Rory Walker – Designer

I'm a freelance illustrator with 20 years professional experience. I've worked with publishers and authors around the globe and can transform your ideas into beautiful artworks. Big projects include a series of 18 chapter books for Hachette in Australia, detective comic strips for La Settimana Enigmistica in Italy, and storyboards for Aardman. My favourite projects are big, bold and bright illustrations that draw the readers' (or listeners') eyes and ears in to the artwork.

Expect colourful and fun drawings, exciting composition, dramatic characters, and visual storytelling, with a solid foundation of 20 years professional experience. Give me something to run with and I can help create your ideas into something wonderful. Working with me is simple and clear regardless of how much experience or knowledge of artwork creation you have. I've completed over 600 separate projects with people and companies around the globe; from massive publishing houses like OUP and Macmillan, through to single writers who have a story to tell and an urge to get their work out to a wider audience. Every tale deserves glorious artwork, so I welcome you to get in touch and discuss your project with me.

A couple of things to think about which may help you navigate the rivers of choice.

Pricing - A single image can cost as much as you're prepared to pay for it. By that I mean that a simple image will (generally) be less expensive than a complicated one. If you have a single character holding a balloon, drawn as a simple line illustration in black and white it'd cost far less than a big crowd scene of 50 people ALL holding balloons in luxurious full colour. If you have a whole book that requires artwork created for it, have a think about how best you'd like to spread your budget out. If you have unlimited funds then a go crazy and commission a full-page complicated image for every page in the book. If, however, you have a finite budget then consider how you could distribute different imagary throughout the book. Maybe a small black and white image on one page with a simple colour spot artwork (such as characters face or a pertinant object from the text), followed by a coupe of half page images then splash out with a big full-colour double page spread when the exciting part happens!

Copyright - 99 out of 100 questions I get asked refer to copyright. Hopefully this will explain it in simple and clear terms so that you can come to me knowing exactly what it is that you want and knowing exactly what it is that you'll get.

As a writer you've created something that you'd like published. My job as an illustrator is to create artwork to acompany your writing. By default that means that our work will be published together. As the comissioner, you're asking me to create a number of artworks to accompany your text. Once I've created the artwork I'll send it to you for use in the project we've agreed on; for example publishing together in the book you've written. Great! We're now a published writer and artist team. You can use the images you commissioned me to do for a few other things. These are things like using them in promotional material on your website or a sales brochure or on social media - that kind of thing. You've commissioned these images for a specfic purpose - and here's the aspect of copyright that needs particular clarification - to accompany the text in your book but not for other purposes. Other purposes would refer to using the artwork to illustrate a second book. Or to be printed on to postcards (or anything else) to sell. In 20 years no-one has ever wanted to do that, but you never know, you may be the person who does. In which case that's fine, however, it needs to be discussed and a seperate fee needs to be paid in order to use them for a purpose in which they were not originally intended. I have no problem at all in discussing addtional usage but need to ensure that all writers understand that the illustrations and copyright associated with them are licensed for a single use. Additional usage needs to be negotiated. And that's about it. I hope that explains clearly.

Thanks for reading! Rory