Patrick James Lynch, known artistically as PJ Lynch, he is an Irish children’s illustrator and writer. Born in Belfast on March 2, 1962. He always knew he wanted to be an artist but he was thinking in terms of something like architecture and then he went to art college in Brighton and realized that he was pretty well suited for illustration.
He had the luck and the pleasure of meeting and getting to know several book illustrators that were on teaching staff there at college in Brighton, such as Raymond Briggs. Immediately after college he got a project to illustrate a book, “A bag of moonshine”. During his illustrator career he has won several prizes: the Kate Greenway Medal (twice), the Christopher Medal (three times), and the Mother Goose Award. He also recently became an author too, with “The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower”.
In 2014, PJ Lynch obtained an Arts Council bursary for literature to assist him in completion of his book “The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower”.
“For me as a career illustrator, to receive a Literature Award was a tremendous boost to my confidence as a writer”, he said.
He had already worked on it and was pleased that his publishers liked the first draft of the story, but he realized that it would take him another two years just to create extremely detailed paintings. So, the bursary award gave him extra bit of time to finish the work on the book.
In 2021 he also designed the new coin, depicting the national icon Britannia as a woman of color for the first time. Britannia was the Latin designation assigned to the UK by the Romans following their conquest in 43 CE. The armed female warrior evolved into a symbol of the British Isles and has appeared on the nation’s coinage since 1672.
Arthur Rackham and Edmond Dulac were the artists he was most influenced by, and Alan Lee, the contemporary illustrator. But he’s also influenced by American artists like Norman Rockwell and NC Wyeth.
It’s interesting to know his creative process. His process always starts with a story. By reading the story he decides which parts need to be illustrated, then there’ lots of drawings of very rough thumbnails. The next step is to select the thumbnails that are working best adding more details.
The use of light and contrast creates his characteristic style. Lynch puts great effort into guiding readers toward their own impressions of mood and atmosphere, choosing warm or cool shades to suit each scene. While his first illustrations were created only with ink and watercolor, over time he has added oils to his palette and now also turns to digital tools at the start of a project.
He advises young aspiring illustrators to draw every day, to draw using pencil and paper because scribbling with a pencil is so good for your technique and for your thought processes.
PJ Lynch elevates illustration to a higher level in which his incredible artistic qualities ranging from the accuracy of execution to the depth of observation allow a narrative synthesis where a single drawing often contains multiple moments of the story almost like a movie in a snapshot. This is a result that can only be achieved through a profound and sincere humanity in capturing the small details of everyday life and an extraordinary ability of representation.
Website: https://pjlynch.bigcartel.com/
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