How a Lion Convinced me to Draw

One of my most vivid childhood memories is sitting on the sofa, terrified by the roaring lion that would loom out of the screen from the Metro Goldywn Meyer logo. Lions, in my child’s mind, were truly the kings of the jungle, a roaring, merciless beast to be feared.

Luckily for me, books were just as big a part of my childhood as TV or movies and I will forever be grateful to those illustrators who made the lions of my picture books, smile and talk and who drew their manes like the rays of the sun or the rings of Jupiter, so that lions very quickly went from my most feared to my most loved animal.

I have always loved to draw so it probably won’t surprise you to know that lions soon appeared in every drawing, the teachers at school must have assumed we had a very large cat as every time they asked me to draw my family I would sneak a lion into the picture. Admittedly, at the time my lions sometimes looked more like spiders, or piñatas, their faces often looked like a wide-open eye surrounded by tousled eyelashes, realism was not my top priority. Even then, I knew drawing is always about so much more than the lines on the page.

And so the years went by and I kept drawing, at school, at home, in the street and slowly began to be commissioned by magazines and educators and find all the ways that art can transform lives. Millions of lines on many pages and screens later, I use my drawings as teaching tools to a new generation of children. I use art as a way for them to learn a new language or to express themselves in their native one. It’s a collaborative process where my illustrations and their drawings work together as they learn. Sometimes a spider face or oddly shaped piñata appear and I pause and smile as my own lions prowl back into the picture.