his models, who are also natural actors.
Lynch’s illustrations display quite a classical style and often a sense of nostalgia emulates from his work. His predominate medium is watercolors, although he adds highlights using gouache in order to achieve a full range of colours, which he feels he cannot get from watercolors alone. It also gives an opaque appearance to his works. His favorite illustrators are Gennady Spirin, a Russian working in the U.S. who does beautiful, intricate fairy-tale books; Lzbeth Zwerger, an Austrian illustrator whose primary medium is watercolour, and Alan Lee, who is a master of watercolors and has won an Oscar for his designs for The Lord of the Rings. P.J. Lynch hopes that ‘his work never settles into a recognizable ‘style’ [because] so long as I am learning, my work will always be changing’. This continuous development is evident in P.J.’s works, particularly in one of his newer books Lincoln and his Boys. This book is done in oil painting with glazing – a new medium for P.J.. Although P.J. begins his works with a traditional approach to drawing, he also uses a technical and modern approach in his works through the use of photoshop on his computer. This saves him time as the program allows him to scan in his drawings and divide the picture into separate elements which can be moved around like paper cut-outs. It also enables him to reduce or enlarge the size of the drawing, or to flip it in the opposite direction.
There are two genres of books that P.J. Lynch generally illustrates; realistic or historical fiction and traditional literature or fantasy. All his realistic paintings evoke tenderness, such as in The Gift of the Magi, or kindness and compassion in The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey. I also admire his perfection to detail within each illustration and the amount of prior-research he does is truly evident. For Lincoln and his Boys, P.J. flew to Springfield to meet the author Rosemary Wells and to visit the Lincoln library and his preserved home. He also read a vast array of books and eye-witness accounts, watched movies and studied photographs of Lincoln. Similarly, before beginning work on Grandad’s Prayers of the Earth, Lynch traveled to an island in Minnesota where the author, Doug Wood, walked with his grandfather in the woods.
P.J. Lynch loves to work on folklore, myths and fairy tales as they are classic stories which really suit his style. They are familiar stories and therefore he finds them comfortable to work on. He also enjoys the feeling of nostalgia that he gets from a slightly older story. His illustrations immediately draw you into a magical world by angling the illustrations from the viewpoint of the characters. Although old stories, his illustrations bring them to a new and vivid life.
Possibly, we may look forward to a story written and illustrated b P.J. Lynch in the future. Although he has written some, he doesn’t feel comfortable going forward with them just yet, so he tells us in his blog, which he updates almost on a daily basis. Below is a painting that P.J. has recently completed (taken from his blog), which is for a book to be published in 2015. Perhaps, this may even be the book written by himself? We will wait in anticipation.