Collage & Crayon: Meet William Grill 

Award-winning author and illustrator, William Grill, tells us about his love of Cornwall and how the natural world inspires his work. 


This season, we’ve found inspiration in the love affair that many artists have with Cornwall. As part of Collage & Crayon, we sat down with award-winning author and illustrator William Grill to chat about Falmouth, illustration and how he finds inspiration for his work.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am an author and illustrator who is now based in Bristol. I practiced illustration at University College Falmouth in Cornwall, where I loved the outdoor space and slower pace of life.

I like to adapt true stories into in-depth picture books, where the subject always revolves around how we connect to the natural world. My practice has always been strongly rooted in drawing in sketchbooks. Although most of my work is done in colouring pencil, I take some inspiration from printmaking processes like lithography.

What led you to become an illustrator?

I think struggling as a reader when I was younger and being dyslexic led me to read more comics and picture books and watch documentaries, which probably encouraged an interest in visual storytelling.

I also looked up to my brother when I was younger who used to enjoy drawing; I definitely wanted to be as good as him at drawing. Years later visited him at art school at Falmouth which I found so exciting – sculpture, textiles, animation, painting, printmaking all going on at once. Coming from school it represented a whole new world to me.

Cornwall is a constant source of inspiration for us. Can you tell us more about what influences your work and how you find new ideas?

Cornwall has a special place in my heart. The coastline, isolation and light make it feel so different to other places, and I treasure the happy memories of family beach holidays during my four years at Falmouth studying.

My inspiration nearly always comes from the natural world and how we connect with it. I try and draw a lot in sketchbook when I’m out and about, but also when reading or watching something. They are so useful for capturing ideas however big or small.

I’ve previously found inspiration in adapting stories that I’m drawn to visually, but the stories must have characters and an arc to it that I feel says something meaningful – that can be quite hard to find sometimes when it must appeal to a younger audience too.

I find ideas reveal themselves after enough time reading and watching films and documentaries. To me, if I haven’t seen a picture book about ‘X’, or if a topic is overdue a refresh, then I feel like it is a good idea to pursue.

What does your creative process look like?

As mentioned earlier, sketchbooks are the foundation of what I do – some of my biggest projects have started from a tiny sketch in a book that seems so insignificant.

The sketchbooks are a place for gathering, experimenting and recording. After an idea graduates from a sketchbook, I research the subject I’m interested in and check whether there are other books out there that have already covered the subject.

I will then bullet point the key moments of how I see the story in my mind. Once I have this list, I will draw them all as small thumbnail sketches in sequence. This gives me a basic storyboard; from here I can then write a rough text to what is happening on each image (spread).

After that, I will simply refine each drawing many times. These are called ‘roughs’, which transition into ‘tonal roughs’ (roughs with a tonal range to show light and dark areas). Once I am happy with the flow of the story, visually and verbally, then I will work on the colour artworks, then finally the book cover and other design elements like endpapers and title page.

I work in colouring pencil, so my artwork process is usually quite straightforward. However, my last book ‘Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue’ was drawn by hand in colour separations and coloured digitally, like a digital lithograph or screen print.

What are your favourite pieces of work?

I think this spread ‘A Sea of Jungle’ from my latest book ‘Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue’  is one of my favourites. It felt like a successful drawing in the new technique I was using – working in colour separations. I wanted the jungle-clad hills to be almost like green waves that rolled on forever. I was happy with the way everything came together – like the vastness of the scene but also the feeling in the image.

What inspired your new book, Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue?

I found a book called ‘Elephant Bill’  in a secondhand bookshop while on my illustration BA in Falmouth around 10 years ago. The title caught my eye, and the book itself had some amazing images in it of elephants hauling enormous logs and building bridges. It conjured up a mixed emotion of awe but also concern for the animals’ welfare, which is addressed in the book.

At the time I shelved the book as it was before I even entertained the idea of making books. When looking for a third title to compliment my previous two books ‘Shackleton’s Journey’ and ‘The Wolves Of Currumpaw’  I thought this story built upon them and further explored our relationship to nature and animals, while containing a message about how we might better live alongside them.

I think if you’re going to re-tell a story you have to offer something new, so although the account was written by J. H. Williams, I wanted to focus more on the story of Bandoola and our connection to animals.

‘Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue’  re-tells the true story of a remarkable Asian Timber Elephant named Bandoola, an elephant raised with kindness and patience – and the heights that he reached because of this. He was raised from being a calf, rather than being captured as an adult, which was unusual for the time. He was the first elephant conscripted into the British Army during WW2 and helped build hundreds of bridges and evacuate refuges from Myanmar to safety into India.

You can find out more about William and his new book, ‘Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue’  at WILLIAM GRILL