Kathleen Hale

Kathleen Hale was a British artist, illustrator, and children's author. She is well known for the illustrations she created about Orlando the marmalade cat.

During the 1920s she focused on creating book jackets, posters and illustrating children’s books as well as selling her own drawings.
Orlando the marmalade cat was a story that she would tell her two sons before they went to bed and in the 1940s and 50’s the book became very well known especially due to the illustrations.
To be completely honest I don’t really like the work of Kathleen hale for me they look to old fashioned and dated, I can see why they would appeal to illustration students and children as the drawing its self is really remarkable and the texture on the fur of the cat looks really nice but this style of work is not for me and I doubt I would ever do any work in the style of this artist.

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle was a British artist who is most famous for creating the St Trinians School with Geoffrey Willans. He studied for 2 years at Cambridge college of arts and technology, whoever in 1939 he had to give up his dream of being an artist as it was obvious that war was about to take place and Ronald Searle enlisted in the royal engineers. In 1942 he was taken a prisoner of war and was forced to work of the death railway. Even though he was now a prisoner of war this never stopped him drawing and documenting what he saw, many of these drawings appear in his book Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-1945 in which he talks about what it was like to be a prisoner of war. He continued to work of the St Trinians books as well as his book on cats before moving to Paris where he started designing for the cinema and worked on films such as Monte Carlo or bust.
I like how the drawings are mostly in black and white it gives a child like feel to them, I love the drawings of cats he has created as they have so much character and humor to them which appeals to me as I’m sure it does to many other people. And even though I don’t want to go do the illustration path I still would use his work for inspiration.

see more of his work and learn about him http://ronaldsearle.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2012/january/ronald-searle