Anna Shuttlewood

I was born in a sunny city in Eastern Europe. A lot of my childhood I spent at the backstage of the family puppet theatre where I used to grow up with the puppets and sets of each new performance. This is where my love for stories and illustration began.

Back home I was surrounded by my dad’s paints and pictures. I used to play with sketchbooks, which I continually filled with my crayons, page after page of big smiling suns with thick hairs of colourful rays.
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In a sense my art hasn’t changed that much – the world I create is bright and happy, my characters who are often animals are friendly and naïve, they sometimes live in a human-like environment and have human-like thoughts and dreams. My pictures are detailed and have many ‘mini-stories’ to discover, one can look and imagine what the characters are like and what their dreams are. I also like to explore a world of animal – human relationships. I like to create pictures and stories that are ageless, that would be interesting and amusing and at the same time valid for the children and also the adults.

I went to school in Sofia where I studied at the National School for Fine Art where I studied for five years and was trained in classical techniques and subjects. After that I continued my art education and gained a BA in Fine & Art and Mural Painting from the National Academy of Arts in 2008. I now live in England and since moving here have been working on children’s book illustrations and also on greetings cards for Two Bad Mice, as well as on paintings and mural paintings.