Illustrator
Tony is an international award-winning illustrator of more than 50 books. Tony is best known for his chapter book series Saurus Street and Samurai vs Ninja. His recent picture books include Grandma’s First Tattoo (2023), This Old Thing (2022), and the Australian National Anthem – Advance Australia Fair (2022).
His love for illustration is inspired by his day-to-day life, travel and his dogs. He is currently working on another picture book for Walker Books Australia and a new adventure graphic novel series as author/illustrator. The graphic novel series incorporates a new experimental format for illustrated books, 3D optical illusions as a part of a standard graphic novel format.
Tony is an experienced presenter with a teaching background. He is currently working as a lecturer in Design at the University of Tasmania. His sessions are high-energy, fun filled presentations that inspire students to unlock their own creativity and story building skills. With a playful approach to learning Tony is at ease sharing his experiences with audiences from Prep to Adults.
P-2 Character stories: In this session Tony will guide students through his approach to building pictures that tell a story. By interacting with the audience, we will develop a number of characters that we can use as the starting point for story building. This provides an approach to storytelling that is developed out of a character’s reaction to a situation. The session will include a lot of tips for students who want to develop their own drawing and storytelling skills.
3 -4 Writing with pictures: Exploring creative play as a way to build stories through an image-based approach to writing.
In this session Tony will interact with the audience to build a unique story that will be generated as a group. This story will come to life through images that will be created along the way. This playful approach to writing negates our natural tendance to self-edit stories created in written formats. Allowing the story to form in an organic way through ideas, images, and playful exploration of possibilities. This session is design to kick start creative processes and provide some simple practical techniques that can be used when approaching a writing project.
5 – 6 Comic Books, oh sorry I mean Graphic Novels!: This session focus on the building visual story telling skills. Graphic novels are an ever increasingly popular format with book audiences. If you want to appreciate them more or tackle your own graphic novel, it is important to build an understanding of the visual language of sequential art.
Tony will collaborate with the group to develop a simple concept for a scene in a graphic novel. Then explore a variety of ways to tell this story. This will be a fun and highly interactive session, while it is focused on storytelling for graphic novels, the techniques used will be transferable to a variety of other storytelling formats.