Jill Calder
Illustrator: mentor in 2025
Jill Calder is an award winning illustrator and lettering artist who loves drawing, ideas, colour, ink, typography, stories, books, dogs, and deadlines. Through her work, she has been invited to talk at various events and conferences and teach at schools and universities throughout the UK, USA and Hong Kong. in 2025, she was nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Illustration for her book, Coorie Doon: A Scottish Lullaby Story written by Scots-language author Jackie Kay.
“Esther needs absolutely no encouragement to be wildly creative and inventive and mentoring her has been a thoroughly engaging, thoughtful and fun process! While Esther is an experienced commercial illustrator, she came to Picture Hooks wanting to hone and develop her sequential visual storytelling with her story ‘Baby Bear’. Over the past few months we have pulled apart drawings, analysed colour palettes, discussed composition options, mulled over portfolio layouts and looked at the purpose of every single image in her story – It’s been intense but very enjoyable! And each month Esther would come back with improved ideas and drawings, her beautiful illustrations just getting better and better. It’s been a huge pleasure working with someone so talented and I’m very confident that we’ll see ‘Baby Bear’ snapped up by a publisher soon, followed by all the other picture books I know Esther will write and illustrate in the future!”
In 2023, Jill mentored Aline Monda
“I absolutely loved working with Aline! She immediately presented me with several story ideas from her sketchbooks, showing me her love of Brazilian folk art and risograph print techniques. So, we set about choosing the best story to develop and transform into a complete dummy book. We also worked on how best to present all her other ideas to editors and agents, which she did very successfully on a solo trip to Bologna Book Fair in April. Aline has a great visual instinct and natural storytelling abilities so, for me, it was just a question of gently nudging her into the fun fast lane of creating beautiful, funny and thought provoking children’s books! It was a genuine pleasure to help her bring ‘Catch of The Day’ to life and I have every confidence we’ll be seeing her picturebooks in bookshops and libraries around the world very soon! Muito obrigado Aline!”
