About Me
I’m a freelance illustrator working across children’s publishing and editorial illustration – two worlds that, for me, grew out of the same strange beginning.
Before art school, I was going to be a doctor. I was sure of it. Then, at sixteen, a serious illness left me bed-bound for a year. With nothing else to reach for, I started drawing – making up stories, building worlds on paper. What began as escape became therapy, and what began as therapy became a career.
I graduated in 2014 and won a Best in Show award at the D&AD New Blood festival. The following year, I was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust scholarship, which took me to Falmouth University’s Authorial Illustration Masters – a course that changed how I thought about pictures and what they can do. I stayed on at Falmouth to lecture on the BA Illustration course, eventually heading up the second year. Teaching made me a sharper thinker and a better illustrator. Along the way, I authored and illustrated several children’s books, collaborated with design agencies, and built a growing body of editorial work.
Between 2021 and 2025, I stepped back to build my family, and in doing so, I got the best possible education in children’s books. I learned which stories my kids wanted again and again, which ones fell flat after page three, and which ones I genuinely loved reading for the fortieth time. That experience, plus the daily inspiration of two small, chaotic people, has reignited something in my work. I want to make more books for young readers, and I want them to be the kind that survive the bedtime-story gauntlet.
The other side of my practice is editorial illustration, particularly conceptual work around science and medicine – a thread that traces right back to that teenage ambition to practise medicine. It turns out I never really let go of it; I just found a different way in.
When I’m not illustrating, I’m probably growing vegetables, exploring the Cornish coast, sailing, or (let’s be honest) changing nappies.
Fiona Rose Illustration 