Tim Hopgood
Illustrator Tim Hopgood talks about his love of colour, and how WOW! Said The Owl changed his life. Interview by Nicola Baird.
It is a joy to see that illustrator Tim Hopgood, when wearing glasses, looks a bit like his colour-loving owl creation from WOW! Said The Owl. This prizewinning favourite of very young readers, originally published in 2009, has even made it from bedtime reading and as a library classic on to the stage at Little Angel Theatre. In this, puppets transformed the owl’s colour journey into another witty way to woo young and old.
Wow! Said the Owl
WOW! Said the Owl was Tim’s fourth book. “Until then, I was having to do part-time work around writing and illustrating and was having to work as a school cleaner. It felt like being a student again. Then I was washing up in a cafe. That’s quite hard to do when you’ve got teenage kids going, ‘What happened to Dad? You know he’s lost the plot.’ And then WOW! came out as a paperback and had good reviews. After about a year or two it suddenly came out as a board book, and then it took off.”
It’s been a busy career: Tim’s first picture book Our Big Blue Sofa won the Cambridgeshire Read it Again Award in 2007; he then won a Book Trust Award for Best Emerging Illustrator with Here Comes Frankie in 2008; recently won a gold medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award (US) for his illustrations of Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson (2025) and is just as proud of the myriad illustrations – from guitar to police car, saw to ostrich – that he’s dreamed up for All Kinds of Things, picked by Frances Stickley, which is due out in July 2026.
Tim’s illustrations use layers of colour. “It’s digital – I call it screen printing without the mess,” he says over a Zoom call. Behind him is a neat bookshelf full of reference works and a repurposed (turquoise-coloured) Heinz beans tin filled with his favourite paintbrushes. “I’ve been forced to embrace Photoshop but, basically, I work in black and white, and it’s all painted, then I scan the drawings in and layer them up on the computer and then you can colour each element. I like that screen printing feel. Photoshop offers you so many tricks but I tend to prefer the illustrations that are simpler textures, bold colours, but without getting into fancy effects,” he says.
It’s a complex process but the result are images that really help readers to linger on the page. Tim, who especially enjoyed graphics and illustration when at Kingston University says he learnt to think in layers early on in his career when working (from 1985-87) at the uber cool i-D magazine – famous for its innovative photography, typography and London attitude. “We used to go to the printers to look at it on press day, but we couldn’t afford to proof it. So, I learned to mark things up in colour, think about layers and try and imagine what’s this going to look like in colour. Sometimes we got it completely wrong, and you couldn’t read the text, and then people would go, ‘oh that’s i-D’.”
“People tend to overlook the power of illustration, re-reading pictures and how text and pictures work together. That whole dynamic really drives my interest. I’m thinking about the parent, and the adults who’ll read it as well, so that things work on different levels. You want to keep adults interested as well, because they’ve got to read a book over and over again,” says Tim who now has five young grandchildren.
Library life
Tim lives outside York, but it was as a child in Wolverhampton that he fell in love with libraries. “Castlecroft was only small, but I absolutely loved the whole process of going to the library. I think you had five card tickets that were kind of mustard with your name in biro. I just loved the idea that you could choose five books, and it’s up to you what you choose. I struggled to read, so I used to spend a lot of time looking at the covers. Often, I’d come home with these huge books on dinosaurs or butterflies with these amazing illustrations. I loved the fact that no one was saying ‘oh you can’t have that’.”
“I’m still in touch with that child inside me, so I’m thinking about what they would find funny or interesting,” he adds.
Tim’s not a big library user now, but is currently being inspired by Wild: The Naturalistic Garden by Noel Kingsbury with photographs by Claire Takacs ready for a project in his York garden and cookbooks.
Classic gifts
Tim’s also had a huge success with his illustrated song books. “A lot of people buy books when someone’s had a baby or a first birthday and I thought the words to the song, What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong would be great to illustrate and would make a lovely gift. But everyone was like, ‘oh, that’s going to be really complicated getting the rights to the song’. The idea sat at my desk for about 10 years and then Pete Marley, who was then an editor at Oxford University Press Children’s (OUP) got in contact asking if I would be interested in illustrating a classic.” Tim quickly suggested his idea of illustrating a classic song and after a long gap OUP agreed. So far four have been published: What a Wonderful World, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, Moon River and Singing in the Rain.
Tim then reveals proofs of his next illustrated classic song, Feeling Good (sung by Nina Simone) which is due to be published in September 2026. Even over Zoom, during the wettest ever start to the year which the BBC’s weather readers are telling us is because of the world’s climate getting hotter, the pages shine with colour. “It is like the pure joy of being outside in nature. I think it’s good to celebrate nature and everything that’s also right about it. I hope it strikes a chord at how amazing nature is and how somehow things carry on, don’t they?” he explains, admitting that he’s a positive person.
Tim Hopgood may be imagining a curious two or three-year-old as he develops his words and pictures, but his published books give all readers, whatever their age or emotional state, a truly beautiful world. The more we understand about our world, the easier it is to look at the genuinely big picture and better care for our planet.