Famous graduates
Some of the schools most famous graduate are:
Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and Dave Gilmour, Spitting Image Creators Peter Fluck and Roger Law, Creator of St Trinian's Ronald Searle and Harry Potter illustrator Thomas Taylor.
Ronald Searle
St Trinian's is a fictional girls' boarding school, the creation of English cartoonist Ronald Searle, that later became the subject of a popular series of comedy films.
The first cartoon appeared in 1942, but shortly afterwards Searle had to fulfill his military service. After the war, in 1946 he started making new cartoons about the girls, but the content was a lot darker in comparison with the previous years.
The school is the antithesis of the Enid Blyton/Angela Brazil-type posh girls' boarding school; its pupils are wicked and often well-armed, and mayhem is rife. The mistresses (as female teachers in Britain were known at the time) are also disreputable. Cartoons often showed dead bodies of girls who had been murdered with pitchforks or succumbed to violent team sports, sometimes with vultures circling; girls drank, gambled, and smoked. It is reputed that the gym-slip style of dress worn by the girls was closely modelled on the uniform of the school that Searle's daughter Kate attended, JAGS in Dulwich. The films implied that the girls were the daughters of gangsters, crooks, shady bookmakers and other low-lifes and the institution is often referred to as a "female borstal"
Thomas Taylor
Thomas Taylor, the young graduate artist from the Cambridge School of Art, who decided what Harry Potter ought to look like, made only two or three hundred pounds for his first drawing of the boy hero in 1997. Now, five years after its publication, initial designs for the covers of J. K. Rowling's novels are worth tens of thousands.
The large sums changing hands have revitalised the market in children's book illustrations and established Potter first editions as more valuable to collectors than classics by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens.
A copy of the rarest Rowling first edition - the hardback version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - has already been sold at Sotheby's for £10,575 and a collection of first editions of the first three titles, in slightly poorer condition, fetched £8,812.
But the highest Potter prices of all are reserved for original artwork. Taylor's preliminary pencil and watercolour drawing for the front cover of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone , were sold at Sotheby's last year for an astonishing £85,750. Children's books specialist Catherine Porter suspects this drawing will prove the quintessential piece of Potter memorabilia, as it represents the first visual image of the bespectacled trainee wizard. 'The drawing gave children an image of what Harry really looked like and, as a result, formed the basis for the film character,' she said .
Student's New York Times book accolade
A Cambridge School of Art graduate's first book has been lauded in the international press. Kazuno Kohara, who graduated from the MA in Children's Book Illustration in 2007, has had her first book voted as one of 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books 2008 by a panel of judges appointed by the New York times to select from among the several thousand children's books published that year.
Renowned illustrator John Lawrence, who himself appeared in the New York Times 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books List in 2002 for his book 'This Little Chick' (Walker Books) said 'I am thrilled for Kazuno, it took thirty years for one of my books to be chosen for such a distinction and she has done it with her first book. It will help sales enormously and Kazuno will get wider publicity and distribution as a consequence.'
The book was described as 'sweet and beautiful' by New York Times Book Review Editor Gregory Cowles. Cowles writes '["Ghosts in the House!"] provides a welcome timeout: its simple linocut illustrations are limited to three candy-corn colors, orange and black and white, and it is so insistently un-ironic that it ends, sincerely, with the words "And they all lived happily ever after," ...the story manages a gentle charm."
Kazuno's book, which she wrote and illustrated, describes a girl and her cat moving into an old house at the edge of town. "It was a splendid place," she writes, "but there was one problem. The house was... haunted!"
Top Gear book triumph for Cambridge School of Art graduate
A London based Illustrator and graduate of Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University is featuring prominently in the book charts with the hugely popular 'Where’s Stig?' book in the run up to Christmas.
Rod Hunt is enjoying chart-topping success – including a listing as Book of the Week in Bookseller magazine and a No 1 slot in the Sunday Times Bestsellers list and No 6 in the overall UK chart - for the book he illustrated for the BBC Top Gear production team.
Presenters of the programme, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, have been worth £44m to UK book retailers over the past five years. But this year it is their mystery resident racing driver that’s taking centre stage. Where’s Stig? (BBC), a Where’s Wally?-style book which sets out a hunt for the white overall-wearing driver has been one of the best-selling hardbacks of recent weeks. Total sales are currently standing in excess of 60,000 which is on a level with sales of Jeremy Clarkson’s recent release Driven to Distraction.
As Stig merchandise is everywhere in the supermarkets and a new series of Top Gear has just hit BBC2, it is hardly a surprise that Where’s Stig? is featuring so prominently.
Rod Hunt has built a reputation for retro tinged illustrations and detailed character filled landscapes with UK and international clients in publishing, design, advertising and new media, for everything from book covers to advertising campaigns, and some large scale installation too.
Most notably Rod illustrated the cover of Change The World 9 To 5, the best selling environmental book by We Are What We Do, and various theme park maps including one for Chessington World of Adventure.
Now a freelance illustrator, Rod graduated with a BA (Hons) in Illustration from the Cambridge School of Art. It took him two years to build up enough work to work as an artist full time and in 1996 he moved to London to set up his own business with support from the Princes Trust, his local Training and Enterprise Board and the Association of Illustrators. He has been working as a full time illustrator ever since.
Talking about Cambridge School of Art, Rod says: ‘Back in my university days I painted all my work in acrylic paint using hog’s hair brushes. It was at Cambridge School of Art that I had the time to develop my skills, thought processes and had the space to experiment.
‘In 2001 I reinvented my work & moved to working digitally. I decided to change purely because my work had not developed the way I had wanted it to and so I decided to completely re-invent myself and it is probably the best thing I ever did. I went to my clients and told them I had gone digital, so they asked me to send them a couple of samples which they all liked. There was no resistance really and it has opened many new doors in my career. It’s pretty crazy to think that I have a book in the UK Top 10 best sellers list!’
Katy Bailey
Katy Bailey is a local artist who was born into an Anglo/Dutch family in Cambridge in 1960. Her current paintings are a continuation on a theme of love and loss.
In Feb 2007 during Valentines week she secured a solo show in the Latin Quarter of Paris at the renowned Gallery Arteconte , Rue de Savoie , Paris. She had been working on this show exclusively since April 2006 and showcased twenty new pieces.
Her use of coloured mixed media , such as pastels and oils has added a passionate intensity to her vigourous yet sensitive draughtsmanship , the last two in the series for Paris were unmade beds with tantalising stories to tell about the discarded objects left on them.
Since studying at the Cambridge School of Arts between 78-82 on the Illustration and Graphics course her metier has become the human form . She exhibits about six times year in such diverse places as New York, Cannes, Edinburgh, Dubai and has successfully exhibited in Cambridge Open Studios for the last seven years and had a very successful show in Cork Street London in 2005.
Her objective in painting is to follow a journey through emotion and thought , to escape into a world where time ceases to exist.
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