Season 1: The Chateau Season
Episode 17: Maddie Kimber, Children's book illustrator
In this episode, I interview Maddy, a 25-year-old children's book illustrator, graphic designer, and screen printer from Illinois who now lives in Savannah, Georgia. Maddy's work focuses on telling stories to kids in a respectful and creatively fulfilling manner – avoiding the tendency to just use bright colours and crazy visuals to grab children's attention, instead focusing on more mundane but impactful stories using animal characters. Her creative process is deeply informed by her own childhood experiences with undiagnosed ADHD, thinking about the difficult feelings and big issues she struggled to navigate as a kid without the nuance of adulthood. She works extensively with animal characters to create allegory that's both fun and engaging for children without scaring or boring them, believing that kids don't like being told how to do things but respond to stories that invoke imagination. Her process involves lots of sitting, doodling, figuring out what fits the story, doing colour studies, and thinking about how colour engages different moods – using saturated colours because she feels things deeply, but not to dictate how viewers should feel. Maddy's creative inspirations include her mum, a therapist who has a gift for making people feel seen and heard; Winnie the Pooh and A.A. Milne; Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson; and Louis Wain, known for painting anthropomorphic cats with gouache and his mastery of colour and brushstrokes. She emphasises remaining curious as central to her creative routine, spending lots of time with her sketchbook to practice skills and explore outside her comfort zone – especially important since client work requires more cautious steps, while personal art and sketchbook work allows experimental exploration. She's particularly interested in drawing anthropomorphic animals living human routines, carrying over human elements into animals. Her advice to beginning creatives is to make bad art – with the understanding that no art is ever bad if it's bringing you closer to your vision – and to think of art like singing in the car: something you do not because you need an endpoint but because it's natural to humans to have fun and express themselves creatively. She encourages people to keep making art while honing technical skills, taking the steps that feel right for them rather than the ones that will turn them into someone else.
Connect with Maddie Kimber
