My Design Journey: Maxine Hamilton

Meet Maxine! In the early oughts she worked on our team at Longina Phillips Designs, producing prints for the collection and graphics for various projects. Now she's a children's book illustrator and we thought you might like to see her beautiful work.

Read Maxine's story in her own words, below.

Book illustration was something I always wanted to do but...

I knew it was not the most profitable of career choices. So I put my dream on the back burner for many years so I could afford to travel overseas and buy a house.

The passing of two close friends prompted me to finally take the leap.

After losing my friends I felt like life was too short to not do what I love so I went about making my children's book illustrating dreams a reality.

My favorite part of illustrating is when...

I am painting up the final illustrations for a book.

My process involves...

When illustrating children’s books I mainly use watercolor, colored pencil, and aquarelle crayons. For my print design work, I use watercolor, pen and ink, graphite pencil, and also digital media. 

A regular day looks like this:

After walking my giant puppy my days start by checking emails and socials, then I usually work on roughs for a book and liaise with my editors via meetings and emails.

My best drawing tip is...

Don’t worry about what other people are doing or what they think of your work - just do what YOU love and the results will show.

In 5 years' time I hope to...
be a successful, and hopefully award-winning, children’s book illustrator. I would also like to venture into writing children’s books but am not too sure this new dream will be realized.

Find Maxine on Instagram at @mhdesignillustration

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